(HONG KONG) — Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam said Thursday that the ”one country, two systems” framework under which the city enjoys freedoms unknown in China could continue after a 2047 deadline if loyalty to Beijing is upheld.

Lam’s comments at the Legislative Council appeared to be an appeal to those in the city who see Beijing as tightening its control over the semi-autonomous territory’s civic, economic and political life.

Hong Kong has been wracked by often violent anti-government protests since June, although they have diminished considerably in scale following a landslide win by opposition candidates in races for district councilors late last year.

Hong Kong was handed over from British to Chinese rule in 1997 with a promise that it would maintain its own capitalist economy and Western-style institutions for 50 years.

“Only if we insist on implementing the ‘one country, two systems’ principle and practice it continuously and fully … then I think there will be enough grounds ..

(TOKYO) — Japan’s government said Thursday a man treated for pneumonia after returning from China has tested positive for the new coronavirus identified as a possible cause of an outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

The man developed a fever and coughs on Jan. 3 while in Wuhan, returned to Japan on Jan. 6, and was hospitalized four days later due to persistent coughs and fever, with his X-ray image showing signs of pneumonia, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said.

Tests conducted Tuesday found the same coronavirus as had been detected in other patients in the Wuhan outbreak, the ministry said.

The man has since been released from hospital as his symptoms subsided. He was only identified as a man in his 30s in the Kanagawa prefecture, west of Tokyo. No sicknesses have been found so far in his family and medical staff who treated him. Kyodo News agency says the patient is Chinese.

Officials in Wuhan said last weekend 41 people had pneumonia caused by the new coronavirus an..

(CANBERRA, Australia) — Specialist firefighters have saved the world’s last remaining wild stand of a prehistoric tree from wildfires that razed forests west of Sydney, officials said Thursday.

Firefighters winched from helicopters to reach the cluster of fewer than 200 Wollemi Pines in a remote gorge in the Blue Mountains a week before a massive wildlife bore down, National Parks and Wildlife Service Director David Crust said.

The firefighters set up an irrigation system to keep the so-called dinosaur trees moist and pumped water daily from the gorge as the blaze that had burned out of control for more than two month edged closer.

Firefighting planes strategically bombed the fire front with fire retardant to slow its progress.

“That helped just to slow the intensity of the fire as it approached the site,” Crust told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“The Wollemi Pine is a particularly important species and the fact that this is the only place in the world where they exist and they ex..

Even in 2018, when Vladimir Putin still had a full six years to serve as President of Russia, the political class around the Kremlin began to whisper about what comes next.

Some pundits referred to the problem as Operation 2024, the year when Putin would have to decide whether – or, more likely, how – he would remain in power after his final term runs out. That operation appeared to begin on Wednesday, Jan. 15, the day after Russians emerged from their long winter holiday.

In his annual state of the nation address in Moscow, Putin announced his wish to reform the Russian constitution. “I truly believe that it is time to introduce certain changes to our country’s main law,” Putin said. Shortly afterward the government resigned en masse, not in protest but seemingly to pave the way for these reforms.

The changes Putin proposed would not blow up the edifice of Russian democracy; the president’s best-considered moves tend to be more subtle and circumspect than that. What he suggested in..

China pushed back against a damning Human Rights Watch report released on Tuesday, insisting instead that the country’s record on human rights has never been better. “The Chinese people are in the best position to judge China’s human rights condition, which is at its historical best,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang on Wednesday.

The World Report 2020, HRW’s annual survey of the global state of human rights, highlighted China’s detention and mass surveillance of 13 million Uighur and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang province, the crackdown on Hong Kong‘s pro-democracy protesters, severe restrictions on religious freedom, speech and movement in Tibetan areas and the government’s stifling on freedom of expression online and in schools and universities. The report was originally to be launched in Hong Kong but the organization’s executive director was denied entry by authorities last weekend. “I had hoped to hold this press conference in Hong Kong but the Chinese auth..

Nusra Ara had only just fallen asleep when the phone rang. It was 10 a.m. on Tuesday and though she had returned home seven hours earlier, she stayed up cooking, cleaning, packing lunch boxes and then dropping her daughter to school. When she picked up the call, a fellow protester’s voice rang out in panic and made her sit up. Soon she was rushing out of her home through the busy, narrow streets of Shaheen Bagh in South Delhi, toward the site where she and thousands of other protesters, mostly women, have gathered every evening for more than a month.

Making her way past shabby buildings alternating with newer apartment blocks, through alleyways filled with restaurants, car repair shops, schools and clinics, she reached just as the news she had heard on the phone was beginning to spread: the police were about to arrive. Within minutes, women streamed out of houses and alleyways and the relatively empty protest site began ringing with chants, poetry and the Indian national anthem. As t..