Lynn sat in the parking lot of her opioid treatment clinic in Columbus, Ohio, for hours on a recent Tuesday. Like in other parts of the country, the coronavirus pandemic was leading to longer wait times for medication — in this case, Suboxone.

Around her, people idled in their cars or stood in a smoking area until the doctor called them inside via text message. The process to get treatment took nearly four hours. "I was worried COVID might escalate more. I didn't want to be dependent on something that I wouldn't be able to get all of a sudden," said the 30-year-old, who asked to be identified only by her middle name. "I kind of weaned myself off Suboxone. That led to an overdose."

Lynn has struggled with heroin addiction since 2018. She said she hadn't used opioids for three months, until she was hit by the stresses and isolation of COVID-19, which public health officials fear may be contributing to relapses in Ohio's recovery community and beyond. Lynn thought she could taper off doses of Suboxone, a drug containing buprenorphine that's used to treat opiate addiction, in case the pandemic caused more roadblocks for her treatment.

Michigan State Police investigators are looking into reports that a Flint dollar store security guard was fatally shot Friday after an argument with a customer who refused to wear a mask in the store.

The 43-year-old guard was shot in the head at about 2:15 p.m. Friday at the Family Dollar store at 877 Fifth Ave. He later died in an area hospital. Police are not yet releasing the name of the guard.

Michigan State Police 1st Lt. David Kaiser said Sunday that detectives are investigating a flood of reports on social media from people who say the violence sparked when the guard told a customer he had to wear a mask, a policy set forth by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to help curb the spread of the coronavirus.

"We're seeing a lot of these reports on social media, so we're investigating them," Kaiser said. "We'll talk to all the potential witnesses."

Coastal states are facing a salty insurrection as warming temperatures send lockdown-weary citizens running for the beaches. Faced with seemingly arbitrary closures, thousands of would-be sunbathers became protesters.

Federal stay-at-home guidelines have expired and only state-level measures remain, placing governors and city officials on the opposite sides of the barricades. A unique situation has emerged in which citizens are technically violating the law and law enforcement is looking the other way, unless they choose not to.

There were no arrests made at Huntington Beach after beachgoers defied Governor Gavin Newsom's executive order closing all beaches across Orange County in the name of the ever-present threat of coronavirus. Police and lifeguards were there, and a helicopter barked loud warnings that the beaches were closed, but not a single citation was issued, according to the city's public information officer. Nor were there any arrests on Friday, as the water gleamed invitingly while tightly-packed, sweaty crowds of protesters jammed the streets, waving flags and signs protesting the beach closure and demanding an end to the lockdown.

From May 11, the date of the start of deconfinement, many Parisians will have to find their way back to the office. But for their children, the situation looks more complicated. In the capital, only 10% of schoolchildren will be able to be accommodated in their public schools, explained to Figaro Patrick Bloche, deputy mayor responsible for education. Which would correspond to 13,000 children. "If we reach it (this digit, Note), it will already be very good, "added the deputy, referring to the classification of Paris in" red zone ".

This very limited reception - due to the numerous health measures to be implemented in schools - should pose a problem for parents forced to return to work from May 11. Always according to Figaro, which is based on several estimates from school directors in the capital, 40% to 60% of Parisians would nevertheless like to put their children back in school as early as next week despite the still complicated health context.

A truck-bomb attack at a military center in Afghanistan's southern Helmand Province has killed at least five people and wounded several others.

The May 4 attack came as U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said attacks by the Taliban were increasing, despite the United States and the militant group having signed a peace deal in February.


The Taliban, claiming responsibility for the bombing in Helmand, said it attacked a center where at least 150 members of the Afghan army and intelligence wing were stationed.

"Five members of the Afghan security forces and intelligence services were killed and seven others were wounded in a truck-bomb explosion in Grishk district," Omar Zwak, a spokesman for the regional governor, told RFE/RL.

NHS England's flagship Nightingale hospital in London - which opened to much fanfare a month ago - is to close its doors and be placed on 'standby' after treating just 51 Covid-19 patients, despite having room for 4,000.

The construction of the 'field hospital' at the ExCeL Centre in East London, which was opened by Prince Charles on April 3, was hailed as a huge success by the UK government. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the makeshift hospital showed the "best of the NHS."

The hospital's chief executive, Professor Charles Knight, emailed healthcare staff on Monday morning, telling them the site would be placed on standby after the remaining 20 patients are transferred to other medical facilities over the next four days. Knight added that they will be "ready to resume operations as and when needed in the weeks, and potentially months, to come."

Following the reported death of a rejected Iraqi asylum seeker, Finland was found guilty of violating his human rights, ordered to pay 20,000 euros in compensation, and instructed to limit deportations to Iraq. Now, the Finnish police suspect that he is alive and well, and a party leader labelled his purported death a "sob story".

Finland's National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) suspects a Iraqi man, previously thought to be dead, of aggravated fraud and forgery for faking his own death, national broadcaster Yle reported.

The police suspect the man known in Finnish press as "Ali" is currently in Iraq, alive and well. Ali's daughter was recently remanded into custody by Finnish authorities, and accused of helping her father fake his death.

"The suspect arrested last Friday clarified the course of events. The interrogation confirmed the perception that the Iraqi man is alive," the head of the investigation Jan Aarnisalo said, noting that the daughter is not suspected of having acted alone, and there are other persons of interest in the case. "All indications are that this was a planned act, in which several persons were involved," Aarnisalo said.

Stockholm Syndrome:
A condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity.

Lockdown Stockholm Syndrome:
A psychological state of mind that causes its sufferers to come to love seeing their economies and liberties being destroyed, whilst simultaneously being incapable of accepting that Sweden kept its society going without resorting to such measures.

I continue to be baffled by those who cannot bring themselves to admit that Sweden has carried out a relatively sensible policy on Covid-19, whilst the response of so many other countries has been authoritarian and frankly unhinged. The idea of quarantining millions of perfectly healthy people and stopping them from doing normal, healthy things is something that has apparently never occurred to any national leaders in the past, or at least if it did, they presumably never enacted it for fear of revolt.

No such fear today. It is simply staggering to see how so many people have not only come to accept the inevitable destruction of the economy and curtailment of civil liberties as a price worth paying to deal with an illness which is killing numbers on roughly the same levels as a bad flu season, but have actually become cheerleaders for the giant social experiment being done to them. It reminds me of the chilling and dispiriting line at the end of 1984: "He loved Big Brother." Today, for reasons that are not at all clear to me, many appear to "Love Lockdown" — that is, they appear to be absolutely fine with having their liberties taken away from them; absolutely fine with having the right to do lawful work taken from them; and absolutely fine with having the right to do normal, healthy things taken away from them. If anyone has an explanation, do be sure to let me know.

But it gets worse. Not only do they seem to be perfectly willing to go along with these things, but they are appear to be utterly oblivious and even apathetic to the economic train wreck headed their way because of the policy they support. Why? What will shake them out of that apathy and complacency? Will it be when they hear about the Great Depression-era unemployment levels coming on us? No! Even that doesn't do it. The chart below is one of the most genuinely frightening I've ever seen, showing as it does US unemployment rising by over 30,000,000 in just seven weeks to levels not seen since the 1930s. And yet when I show it, many just airily dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders as if it's irrelevant. Perhaps it will only be if they lose their own jobs and can't pay the rent or can't get stuff in the shops like they used to that it'll hit home! Who knows?

Having provoked extensive existential angst and worry through a Covid-19 Project Fear, governments are now faced with societies that are petrified of normal life and are pushing back against any easing of the lockdown.

A new poll by Opinium in the UK reveals that the vast majority of Britons remain strongly opposed to lifting the coronavirus lockdown; just one in five want schools, pubs and restaurants to be reopened.

This poll found that only 17 percent of people think the conditions have been met to consider reopening schools, as opposed to the 67 percent who say they have not been met and schools should stay closed.

Opposition to reopening restaurants and pubs - and allowing mass gatherings in sports and other stadiums to resume - is even higher. Just 11 percent of people think the time is right to consider reopening restaurants, while 78 percent are against. Only nine percent believe it would be correct to consider reopening pubs, while 81 percent are against; seven percent say it would be right to allow mass gatherings at sports events or concerts to resume, with 84 percent against.

A Nevada nurse who travelled to New York to help treat COVID-19 patients has posted a tearful Facebook Live video claiming that patients are not dying from the virus, but are being "murdered" by "gross negligence and complete medical mismanagement."

Nicole Sirotek, a nurse from Elko, Nevada, was assigned to two different hospitals in New York City.

"I am literally telling you that they are murdering these people," Sirotek says in the terrifying video.

The video begins with Sirotek explaining that every time she attempts to advocate on behalf of one of her patients, management takes them away and reassigns her to another unit. She said that this happened at both of the hospitals she has worked at in the city. "I legitimately don't even know what to do anymore. Even advocacy groups don't give a sh-t about these people," she said. "Black lives don't matter here."