'Can I ask what exercise you're doing, sir, apart from exercising your thumbs?' The copper is wearing a perfect sneer. I get the impression he has been waiting his entire jobsworth's life to be able to reprimand someone for sitting on a park bench and writing a text message. 'I've been cycling and walking and now I'm resting for a couple of minutes', I say, horrified by my own words; horrified that I am having to explain perfectly lawful, perfectly safe behaviour to an agent of the state as if I were in the Soviet Union rather than sitting by the Serpentine in the heart of London. 'Well, move on', he says, balefully and gleefully, like a character from a Kafka novel.

Like all Londoners, I love Hyde Park. It isn't even really a park, as many writers over the decades have observed: it's a chunk of countryside plonked in the middle of a mettlesome city, never changing, however much its surroundings might. It is wide and rambling and free. But today I hated it. It is swarming with police. They're whizzing round on bicycles, seeking out couples sitting under trees to tell off. They're marching around the perimeter barking 'TWO METRES' at people who are far more than two metres apart. They're driving around in vans, polluting this wonderful space with their exhaust fumes and their diktats shouted from the vans' windows. One van cop driving past the Serpentine yells 'No sitting down' at a man sitting down. I take a photo of the scene and quick as a flash the van stops in front of me. 'I thought I'd stop and say hello while you're YouTubing us simply for reminding people of the government guidelines', the policeman in the front seat says. Oh fuck off.

A former hippie guru who lived the high life in Europe for years after murdering his ex-girlfriend in Philadelphia in the 1970s has died in prison.

Ira Einhorn, 79, died early Friday in a state prison in western Pennsylvania of natural causes, according to Susan McNaughton, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections. The death at SCI-Laurel Highlands was not related to the COVID-19 virus, she said.

Einhorn was serving life in prison after being convicted twice — once in absentia — for the murder of Holly Maddux, who disappeared in 1977. Eighteen months later, her mummified remains were found in a locked steamer trunk in the West Philadelphia apartment they shared.

Einhorn vanished just before his trial in 1981, and was convicted in absentia in 1993. He was living under assumed names across Europe before he was finally caught in 1997 in a converted windmill in France, where he lived with his Swedish-born wife.

America is crashing into a depression. In just two weeks, 10 million people have claimed unemployment benefits. This has put unprecedented stress on food bank networks across the country, a new investigation via The Guardian shows.

The US labor market is in free fall - the increasing lockdowns across major US metropolitan areas have forced millions of people out of work and into a hunger crisis.

The Guardian shows demand for food aid in some regions of the country has surged eightfold in recent weeks as RealInvestmentAdvice.com's Lance Roberts warns the unemployment rates in the US could spike to levels not seen since the "Great Depression," or about 15-20% in the second quarter.

The National Guard has been deployed for a variety of reasons: One is to support local area hospital systems, another is to maintain social order, and now soldiers in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Phoenix have supported food banks to ensure shortages do not materialize, mostly because that would trigger social unrest among the working poor.

Reporters at the White House press briefing on Sunday repeatedly asked President Donald Trump why he chose not to wear a medical mask.

One reporter, who was not wearing a mask, noted the former Vice President Joe Biden said he would start wearing a mask outdoors, and he asked President Trump if he and the White House task force would start wearing masks.


"Are we getting to the point where we might see the members of the coronavirus task force also wear face coverings?" the reporter asked.

Trump said the advisory was voluntary and that he would have no problem with anyone wearing a mask.

Another reporter asked why the first lady recommended that Americans wear masks when they were in public.

"She feels that way," Trump said.

"I would wear one," he said. "Would you like me to wear one right now? That would be a little awkward, I guess. But again, I would wear one if I thought it was important."

"If you give me all of Israel's money, I would never concede an inch of my land."

Palestinian Saadat Sabri Gharib, 38, had never imagined that his house, which was built by his father in 1979, would be turned into a very narrow cage surrounded by barbed wire and surveillance cameras.

Gharib's house is located in the Biet Ijza neighbourhood, west of occupied Jerusalem. It was surrounded by about 100 dunams of land owned by Gharib's father. However, the Israeli settlers stole all of this land and kept the house, which is only 500-metres square.

Gharib told Anadolu Agency, that since 2008, his house has been turned into a very small cage surrounded with concrete walls and located in the middle of an Israeli settlement. It has only a very narrow passage with 12 cameras monitoring it.

Gharib, his mother, his wife and three children live in this house. "Our house is a real prison," he explains, adding:

A man in Chicago suburb Lockport Township killed his wife and then himself this week, police say. On Thursday evening, police responded to a wellbeing check at the couple's home, where they found Patrick Jesernik, 54, and Cheryl Schriefer, 59, dead, NBC Chicago reported. An autopsy found that each died from a single gunshot wound to the head.

The couple's family told police that Jesernik was afraid that they both had COVID-19, the coronavirus disease. Schriefer was reportedly tested for the virus two days earlier after having trouble breathing but hadn't yet gotten results.

When they arrived, police found Jesernik and Schriefer in separate rooms, with a loaded revolver near Jesernik's body. Jesernik's death was ruled a suicide, and Schrieffer's death had been ruled a homicide. Authorities have said that both tested negative for COVID-19. Illinois has more than 10,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 243 deaths as of reporting.

During 2019 BC (Before Coronavirus), every morning brought at least one or two headlines of some person or group newly offended in the culture wars. Some sportscaster would make an innocuous comment, be labeled a misogynist, and find himself packing his bags. A speaker would arrive at a college campus where an angry mob would shout her down as a racist and drive her from the stage. Parents protesting a sex education program promoting masturbation for elementary school students were attacked as homophobes.

These were just some of the burning issues of 2019 BC.

In 2020 AC, not even crickets.

Oh sure, some have called President Trump a racist for using the term "the Chinese Virus" to describe COVID-19. I would quarrel with this term not as racist, but as inaccurate. As some others have noted, we should call it the "CCP Virus," or the Chinese Communist Party Virus, to remind readers who was responsible for this pandemic.

No - like an 18-wheeler loaded with toilet paper roaring down the freeway - may it arrive soon! - the coronavirus has run over and flattened almost all other news, including stories of micro-aggressions, hidden racism, and whether a man can become a woman. Those days are gone, at least for now.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." The words are Franklin D Roosevelt's. His challenge was recession, not disease, but his words have a wider resonance.

Fear is dangerous. It is the enemy of reason. It suppresses balance and judgment. And it is infectious. Roosevelt thought government was doing too little. But today fear is more likely to push governments into doing too much, as democratic politicians run for cover in the face of public panic. Is the coronavirus the latest and most damaging example?

Epidemics are not new. Bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, meningitis, Spanish flu all took a heavy toll in their time. An earlier generation would not have understood the current hysteria over Covid-19, whose symptoms are milder and whose case mortality is lower than any of these.

Web site that tracks actual hospital beds in use suggests the model used by top White House health officials to project the trajectory of the coronavirus has so far overestimated the number of Americans hospitalized by the disease by tens of thousands.

Those projections, popularly known as the "Murray" model after the model's lead author, University of Washington professor Christopher Murray, were explicitly cited by Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House's Coronavirus Task Force, at a press conference in the last week.

Birx told reporters that Murray's model, which predicts a shortage of tens of thousands of hospital beds throughout the country by the middle of April, underscored the task force's "concern that we had with the growing number of potential fatalities" based on the model's projections.

It was January 27 when 11-year-old Gannon Stauch disappeared from his Colorado Springs home. He missed school that day, and his stepmother, Letecia Stauch, reported him missing shortly before 7 p.m. that night.

Letecia's story about what happened the day Gannon disappeared kept changing, and despite her interviews with the media where she denied she had anything to do with the little boy's disappearance, she was arrested a month after she reported him missing and charged with his murder.

Letecia initially said that Gannon left their home around 3:15 p.m. on the day he disappeared to walk to his friend's house, but when he didn't come home for two hours, she reported him missing, The Daily Beast reported. A neighbor would later tell police his home-security video showed Letecia and Gannon leaving their family home that morning and Letecia returning home alone hours later.