In a scathing letter addressed to WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom on Monday night, Trump took the agency to task for what he said were “inaccurate and misleading” statements about the coronavirus and moving too slowly to address the crisis, while also accusing it of doing China’s bidding along the way. “Throughout the crisis, the World Health Organization has been curiously insistent on praising China for its alleged ‘transparency’... notwithstanding that China has been anything but transparent,” the president said, adding, “The only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China... we do not have time to waste.”

President Donald Trump and his senior advisers, encouraged by the relative strength of the stock market and some indicators like credit card receipts, have in recent days expressed confidence the US economy will roar back to life in the second half of this year despite staggering increases in unemployment and small business closures.

"It almost feels like today is the first day," Trump said during a White House meeting on Monday. "People are starting to go out. They're opening. They get it." The White House's rosy view of the US economy's trajectory clashes with the dire predictions of many mainstream economists, as well as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who is set to testify before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday alongside Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Thousands of autoworkers at 24 Ford plants, 19 GM plants, and eight Fiat Chrysler plants are reopening this week with another five Fiat Chrysler plants reopening on May 26. The plants had closed late March due to fears of the coronavirus spreading at factories, leaving tens of thousands of autoworkers in limbo. In a statement to the Detroit Free Press, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Rory Gamble said the union would continue to monitor the reopened plants and push for widespread, readily available testing of its workers.

At present, a total of 117 very large crude carriers (VLCCs) – each capable of shipping 2 million barrels of oil – are traveling to China for unloading at its ports between the middle of May and the middle of August. If those supertankers transport standard-size crude oil cargoes, it could mean that China expects at least 230 million barrels of oil over the next three months, according to Bloomberg. The fleet en route to China could be the largest number of supertankers traveling to the world’s top oil importer at one time, ever, Bloomberg News’ Firat Kayakiran says.

One important detail was tellingly absent from the commission president’s private presentation in a windowless room in Brussels’ Berlaymont building: the hugely divisive question of the size of the recovery fund which she will shortly propose. Ms von der Leyen is planning an audacious bid for new powers as she seeks to put her institution at the centre of efforts to revive the European economy, asking member states for unprecedented latitude to raise funds in the markets. But the former German defence minister faces the central test of her short presidency as she seeks to bridge bitter splits within the EU over the plan.

On Monday, the World Health Organization bowed to calls from most of its member states to launch an independent probe into how it managed the international response to coronavirus, which has been clouded by finger-pointing between the US and China. The 'comprehensive evaluation' over coronavirus, sought by a coalition of African, European and other countries, is intended to review 'lessons learned' from WHO's coordination of the global response to the virus outbreak.

Donald Trump took the row with China further last night when he threatened to permanently cut off funding for the WHO, which he has accused of bias towards Beijing. More than 100 nations on Sunday pledged their support to the inquiry, including the entire 27-member European Union along with New Zealand, Indonesia, Japan, the UK, India, Canada, Russia, Mexico and Brazil.

Republicans have assailed the bill as a profligate wish list. Even Americans who are suffering from the health and economic ravages of the pandemic may feel a bit stunned by the dollar amount. Does the government really have to spend $5 trillion in three months? Can the United States afford to dump such unfathomable amounts of money into the economy?

The answers to those questions are yes and absolutely yes. Small-business activity has plunged nationwide by nearly 50 percent. Hundreds of thousands of companies have already failed. Big retailers such as J Crew and Neiman Marcus have filed for bankruptcy, while others, including Macy’s, are teetering. By some measures, scarcely one-third of Americans say they are working. Next month’s jobs report will likely show that, for the first time since World War II, a majority of Americans aren’t officially employed.

“The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday. “Additional fiscal support could be costly but worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery.”

"On eight of the past nine days," said the [New York] Times, "there have been fewer deaths announced than there were seven days prior, indicating that the virus toll appears to be easing. More than half of the 24 counties that have recorded the most coronavirus deaths, including Oakland County, Michigan, and Hartford County, Connecticut, are seeing sustained declines." Still, the thrust of the Times article was about the new crisis we will be courting, should we try to resume normal activities too soon. Do that, says the Times, and we could easily forfeit all the progress we have made. Message: Social distancing, sheltering in place, wearing masks, working at home – the practices that broke the back of the pandemic – should be sustained for those able to do so.

Clearly, the opening in many states has been driven by popular protest and public demand. Crowds have ignored social distancing to demonstrate for an end to the shutdown. Protesters have refused to wear masks and engaged in the time-honored practice since the '60s of civil defiance and disobedience. The protesters seem to be saying: We deplore the losses and know the risks, but we cannot live our lives behind closed doors in our homes until the elites tell us, as though we were children, when we may go out in the yard. Hence, the next question we are all likely to confront:

If there is a sudden resurgence of the coronavirus, a second wave, and the media elite and blue-state governors demand a new shutdown, a new closure of beaches, parks, shops, restaurants and churches, will the people of this republic comply with those demands or defy them? Will the nation answer back to the elites: We did that. We sheltered in place. We wore the masks. We socially distanced. We stayed in our homes. We stayed home from work. We have done all we were told to do to contain the virus. But, now, with the shutdown having put 36 million Americans on unemployment and sunk our GDP to Depression-era levels, we're going back to work. The political divide has already begun to appear.

Among those making the case for ending the shutdown and reopening the country and economy will be Trump, red-state governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Brian Kemp in Georgia, conservatives in Congress and populists. The proponents of a second shutdown will be liberal governors and mayors, the mainstream media and the Nancy Pelosi wing of Congress.

It should not go unmentioned that the latter's political interests are best served the longer the shutdown endures and the worse the economic situation on November 3. If the economy has failed to begin a robust recovery by fall, the greater the odds that Joe Biden wins the White House.

Unfortunately, other very deep solar minimums throughout history have corresponded with brutally cold temperatures and horrific global famines, and of course this new solar minimum comes at a time when the United Nations is already warning that we are on the verge of “biblical” famines around the world. So we better hope that the sun wakes up soon, because the alternative is almost too horrifying to talk about.

For example, the New York Post is claiming that NASA scientists fear that we could potentially be facing “a repeat of the Dalton Minimum”… which happened between 1790 and 1830 — leading to periods of brutal cold, crop loss, famine and powerful volcanic eruptions. Temperatures plummeted by up to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over 20 years, devastating the world’s food production.

Even worse would be a repeat of the Maunder Minimum which stretched from 1645 to 1715. It came as the globe was already in the midst of “the Little Ice Age”, and it caused harvest failures and famines all over the globe…

“From a psychological perspective, I am not sure that it works at all,” said Rory Sutherland, a behavioral scientist and vice chairman of the advertising agency Ogilvy. “Any group assembling could simply claim that everyone present was part of the same cluster, and without spectacular levels of bureaucracy, it would be impossible to establish the veracity of this. It would re-establish the sight of large groups of people as a norm.”

“I think it falls into that category of “excellent science, bad policy,” he added. It’s easy to envisage a not too distant dystopia of state-enforced social distancing where the mandatory app will deduct points from your social credit score if you venture outside of your house once too often or meet with an unauthorized friend.