Many hardline environmentalists are overjoyed at the atmosphere of fear that Covid-19 has created; for them, it is an instrument for realising the dream of a society that runs according to climate alarmists' dogma.

"Some believe the pandemic is a once-in-a-generation chance to remake society and build a better future," argues one advocate of climate alarmism.

So, in case you thought that Covid-19 is a global pandemic of catastrophic proportions, think again!

An engineer deliberately ran a train off the tracks at high speed near the Port of Los Angeles in an attempt to crash into and damage the USNS Mercy hospital ship, prosecutors say.

The Pacific Harbor Line train derailed Tuesday, running through the end of the track and crashing through barriers, finally coming to rest about 250 yards from the docked naval ship.

Federal prosecutors allege train engineer Eduardo Moreno, 44, of San Pedro intended to hit the ship, saying he thought it was "suspicious" and did not believe "the ship is what they say it's for.'"

German researchers are planning to introduce coronavirus "immunity certificates" to indicate who has recovered from the virus and is ready to re-enter society.

The documents are part of a research project being conducted at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, which will conduct blood tests among the general public for antibodies produced against the virus.

The antibodies will show which of the participants have had the virus and have recovered, according to a report by the German magazine Der Spiegel. Around 100,000 people will be tested at a time, and certificates issued to those found positive.

The testing could start in April if researchers are given the green light.

"You could give immune people something similar to a vaccination certificate that could allow them exceptions from limits on their activities," Helmholtz Institute epidemiologist Gerard Krause told Der Spiegel.

The coronavirus is spreading a dangerous strain of inequality. Better-off Americans are still getting paid and are free to work from home, while the poor are either forced to risk going out to work or lose their jobs.

Driving the news: This sobering reality emerges from Week 3 of our Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index.

• The survey finds Americans with less education and lower incomes far more likely either to have to keep showing up at their workplaces — putting themselves at greater daily risk of infection — or more likely to have seen their work dry up.

Why it matters: "It's a tale of two Americas," said Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs.

• "The rich and affluent have gone virtual. They've maintained their jobs through the virtual world," he said. "The working and the poor are more exposed."

At present, National Guard coronavirus testing is voluntary; however, will that still be the case in a few weeks?

It was a mere four years ago when public outrage forced police in Missouri, Ohio and Colorado to stop intrusive DNA and drug checkpoints.
Currently, there are at least thirty-three different types of police checkpoints going on at any given time across the country.

In some states, police are actually setting up firewood, agriculture and fish and game checkpoints to name a few. With the outbreak of COVID-19, Americans could be facing new type of checkpoint across the country.

In Florida, state police are setting up checkpoints on Interstate 10 looking for Louisiana residents trying to enter the state. In Rhode Island police are stopping vehicles with New York state license plates and the National Guard is going door-to-door looking for New York City residents. The New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority has recently issued "travel papers" to all their employees.

My greatest fear is watching authorities use the public's fear of COVID-19 to create mandatory coronavirus checkpoints.

Violent behavior against pharmacy workers has surged since strict quarantine was imposed in France in order to quell Covid-19, the country's pharmacist association chief has said.

"The situation has deteriorated. Isolation tends to exacerbate fear, anxiety and aggression," Carine Wolf-Thal, the head of France's National Chamber of Pharmacists told Le Parisien newspaper on Wednesday.

"Our system... shows a 50 to 60 percent increase in aggressive action [against pharmacists] since the beginning of the isolation regime compared to the same weeks last year. These actions include insults, threats, but also physical attacks and break-ins."

The hashtag #FilmYourHospital is currently trending on Twitter. With a third of the world's population currently 'on lockdown', some have begun coping with cabin fever by paying visits to their local hospitals to record some of the chaos they expected to see happening there - what with a deadly pandemic raging and all. The surprising thing, however, is that people are finding, for the most part unusually quiet, not busy, hospitals. Some even appear to be - forgive the pun - deathly quiet.

Now, it could be that the reason people are currently seeing empty or quiet hospitals is because Covid-19 cases (suspected and/or confirmed) are being directed - for now - to specific hospitals only. This would make sense from a epidemiological point of view: you'd want to 'contain' cases to as few 'hotspots' as possible because hospitals themselves quickly become strong sources of infection. Has anyone seen reports or directives issued about such an administrative move? I haven't yet. Most reports about hospital preparedness convey the impression that all medical facilities, in cities anyway, are expecting to be 'overrun any day now'.

In one of the first #FilmYourHospital videos published online, by German reporter Billy Six and titled in German 'Mediziner gegen Medien Es gibt keine gefährliche Corona Pandemie', he begins his tour of one of Berlin's busiest hospitals by claiming that he was directed there by administrators of another hospital who had told him the one he's filming from is "where they're sending the Covid-19 cases." But instead of finding medical staff frantically running about handling Covid-19 cases, as you'd expect, he found the hospital to be unusually quiet.

Nearly a fifth of all small and medium-sized businesses in the UK are unlikely to get the cash they need to survive the next four weeks, in spite of unprecedented government support.

That's according to research from a network of accountants which suggests between 800,000 and a million firms nationwide may soon have to close.

Many firms have told the BBC that banks have refused them emergency loans.

The banks say they are following the rules set out by the government.

Federal agents in San Diego uncovered an underground smuggling tunnel last week and seized more than $29 million worth of drugs, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said Tuesday.

The tunnel extended more than 2,000 feet between a warehouse in the Otay Mesa area of San Diego and a warehouse in Tijuana, Mexico, according to the DEA.

Agents seized about 1,300 pounds of cocaine, 86 pounds of methamphetamine, 17 pounds of heroin, 3,000 pounds of marijuana and more than two pounds of fentanyl from the tunnel, according to the DEA. Authorities estimated the total street value of the seized drugs is $29.6 million.

The discovery of the tunnel resulted from a combined investigation from members of the San Diego Tunnel Task Force, as well as Homeland Security, U.S. Border Patrol, the DEA and the United States Attorney's Office.

Diana Johnstone's just published book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher, is the best book I have ever read, the most revealing, the most accurate, the most truthful, the most moral and humane, the most sincere and heartfelt, and the best written. Her book is far more than a memoir. It is a history that has not previously been written. If you want the truth of the last 60 years in place of the contrived reality constructed for us by controlled explanations, it is in this book.

This book is so extraordinary in its truthfulness and conciseness that it is difficult for a less gifted writer to do it justice. It is a book without a superfluous sentence.

Herein I will provide some of the books message. In future columns I hope to present some of the history in the book.

In the Western World the legitimate national interest of people has become identified with racism and fascism. Corporate globalism requires open borders, and the left has aligned with globalism and has become the most zealous enforcer of open borders, which has come to mean the right of refugees with victim status to other peoples' countries. The leftwing has abandoned the working class and anti-war activity. Today the leftwing is pro-war in order to enforce "human rights" on alleged dictators by bombing their peoples into oblivion, thus producing refugees and tag along opportunistic immigrants that flock to the Western aggressor nations.

Self-styled moral censors, such as Antifa, denounce hate while violently hating those they denounce. Everything is settled by controlled explanations that cannot be questioned or examined in debate. Those who engage in critical free thinking are censored, shouted down, beaten up, fired, and cancelled. The cancel culture permits no debate, only enthusiastic acquiesce to explanations that have been settled in advance.