More than 1,000 people queued up in Geneva to get free food parcels. The anti-coronavirus measures that have been in place since mid-March have taken a heavy toll on the country's poor.

Hundreds of people turned out to get free food from charities in one of the world's leading financial centres, typically associated with wealth, on Saturday. As those gathered had to follow the social distancing rules, the procession stretched for more than 1.5km (a mile).

Those most eager to receive food assistance began lining up in a file starting as early as at 5:00 am, according to the Caravane de Solidarite association, the main organizer of the event. It's the sixth time the group has been doling out food since the onset of the coronavirus outbreak in the country, head of the organization, Silvana Mastromatteo, told AFP.

She noted that the number of those seeking assistance has grown with each time.

It sounds like a news report out of yet another dystopian novel: Mexico is halting grid connection for new solar and wind power projects. In a world rushing to produce clean energy, Mexico has suddenly stood out like a sore thumb. But, as usual, there's more to the story.

The country's National Energy Control Center, or Cenace, announced it would suspend grid connections of new solar and wind farms until further notice earlier this week. The motivation behind the decision was the intermittency of solar and wind power generation, which, according to the state-owned power market operator, could compromise Mexico's energy security in difficult times. Cenace wrote in a document setting out the rules of the country's electricity market during the Covid-19 lockdown:

"The intermittent generation from wind and PV plants affects the reliability of the national electricity system, [impacting] the sufficiency, quality and continuity of power supply."

A coronavirus patient was arrested Thursday after prosecutors said he jumped a fence and fled the Nashville Fairgrounds, where health officials are using enforceable quarantines in an attempt to control an outbreak at an emergency homeless shelter.

This appears to be the first case in Nashville of police making an arrest to enforce coronavirus restrictions enacted by the local government.

The Tennessean is not naming the man to protect his privacy and because the charge is a misdemeanor.

According to an arrest affidavit, a 39-year-old man was taken to the Nashville Fairgrounds on Monday and placed under quarantine by the Metro Nashville Public Health Department because he tested positive for the coronavirus.

People of a certain age might remember the old John Birch Society slogan "Support your local police!" The idea here is that your local policeman is a liberty-loving buddy of yours who would only ever support just laws and constitutional mandates. Only those bad guys in the FBI or BATF would ever consider violating your rights.

Now, obviously that has always been a rather naïve fantasy, but the notion certainly has a long history of support among American conservatives. The idea that unionized, well-paid government employees sympathize with the common man instead of with the government that signs the cops' checks apparently has long made sense (for some reason) to conservatives and many others.

But thanks to the ongoing "state of emergency" and the fact that state governors, mayors, and health officials now rule by decree, we're witnessing more and more how local law enforcement officers have no particular interest in the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, or basic human rights of any sort. Police have been at the forefront of arresting business owners for the "crime" of using their own private property, using city parks, and engaging in other peaceful activities.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he was "immediately" filing a lawsuit against a California county that is not allowing his company's headquarters to reopen because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Making the comments Saturday on Twitter, Musk tore into Alameda County's interim public health officer, Dr. Erica Pan, and also said Tesla will move its operations in California to another state, calling the county's coronavirus restrictions the "final straw."

"Tesla is filing a lawsuit against Alameda County immediately. The unelected & ignorant 'Interim Health Officer' of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!" Musk said.

Palestinian officials said Friday that Israelis forcing banks in the occupied West Bank to close accounts held by the families of prisoners in Israeli jails to prevent the Palestinian Authority from providing stipends to them.

Israel has long objected to the Palestinian Authority's payments to the families of prisoners and those killed in the conflict, including militants, saying it rewards terrorism. The Palestinians view the payments as a social safety net for those living under decades of military occupation.

The apparent move to target banks comes as the Palestinians face a potentially severe economic crisis after weeks of lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic. It also comes as Israel vows to annex large parts of the West Bank in line with President Donald Trump's Middle East plan.

Protesters shattered the windows of several bank branches and set fires outside some of them late Thursday and early Friday as word of the new regulations spread.

A California physician is being hailed as a patriot after delivering an impassioned speech citing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in a sweeping condemnation of the coronavirus lockdowns imposed across America.

Dr. Jeffrey Barke stepped up to the microphone during a protest rally in Riverside County, addressing the crowd that had gathered to demonstrate against the economic shutdowns in his community and beyond.

Barke, a family physician and associate clinical professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, began by asking, "What if wearing a mask in public is not effective?"

Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College "stepped back" from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed. Perhaps he should have been dropped for a more consequential misstep. Details of the model his team built to predict the epidemic are emerging and they are not pretty. In the respective words of four experienced modellers, the code is "deeply riddled" with bugs, "a fairly arbitrary Heath Robinson machine", has "huge blocks of code - bad practice" and is "quite possibly the worst production code I have ever seen".

When ministers make statements about coronavirus policy they invariably say that they are "following the science". But cutting-edge science is messy and unclear, a contest of ideas arbitrated by facts, a process of conjecture and refutation. This is not new. Almost two centuries ago Thomas Huxley described the "great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

In this case, that phrase "the science" effectively means the Imperial College model, forecasting potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths, on the output of which the Government instituted the lockdown in March. Sage's advice has a huge impact on the lives of millions. Yet the committee meets in private, publishes no minutes, and until it was put under pressure did not even release the names of its members. We were making decisions based on the output of a black box, and a locked one at that.

In the Sicilian city of Ravanusa, 33-year-old Dario Musso drove down the street with a megaphone, wanting to wake up his fellow citizens to the cry of "The pandemic is not deadly! Come out, take off your masks! Open up the stores!"

All witnesses claim that he was perfectly sane, simply outraged.

He was arrested by the Carabinieri (one of Italy's main law enforcement agencies) and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he was bound to a bed for 4 days, drip fed and sedated.

The hospital refuses to give out any information.

As we get deeper into this crisis and we get used to our "new normal", it's easy to focus on the daily corona-horror stories in the media or the latest shocking unemployment numbers, and lose track of the bigger picture and of what is really, fundamentally important. Even as the lockdown measures begin to get phased out, the scale of the economic damage is unimaginable and the idea of returning to "business as usual" is no longer tenable. The last couple of months have had a severe impact not just on the economy, but on our societies and geopolitical reality too. These changes are most likely irreversible and we as citizens and as investors will have to be prepared to deal with this massive shift and all that it entails for a long time.

Amid the panic, the distractions and the hyperbole that are prevalent these days, my own daily task has been an effort to separate the signals from the noise. In order to do so, I've also reached out to the few people whose views and insights I have long found invaluable and who have prioritized critical thought and kept their principles intact throughout this crisis. Straight talk and direct answers are very hard to come by these days from most Western leaders and institutional figures, this is why I turned to Former President of the Czech Republic, Prof. Ing. Václav Klaus, who has long been a voice of reason and whose unique perspective is even more important now. In the interview that follows, he shares his views on the current crisis and on what's to come, in a succinct and resolute way and with a directness that is as rare and as it is essential in times like these.