Social distancing and people's potential discomfort sitting in auditoriums have given Indianapolis venues several problems to solve amid coronavirus.

If Indianapolis had a spokesman, it was Jim Gerard. The Jim Gerard Show was a stop on many celebrity tours — bringing in stars like Bob Hope.

I CAN'T help feeling that this is all a long-delayed return to normal. I know the lockdown feels abnormal, and I suppose it is, in that we've never seen anything like it before. But beyond that, I have a powerful sense that normal relations have merely been resumed; the age-old see-saw relationship between man and planet re-established.

I'VE NEVER seen or heard anything like it. Or rather, NOT heard. I was on the green roof of London: Kite Hill, the highest spot on Hampstead Heath, and summit of my daily permitted exercise routine.

THE RISKS of lockdown are threatening to become greater than the risk of catching the coronavirus.The blunt instrument of social and economic shutdown may soon begin to bludgeon more people to death than the microscopic bug it is meant to protect us from.

SIX WEEKS into lockdown and every day brings fresh headlines and behaviour you simply couldn't and wouldn't have predicted when you went to bed the night before.

PROFESSOR Neil "do as I say, not as I do" Ferguson has had a bad week, which he brought entirely on himself.

Our leaders need to get back to the roles they were elected to and stop playing politics, a letter to the editor says.

Walter Goudy, 51, reached a settlement with the city of Anderson and the state of Indiana, according to city officials and and his attorney.

Randal Taylor, who became police chief last week, has felt the grief that lies behind every shooting in Indianapolis.

Battle was a four-star recruit ranked 82nd by ESPN in the 2019 class and became the highest-rated out-of-state player ever to pick Butler.

Eighty-five years ago Monday, Jesse Owens tied the 60-yard dash world record at the Butler Indoor Relays at Hinkle Fieldhouse.

Rotnei Clarke and his wife packed for her and their three small children in less than three hours.

Jordan Tucker is second Butler player to announce decision to leave this offseason.

We know Khalif Battle is headed out, but will anyone follow? And who could be coming in?

Hayward scored eight of his 22 points in the closing six minutes, and Butler knocked off Kansas State 63-56 Saturday in the NCAA West Regional final.

Coming-of-age story "Lady Bird" collects top prize in five Indiana Film Journalists Association categories.

Check out performances at Indy CD & Vinyl, Luna Music and Square Cat Vinyl.

Noblesville has applied for a state grant to fund most of its section of the Nickel Plate trail, while Fishers and Indianapolis are pushing forward with their own plans.

Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness announced Thursday that the city will seek to establish its own health department.

John and Tucker Hartung of Lamar Advertising removed an Indianapolis 500 billboard along Lafayette Road, April 7, 2020. The race is delayed to August.

Another NASCAR legend will join IndyCar's iRacing Challenge event on Saturday, the first one held on an oval track.

Though he's been heavily into iRacing in recent years, Dale Earnhardt Jr. had never ventured into the world of IndyCar. This week, he's gotten a heavy dose.

He's unsure when he might return to the virtual IndyCar grid, but it's sure not from Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s lack of enjoyment in Saturday's event.

Broadcast on NBC Sports for the second consecutive week, IndyCar's iRacing audience grew 25% from the previous week.

McLaren Formula 1 driver Lando Norris becomes the latest special guest driver in IndyCar's iRacing Challenge.

St. Thomas Aquinas Church has long worked with communities in Haiti and Africa. The church responded to the president's recent comments.

Sandy Rivera is one of roughly 800,000 DACA program participants whose futures hang in the balance of a congressional debate.

At what age should crime suspects be charged as adults? It's a question that elicits strong opinions. It's a conversation Indiana needs to have.

Located off U.S. 36, home decor store At Home will replace what used to be a Gander Mountain in Avon, Indiana.

Plainfield Correctional Facility inmates grow produce in a garden to give to needy.

Plainfield Correctional Facility inmates donate fruits and vegetables from their garden to community organizations.

Plainfield's volleyball team won nine matches in 2015. This year, they've won 11 matches already. Here's what changed.

Brownsburg defeats Plainfield, 55-43

The Western world remains where it has been for some time, delicately poised between anaemic recovery and a shock that could tip us back into economic contraction.

Perhaps the most conspicuous manifestation of the instability is that investors can't make up their minds whether the greater risk comes from surging inflation that stems largely from China's irrepressible growth or the deflationary impact of the unsustainable burden of debt on peripheral and not-so-peripheral eurozone (and other) economies.

And whence do investors flee when it all looks scary and uncertain, especially when there's a heightened probability of specie debasement - to gold, of course.

Unsurprisingly, with the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, implying that a writedown of Greece's sovereign obligations is an option, and with consumer inflation in China hitting 5.4% in March, there has been a flight to the putative safety of precious metal: the gold price hit a new record of $1,480.50 per ounce for June delivery yesterday and could well break through $1,500 within days (say the analysts). Silver is hitting 30-year highs.

In a way, if a sovereign borrower were to turn €100bn of debts (for example) into an obligation to repay 70bn euros, that would be a form of inflation - it has the same economic impact, a degradation of value, for the lender. But it is a localised inflation; only the specific creditors suffer directly (though there may be all sorts of spillover damage for others).

And only this morning there was another blow to the perceived value of a chunk of euro-denominated sovereign obligations. Moody's has downgraded Irish government debt to one level above junk - which is the equivalent of a bookmaker lengthening the odds the on that country's ability to avoid controlled or uncontrolled default.

Some would say that the Irish government has made a start in writing down debt, with the disclosure by the Irish finance minister Michael Noonan yesterday that he would want to impose up to 6bn euros of losses on holders of so-called subordinated loans to Irish banks.

But I suppose the big story in the eurozone, following the decision by the European Central Bank to raise interest rates, is that the region's excessive government and bank debts are more likely to be cut down to manageable size by a restructuring - writedowns of the amount owed - than by generalised inflation that erodes the real value of the principal.

The decision of the ECB to raise rates has to be seen as a policy decision that - in a worst case - a sovereign default by an Ireland, or Greece or Portugal would be less harmful than endemic inflation.

But is that right? How much damage would be wreaked if Greece or Ireland or Portugal attempted to reduce the nominal amount they owe to levels they felt they could afford?

Let's push to one side the reputational and economic costs to those countries - which are quite big things to ignore, by the way - and simply look at the damage to external creditors from a debt write down.

And I am also going to ignore the difference between a planned, consensual reduction in sums owed - a restructuring that takes place with the blessing of the rest of the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund - and a unilateral declaration of de facto bankruptcy by a Greece, Ireland or Portugal (although the shock value of the latter could have much graver consequences for the health of the financial system).

So the first question is how much of the impaired debt is held by institutions and investors that could not afford to take the losses.

Now I hope it isn't naive to assume that pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and central banks that hold Greek, or Irish or Portuguese debt can cope with losses generated by a debt restructuring.

The reason for mild optimism in that sense is that those who finance investments made by pension funds and insurers - that's you and me by the way - can't get their money out quickly or easily. We simply have to grin and bear the losses to the value of our savings, when the stewards of our savings make lousy investment decisions.

As for hedge funds, when they make bad bets, they can suffer devastating withdrawals of finance by their investors, as and when the returns generated swing from positive to negative. But so long as those hedge funds haven't borrowed too much, so long as they are not too leveraged - and most aren't these days - the impact on the financial system shouldn't be significant.

Finally, if the European Central Bank - for example - ends up incurring big losses on its substantial holdings of Greek, Portuguese and Irish debt, it can always be recapitalised by solvent eurozone nations, notably by Germany and France.

However this is to ignore the node of fragility in the financial system, the faultline - which is the banking industry.

In the financial system's network of interconnecting assets and liabilities, it is the banks as a cluster that always have the potential to amplify the impact of debt writedowns, in a way that can wreak wider havoc.

That's built into their main function, as maturity transformers. Since banks' creditors can always demand their money back at whim, but banks can't retrieve their loans from their creditors (homeowners, businesses, governments), bank losses above the norm can be painful both for banks and for the rest of us.

Any event that undermines confidence in the safety of money lent to banks, will - in a best case - make it more difficult for a bank to borrow and lend, and will, in the worst case, tip the bank into insolvency.

Which, of course, is what we saw on a global systemic scale from the summer of 2007 to the end of 2008. That's when creditors to banks became increasingly anxious about potential losses faced by banks from a great range of loans and investments, starting with US sub-prime.

So what we need to know is whether the banking system could afford losses generated by Greek, Irish and Portuguese defaults.

And to assess this, we need to know how much overseas banks have lent to the governments of these countries and also - probably - to the banks of these countries, in that recent painful experience has told us that bank liabilities become sovereign liabilities, when the going gets tough.

According to the latest published analysis by the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers'central bank), the total exposure of overseas banks to the governments and banks of Greece, Portugal and Ireland is "just" $362.2bn, or £224bn,

Now let's make the heroic guess that a rational writedown of this debt to a sustainable level would see a third of it written off - which would generate $121bn (£75bn) of losses for banks outside the countries concerned.

If those loans were spread relatively evenly between banks around the world, losses on that scale would be a headache, but nothing worse.

But this tainted cookie doesn't crumble quite like that. Just under a third of the relevant exposure to public sector and banks of the three debt-challenged states, some $118bn, sits on the balance sheets of German banks, according to the BIS.

For all the formidable strength of the German economy, the balance sheets of Germany's banks are by no means the strongest in the world. German banks would not be able to shrug off $39bn or £24bn of potential losses on Portuguese, Irish and Greek loans as a matter of little consequence.

This suggests that it is in the German national interest to help Portugal, Ireland and Greece avoid default.

If you are a Greek, Portuguese or Irish citizen this might bring on something of a wry smile - because you would probably be aware that the more punitive of the bailout terms imposed by the eurozone on these countries (or about to be imposed in Portugal's case) is the expression of a German desire to spank reckless borrowers.

But as I have mentioned here before, reckless lending can be the moral (or immoral) equivalent of reckless borrowing. And German banks were not models of Lutheran prudence in that regard.

If punitive bailout terms make it more likely that Ireland, Greece or Portugal will eventually default, you might wonder whether there has been an element of masochism in the German government's negotiating position.

Frenchman reportedly leaving KVSH, kicking off IndyCar's driver movement for 2017

Don't blame Josef Newgarden for leaving Ed Carpenter's popular IndyCar Series team, and don't blame powerful Team Penske for signing Newgarden. It's the right thing to do for the employee and his new employer.

Estado de São Paulo concentra maioria dos casos e óbitos registrados oficialmente, seguido pelo Rio de Janeiro.

Purdue and Indiana have prioritized the Valparaiso product for their 2019 class, but they aren't short on competition.

Purdue, along with Notre Dame, Gonzaga, Louisville and Kentucky are recruiting Dickinson. Duke is also in the mix but has yet to offer Dickinson.

"I'm pretty sure he's one-and-done. I just want to see how they develop him. What they do for him is key for me."

A fixture in IU's starting lineup for most of the past two years, Smith averaged 10.4 points and 5.2 rebounds per game in 2019-20.

There are 124 teams signed up for the Charlie Hughes Shootout, but the June 30 mandate of schools being closed throws the event in doubt.

This year's IndyStar Sports Awards show will be streamed online and available on-demand starting June 18.

The Boilermakers have seven commitments in the 2021 recruiting class, including two from Mooresville

Carmel and IU grad Sage Steele will co-host and star athletes like Drew Brees and Venus Williams will announce winners during the online broadcast.

Among the artifacts displayed at The Gordon Highlanders Museum in Aberdeen, Scotland is a flag from Hitler's staff car. (Don't ask how they got it.)

Education will be the key to enforce orders from Gov. Eric Holcomb and Mayor Joe Hogsett to close businesses and to urge people to "stay at home."

Gov. Eric Holcomb's coronavirus "stay at home" executive order generally limits travel to essential trips, allows outdoor activities such as walking.

Holcomb's veto, only his second as governor, provides a win to hundreds of advocates who had all but begged for his support in recent weeks.