By the time she withdrew the bill -- that would have allowed criminal suspects to be extradited across the border to mainland China -- protesters' demands had expanded to include action on deeper social grievances.

In January, many Hong Kongers across various sectors, including elected lawmakers, called to shut Hong Kong's borders with mainland China to contain the virus. But these demands also reintroduced familiar strands of localism, an ideology focused on preserving Hong Kong's autonomy.

This is why closing the Chinese borders is a politically significant and symbolic act -- and perhaps why Lam resisted doing so for weeks.

The 2019 protest movement may appear to have fizzled out -- but it educated an entire city and generation of youth on organized resistance. Now, this spirit of political action has been redirected toward the outbreak, as people protest for a stronger government response.More than 7,000 health care workers participated in a week-long union strike in early February to demand closed borders; that's nearly 10% of all medical staff of Hong Kong's Hospital Authority.The labor union that organized the strike was one of several born from the 2019 unrest, founded during the tail end of the protests.

Hong Kong's schools are shut until at least mid-March, and many businesses have closed or have instructed employees to work from home.With cases of community transmission confirmed, many people are staying at home for weeks at a time to avoid infection, only venturing out for groceries or quick strolls.

Fear and anger are palpable in the city, especially earlier this week with the disappearance of two people who violated quarantine after returning from mainland China. They were found after being added to a police wanted list.

China says coronavirus death toll reaches almost 1,900

Japanese stocks slide almost 1% after Apple sales warning

Gauging the weakness in China's economy

Economists broadly expect China's growth rate to cool sharply in the first quarter of this year — although the extent of the slowdown is the subject of debate.

Traffic congestion Congestion in 100 major Chinese cities typically picks up in the days following the lunar new year holiday. That has not been the case this year.

Coal consumption Major electricity producers consumed 35 per cent less coal during the first 16 days of February than "normal seasonality would suggest", Goldman said.

Asia Apple suppliers slip after warning from iPhone maker Share prices for Apple suppliers in Asia fell after the Californian company warned that disruptions in China from the coronavirus will cause revenues to fall short in the current quarter.

Health authorities say it can be difficult to distinguish between the two illnesses. Currently, there are 15 confirmed cases of the coronavirus infection in the US. Some 600 people are currently under quarantine.

The World Health Organization has said that the first person to be infected with the disease in Africa is now in recovery. 

China’s central bank said on Wednesday the impact of the coronavirus on the economy will be limited as the epidemic has not changed the country’s economic fundamentals, Reuters reported.

Egypt, Algeria and South Africa were at the highest risk of importing a COVID-19 case from China, but had moderate to high preparedness and low vulnerability. 

The survey stated that 44% of the refugees now rate their German language skills as "good" or "very good." In 2017, the figure stood at 35% and in the first survey in 2016, at only 22%. The proportion of respondents without any knowledge of German has fallen to 5%.

The project’s future is far from certain. It was hailed as an economic breakthrough for the underdeveloped region when it was announced by Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, in November.

Grünheide residents are divided over the issue. The town, home in the 20s to a bakelite plastics factory, has repeatedly missed out on any big economic success in the decades since reunification.

“Of course you always have to weigh up the economic interests with those of environmental protection,” he told Die Zeit. “It’s important to involve the locals in the discussion from an early stage, and that simply did not happen here. The people are supposed to feel blessed by the fact that Tesla is coming and bringing many jobs with it.”

Playing a climate leadership role. In September 2018, the state organized the Global Climate Action Summit, a gathering of world leaders representing governments, the private sector and indigenous people in what became a momentous occasion for subnational climate action, as major companies and jurisdictions lined up to declare or reiterate their climate commitments.

Partnering with other regions and stakeholders, including indigenous peoples, to share California's lessons and experiences from the state's early adoption of comprehensive climate and energy policies. Oregon, for example, is poised to model its carbon pricing program on California’s experience, and is interested in eventually linking to California’s carbon market.

Establishing complementary policies, incentives, and market rules that help the state transition to a low-carbon, clean energy economy through promoting renewables and modernizing and automating energy options in the state.

Fast-tracking emissions reductions to benefit public health through policies that work in concert with cap and trade.

California could take further action by codifying an ambitious midcentury greenhouse gas reduction target to ensure continued momentum on climate action.

By taking bold action California is a leader on climate change. Hallmarks of its success are strong government leadership, accelerated investment in clean energy, and rapid growth of businesses that contribute to the advancement of the low-carbon economy.

He is calling for much further-reaching action and arguing that his deep experience in diplomacy makes him uniquely qualified to reposition the U.S. as the world leader in confronting global warming.

“On Day One, Biden will sign a series of new executive orders with unprecedented reach that go well beyond the Obama-Biden administration platform and put us on the right track,” the candidate’s plan vows.

Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., takes a more measured approach to reaching net zero emissions than some of his more progressive rivals.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar is running as a moderate alternative to the progressive firebrands in the race. As such, her climate plans are more modest than those of some of her rivals.

It’s projected to generate 1.3 million jobs and provide a $684 billion boost to Southern California’s economy.

Southern California is expected to add 129,800 jobs this year and 128,300 in 2021. This year’s biggest employment gain of 52,500 jobs will come in education and health services, the report said, with other sizable increases in leisure and hospitality (20,600), professional and business services (18,900) trade, transportation and utilities (13,200) and construction, natural resources and mining (12,100).

The report defines Southern California as a 10-county region that includes Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Imperial, Kern and San Luis Obispo counties.

U.S. stocks declined on Tuesday, a day after Apple warned that it would miss its sales forecasts due to disruption in China, as concerns about the impact of the outbreak weighed on the outlook for the global economy.

Half of China’s population is facing new travel restrictions.Image

At least 150 million people in China — over 10 percent of the country’s population — are living under government restrictions on how often they can leave their homes, The New York Times found in examining dozens of local government announcements and reports from state-run news outlets.

Japan says 500 people will be released from cruise ship after more cases confirmed.

Australia plans to repatriate about 200 of its citizens aboard the ship on Wednesday, and other countries have similar plans, but Japanese officials did not say whether any of those people were among the 500 who would be allowed to disembark.

Britain prepares to evacuate citizens from cruise ship.

The new virus is deadlier than the one that causes the flu, Chinese figures suggest.Image

The director of a hospital in Wuhan has died from the virus.

Stigma surrounding virus impacts communities in Europe.

Domestic workers from the Philippines will be permitted to return to Hong Kong.Image

South Korea’s leader warns of a dire impact on economy.

Cruise ship passengers blocked from leaving Cambodia.

While health minister Katsunobu Kato said there is "no reason for changing the government position that it has yet to reach a state of epidemic in Japan," infection of a Hokkaido resident in his 50s with no recent history of traveling abroad has been confirmed, the Hokkaido government said. The man is being treated at a hospital where he remains in serious condition.

Elsewhere in Japan, a female taxi driver in her 60s in Okinawa tested positive for the virus, becoming the first confirmed case of infection in the country's southernmost island prefecture or the Kyushu region, local authorities said.

The government has already sent four chartered planes and repatriated a total of 763 people from Wuhan and other areas of Hubei Province amid a wide-scale lockdown of the area. It is planning to send a fifth plane on Sunday to bring home more Japanese and family members who wish to leave the city, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said.

The total number of people infected around the world climbed to more than 71,000 on Monday, including a further 2,048 confirmed cases in China, where the total number of deaths stands at 1,770. Five people have died outside China. Of the 105 deaths reported in China on Monday, 100 were in Hubei province, the centre of the outbreak.

Cities in Hubei have stepped up measures to stop the virus’s spread.

Omi said any disruption to this summer’s Tokyo Olympics – including possible cancellation of the Games – would depend on how and if the virus mutates in the coming months, as well as the effectiveness of the international community’s attempts to contain the outbreak.

But the mothers – most of them now in their late 80s – warn that the current era of alternative facts and revisionist history poses a new kind of threat for the country.

“People were scared,” recalls Gastelú, now 88. “If I talked about my kidnapped son at the hairdresser or supermarket they would run away. Even listening was dangerous.

“Among us there are mothers who escaped from the Nazi Holocaust, only to lose their Argentinian-born children to another dictatorship – so we know for a fact that these tragedies can repeat themselves,” Gastelú says.

"I think the virus will be under control by April. However, in the worst-case scenario, growth may fall to 2-3% in the first quarter and to 5% in (full-year) 2020," said Bingnan Ye, senior macroeconomic analyst at Bank of China International in Beijing.

China's share of the global economy has quadrupled to 16% since the SARS outbreak, so any major disruption to economic activity is likely to have a bigger impact on the world economy now.

"Every day is a deadline in February as Wuhan coronavirus data roll in," noted Lee Hardman, currency strategist at MUFG, the most accurate forecaster for Asian currencies in 2019. "For the yuan, the overall depreciation story continues."

Hospitals in Wuhan, China — the largest city in Hubei Province and the center of the epidemic — have struggled to diagnose infections with scarce and complicated tests that detect the virus’s genetic signature directly. Other countries, too, have had such issues.

In China, health officials have been under exceptional strain. Hospitals are overwhelmed, and huge new shelters are being erected to warehouse patients. Medical resources are in short supply. It’s never been clear who is being tested.

The push to prioritize lung scans seems to have begun with a social media campaign by a physician in Wuhan, who last week called for using the scans to simplify the screening of patients and to accelerate their hospitalization and treatment.

The new coronavirus is highly transmissible and will be difficult to squelch. A single infected “super-spreader” can infect dozens of others. Outbreaks can seem to recede, only to rebound in short order, as the weather or conditions change.

In Hong Kong, people living 10 floors apart were infected, and an unsealed pipe was blamed. A British citizen apparently infected 10 people, including some at a ski chalet, before he even knew he was sick.

Unlike MERS and SARS, both diseases caused by coronaviruses, the virus spreading from China appears to be highly contagious, though it is probably less often fatal.

The country is so central to the world economy that it can easily “seed” epidemics everywhere, he said.

Chinese officials reported Friday that a surge in new infections was continuing, though not as markedly as the day before, when the number of people confirmed to have the virus in Hubei Province skyrocketed by 14,840 cases.

Japan has confirmed its first death from the virus.

For a moment on Thursday, it seemed as if there might be some good news from the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship being held in the port of Yokohama in Japan, when the authorities said they would release some passengers to shore to finish their quarantine.Instead, Japanese health officials announced the first death from the virus in the country, of a woman in her 80s. It was third death from the virus outside mainland China. The woman had no record of travel there.

The Centers for Disease Control said Thursday that a person under quarantine at a military base in San Antonio had tested positive for the virus, bringing the number of confirmed coronavirus patients in the United States to 15.

For the first time in a decade, global oil demand is expected to fall.

The travel industry in Asia has been upended.Image

Movie releases have been canceled in China and symphony tours suspended. A major art fair in Hong Kong was called off. And spring art auctions half a world away in New York have been postponed because well-heeled Chinese buyers may find it difficult to travel to them.

The U.S. reported its 15th case after a person under quarantine tested positive.

The arts world, too, is feeling the squeeze.Image

China ousted a provincial leader at the center of the outbreak.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday summarily fired two top Communist Party officials from Hubei Province, exacting political punishment for the regional government’s handling of the crisis.

A second citizen-journalist in Wuhan has disappeared.

A video blogger in the city of Wuhan who had been documenting conditions at overcrowded hospitals at the heart of the outbreak has disappeared, raising concerns among his supporters that he may have been detained by the authorities.The blogger, Fang Bin, is the second citizen journalist in the city to have gone missing in a week after criticizing the government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic.Mr. Fang began posting videos from hospitals in Wuhan on YouTube last month, including one that showed a pile of body bags in a minibus. In early February, Mr. Fang said he had been briefly detained and questioned. A few days later, he filmed an exchange he had with strangers who showed up at his apartment claiming to bring him food.Mr. Fang’s last video, posted on Sunday, was a message written on a piece of paper: “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”Last week, Chen Qiushi, a citizen-journalist and lawyer in Wuhan who recorded the plight of patients and the shortage of hospital supplies, vanished, according to his friends.

South Korea quarantined hundreds of soldiers who visited China.

In 1976, the Argentine military overthrew the government of Isabel Perón, the widow of populist president Juan Perón. It was part of a larger series of political coups called Operation Condor, a campaign sponsored and supported by the United States.

The Dirty War was fought on a number of fronts. The junta dubbed left-wing activists “terrorists” and kidnapped and killed an estimated 30,000 people.

The government made no effort to identify or document the desaparecidos. By “disappearing” them and disposing of their bodies, the junta could in effect pretend they never existed.

In 1977, a group of desperate mothers began to protest.

Soon, the government turned against the protesting women with the same brand of violence they had visited on their children. In December 1977, one of the group’s founders, Azucena Villaflor, was kidnapped and murdered. Twenty-eight years later, her relatives received confirmation that she had been killed and dumped in a mass grave. Several other of the group’s founders were also kidnapped and presumably killed.

But the women didn’t stop. They protested throughout the 1978 World Cup, which was hosted by Argentina, and took advantage of international coverage to make their cause known.