Indiana

Indiana has hired Towson assistant coach Kenny Johnson to fill a spot on its basketball staff. Towson head coach Pat Skerry confirmed the hire in a Tweet saying, "Congrats to coach kenny johnson and getting the job at indiana. He helped lay a strong foundation this year and will do great things at IU" Johnson is a 1999 graduate of Maryland whose playing career was cut short by an injury when he was in high school at Oxon Hill. He was a head coach at Paul VI High School in Fairfax, Va., and began his collegiate coaching career under Skerry at Towson.

We think we know what Peter Franchot will be next year for Halloween. Just a guess, but Maryland's Comptroller seems to have a bit of an Indiana Jones fantasy -- one that he lived out Sunday morning in a weighty special section delivered with The Baltimore Sun. The 184-page publication features a grinning Franchot on the cover, trying to look as Harrison Ford-y as possible. There's the Indiana Jones whip in one hand, what looks to be an artificact in the other and atop his head, of course, is the archeologist's signature fedora.

An article in the April 6, 1912, edition of The Argus reported a resident's actions to make the dissolution of his marriage official. Calvin B. Green , a well-known resident of Oella, Saturday, by his attorney, John S. Ensor , filed a bill in the Circuit Court at Towson for an absolute divorce from his wife, Mrs. Emma Green . Mr. Green states that he was married in 1887 and that he and his wife separated 23 years ago,...

Finally, the Final Four light shone through for Maryland's Lonny Baxter, a steady force in his team's 64-52 win over Indiana for the national championship. With 15 points and 14 rebounds last night, the senior from Silver Spring, Md., erased unpleasant victories in the final game of his college career. During last season's semifinal loss to Duke, during which the Terps squandered a 22-point lead, Baxter shot 2-for-10 from the field and fouled out on a questionable call late in the game.

On Wednesday night, the Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team played North Carolina Central - the Big Ten, despite having an even number of teams now, still has bye weeks in basketball, leading to absurdities like this one - and welcomed a new manager to the sideline: San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh. According to reports from Yahoo! *, the Indianapolis Star and the Indiana Daily Student , Harbaugh, in Indiana for the NFL scouting combine, was seen setting up chairs and eavesdropping on his brother-in-law Tom Crean's frantic in-huddle coaching.

Whether it was beating Illinois and Duke when he was a sophomore or Connecticut in the East Regional final to keep his college career alive, Juan Dixon always had a flair for the dramatic, and the final three-pointer of his magnificent run at the University of Maryland went down as the biggest shot of the 2002 Final Four. There was no doubt that the senior from Calvert Hall would be named the Most Outstanding Player at the climax of the college basketball season, not after he cooled off a surging Indiana team with two clutch baskets that seemed to soften the hardened Hoosiers.

A 21-year-old Maryland man pleaded guilty Friday in an Indiana federal court to seven counts of producing child pornography, prosecutors said. Trevor J. Shea, of Mechanicsburg, was sentenced to 33 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release, according to a statement Friday from the U.S. Department of Justice. Shea admitted to blackmailing 10 girls, between the ages of 13 and 16, to be video recorded while engaging in "sadistic and masochistic abuse and other sexually explicit conduct," the statement said.

Loyola cut No.3 Kentucky's lead to four points on the first possession of the second half, but the Wildcats later used a 15-2 run to put Thursday's men's basketball game out of reach in an 87-63 win before an announced 22,274 at Rupp Arena. "We withstood the first couple of minutes when they came out strong, and then we made it a really close game in the first half," Loyola coach Jimmy Patsos said. Erik Etherly, who led Loyola (8-3) with 14 points and 11 rebounds, caught a lob pass from Shane Walker and laid it in 13 seconds into the second half to cut the Wildcats' lead to 45-41.

If ever a city was bracing itself to revel in a healthy dose of karma, it's Baltimore. The city spurned by Colts owner Robert Irsay in March 1984 once again welcomes the Indianapolis version to M&T Bank Stadium on Sunday. The Ravens are 9-3 and battling the Pittsburgh Steelers, Houston Texans and New England Patriots for the AFC's No. 1 playoff seed. The Colts? They're 0-12 for only the second time in the club's 59-year history and in jeopardy of joining the 2008 Detroit Lions as the NFL's only 0-16 teams.

Indana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, did something pretty amazing recently. With bipartisan approval in the legislature and working with state employees, he was able to bring about a surplus in the state's budget. He generated $1.2 billion dollars worth of surplus by not raising taxes. All of the savings were from carefully cutting expenses. Indiana's financial situation is far better than its neighboring states, particularly Illinois, which implemented massive tax increases to shore up its finances.