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Wuhan announced that some people could leave the locked-down city, only to reverse the announcement hours later as the coronavirus spreads.

Italy jumped from three reported cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus last week to four deaths at least 190 people testing positive in the northern part of the country by Monday. In response, Italy quarantined a dozen towns and sent masked police officers to guard checkpoints, canceled soccer matches and closed schools, scrapped the final day of Milan Fashion Week, and called off Venice's Carnivale, its famed annual pre-Lenten masked bacchanalia. At the same time, Italian authorities pleaded for calm, noting that the virus has a lower mortality rate than the flu and that all four people who died were elderly.Italy instituted strict travel bans and airport screenings on Jan. 31, and authorities still haven't located the source of the sudden outbreak. Austria has temporarily suspended cross-border travel with Italy and other European countries are considering similar actions.South Korea and Iran also have rising numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths, raising concerns about global spread of the virus, which started in Wuhan, China. South Korea, with 833 confirmed cases and seven deaths, has the highest number of infections outside China. Iran state media has reported 12 deaths from the coronavirus, though the death toll in the holy city of Qom is said to have hit 50.Fears about the global economic impact of the coronavirus helped send stock markets sharply lower on Monday, with European indices leading the declines.More stories from theweek.com The real third way in 2020 Trump's host on his India visit is a fervent vegetarian. The White House is apparently nervous about the menus. Trump arrives in India for 36 hours of pageantry, trade talks

Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has endorsed frontrunner Bernie Sanders – having previously taken a swipe at one of his rivals, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg.Speaking at a Sanders rally in Austin, Texas, Ms Williamson drove home that she sees today’s fight for progressive causes as part of a grand American tradition.

MOSCOW—Few people are familiar with Novaya Zemlya, a very obscure archipelago above the Arctic Circle that is controlled by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the infamous Soviet spy agency, the KGB. Even fewer people hope to travel to those thinly populated and thoroughly militarized islands, where the Russian army tests its Arctic missile systems, and where polar bears suffering the effects of climate change dig through garbage pits at impoverished settlements. Alexei Navalny on Standing Up to Putin and His Murderous MinionsIt sounds like hell frozen over, in fact—and it figures in what looks like a new tactic by President Vladimir Putin (a former KGB operative) to intimidate his most vocal critics. But Kira Yarmysh has a special reason to go there. She is desperate to see her partner, who became the first victim of such an operation last December.“The FSB abducted my boyfriend, Ruslan Shaveddinov, and isolated him in Novaya Zemlya,” Yarmysh told The Daily Beast. “The most outrageous truth is that several divisions of the state system, including military authorities, aviation, and secret services, are helping to hide Ruslan from us.” This was hardly a random act. Yarmysh is a news presenter and spokesperson for Russia’s top opposition leader, Aleksei Navalny, and his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). Shaveddinov is one of the group’s star reporters and presenters as well.Russia still has a military draft, and 12 months of service are mandatory for all male citizens age 18 to 33. Shaveddinov, known as “Shav,” has been famous for presenting vivid, well-documented corruption investigations on YouTube. But at 23 years old, he was vulnerable, and authorities claimed he was draft-dodging.The news agency TASS quotes Moscow’s military commissar, Col. Maksim Loktev, claiming the conscription of Shaveddinov was perfectly ordinary: “He departed to the place of his military service on the draft.” But the young activist’s colleagues aren’t buying it. It’s not just the matter of conscription; it’s the deployment that’s suspicious.“This is a unique example of how the FSB begins to use military service as a prison for politically active young men,” Navalny told The Daily Beast. “I think the order was to isolate Shav.”Viewers all over Russia recognize Yarmysh and Shaveddinov from YouTube, which is the main outlet for Navalny’s reports. More than three million viewed their presentation last summer (while Navalny was in jail) about Moscow Deputy Mayor Natalia Sergunina. They reported she was making millions of dollars off property deals in the Russian capital for companies controlled by her relatives, an allegation that she has denied.  There are frequent police raids on FBK offices, along with confiscations of computers, cellphones, and video cameras. On July 27, members of an armed special unit raided Yarmysh’s home at dawn, woke the couple up, put Ruslan on the floor, and confiscated all of the digital equipment. After a tough 2019, Kira and Ruslan looked forward to celebrating the New Year’s holiday together, without any people around. But on Dec. 23, Kira’s boyfriend vanished and his cellphone was not answered. His friends found the door to his apartment broken. Nearly 24 hours later, Yarmysh discovered that her partner was more than 3,000 kilometers (some 2,000 miles) away, in a unit of what’s called the 33rd Guards Rocket Army based in Rogachevo village on the Southern Island of Novaya Zemlya. Yarmysh had never heard much about the rules of the archipelago and the news came as a shock: there was an old nuclear testing ground near Ruslan’s base; she could not visit his island without a special FSB permit. Then Ruslan called her, and what she heard broke her heart, she says.“There were two army captains with him listening in our conversation, so every time I asked him how he was, he said, ‘Let’s talk about you,” Yarmysh remembered. “He told me he was banned from using his cellphone, which is a violation—every Russian soldier can call home once a week! So I decided to sue his commander.”Yarmysh wanted to be present during the court hearing last week, and, of course, to see Ruslan. She requested an FSB permit earlier this month, but days passed and there was no word back. The court hearing was scheduled for last Wednesday, but a Moscow judge on the case was not able to get to Novaya Zemlya, Yarmysh said—the flight got canceled due to harsh weather conditions. (This is not unusual given the brutal Arctic weather.) “They regularly cancel flights during the winter, so I am surprised that the army managed to transport Ruslan there so easily in December,” Yarmysh said. “It is obvious that the weather is not an issue, if there is an order to bring the guy.”Finally a hearing was held at the end of the week, and a lawyer from the Navalny team was able to make it there, but there was no satisfaction to be had and communications were spotty. At midday on Saturday, Yarmysh tweeted that she still had heard nothing about her boyfriend's fated. (A troll responded with pictures of polar bears eating a bloody corpse: "Found him. But no need to thank me.")The lawyer finally got in touch late Saturday, but only briefly. He reported that, officially, the court said Shaveddinov had no unusual restrictions. But in practical terms that was no consolation, and Yarmysh said she couldn't be sure what happened until the attorney made it back to Moscow. As of Monday, however, he was till stuck above the Arctic Circle because of the weather."Prisoners have more rights than Ruslan," Yarmysh told The Daily Beast. "He doesn't have any right to call, or even to send letters."Yarmysh grew up in Rostov-on-Don, a provincial southern town on the border with Ukraine’s Donbas region. Her single mother brought her up dreaming that one day Kira would win The Clever Heads, a televised competition for high-schoolers that awards the winners with a chance to enroll in Russia’s most prestigious university for future diplomats, the MGIMO, or Moscow State Institute of International Relations. And, yes, Yarmysh won.While studying at MGIMO, she thought she would one day get a diplomat’s position in Africa, far from the Russian political scene. But anti-Putin street protests in 2011-2012 changed her life, and she wound up on the front line of the opposition’s constant fight with corrupt bureaucrats. Her mother has always been an Aleksey Navalny fan, Yarmysh said, so when she got her job at the FBK six years ago, her family supported her. “Kira Yarmysh is one of the brightest stars in Navalny’s team. She is emerging to be even bigger but still stay in Navalny’s shadow,” Echo of Moscow Deputy Chief Editor Olga Bychkova told The Daily Beast. Yarmysh says that if she has to she will wait for her boyfriend for 12 months, as do millions of other Russian girls all over the country. “I hope this is going to be just one year,” she says.  For two months, Yarmysh has been worried, feeling “hurt,” she says, wondering why out of all Russia’s vast military bases, her boyfriend was isolated in the Arctic. “The authorities might think that Ruslan and I, if we come out to a street protest, might lead masses of people,” Yarmysh said, then added: “I personally have no fear. If they raid our homes, if they detain us, I tell myself, we must be doing everything right.” But for the moment that is, at best, cold comfort.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Two Wall Street Journal reporters left China on Monday after being expelled over a controversial headline in an op-ed that angered Beijing. Three reporters were ordered out of the country last week over what Beijing deemed a racist headline that the journalists were not involved in writing -- marking one of the harshest moves against foreign media in years. The Journal opinion piece -- headlined "China is the Real Sick Man of Asia" -- was written by a US professor who criticised the Chinese government's initial response to the coronavirus outbreak.

A policeman was killed and dozens of people injured amid clashes in New Delhi on Monday as thousands demonstrating for and against a new citizenship law rioted for several hours before U.S. President Donald Trump's maiden visit to the city. Police used tear gas and smoke grenades but struggled to disperse the crowds, as both sides hurled stones and turned a wide boulevard into a rock-strewn battle zone, about 11 miles from where Trump will meet Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for talks on Tuesday. An official at Delhi's GTB Hospital said more than 35 people injured in the clashes were undergoing treatment.

President Trump has landed in India for his first state visit, "and at the center of it will be Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a man for whom Trump seems to have a great deal of affection," John Oliver said on Sunday's Last Week Tonight. While Modi may have charmed Trump, however, "within India he's an increasingly controversial figure, because his government has pursued a steadily escalating persecution of religious minorities -- persecution so intense that for the last two months, Indians across the country have been taking to the streets in anger."The charismatic, previously Teflon-coated Modi has both a "cult of personality" inside India and a new groundswell of opposition, Oliver said, "and if citizens in the world's largest democracy, home to over a billion people, are either wearing masks of Modi or marching in the streets, it seems like tonight it might be worth exploring why that is" and "where things could be heading."One of Modi's "defining beliefs" is Hindu nationalism, the idea that "India is a fundamentally Hindu nation -- which is provocative, given that India's founders, Gandhi and Nehru, explicitly disavowed that," Oliver said. While they created India as a secular nation, Modi's BJP party "has served as the political arm of a hard-core Hindu nationalist paramilitary group, the RSS," whose founders admired Hitler's aim to purify the race, he noted. India is home to the world's second-largest Muslim population, and while Modi doesn't say much publicly about Muslims, "those closest to him are comfortable saying a lot."And "since winning re-election, Modi has moved from quiet support for religious intolerance to concrete action," his government working to "strip millions of Muslims of citizenship, and they did it in a diabolically clever two-step way," Oliver said. "They're basically Marie Kondo-ing India, and it's only Muslims that don't seem to 'spark joy' in them." Now, "the government is now building detention camps for all the illegal immigrants that they are creating," and "the only glimmer of hope here is that for perhaps the first time in Modi's whole career, his actions are creating a massive and sustained backlash." Oliver ended with an image of the Taj Mahal and a message: "India, home to this enduring symbol of love, frankly deserves a lot more than this temporary symbol of hate." There is NSFW language. Watch below. More stories from theweek.com Warren Buffett says he'd 'certainly' vote for Mike Bloomberg, but will have to 'see what happens' with Bernie Sanders Fox Business host blames stock market plunge on Bernie Sanders Time's Up calls Weinstein's conviction a 'historic moment'

Delaying the National People's Congress is an admission of China's struggle to control the deadly coronavirus that has killed more than 2,500 people.

Kuwait and Bahrain confirmed on Monday their first novel coronavirus cases, health ministries in the two Gulf states announced, adding all had come from Iran. Kuwait reported three infections and Bahrain one. "Tests conducted on those coming from the Iranian holy city of Mashhad showed there were three confirmed cases of the coronavirus (COVID-19)," the Kuwaiti health ministry said in a statement posted on Twitter.

South Korea now has the highest number of coronavirus cases outside mainland China

(Bloomberg) -- Stunned by Europe’s biggest surge of the coronavirus, Italy appears to be operating in near panic mode.The government imposed a lockdown on an area of 50,000 people near Milan, authorities canceled the remaining days of the Venice Carnival, and universities closed. The Chinatown area in Prato near Florence saw many small businesses close as Chinese nationals voluntarily remained at home for two-week periods.Matteo Salvini, leader of the League party, used the outbreak to attack Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte for not defending the borders. He cited the docking of the Ocean Viking humanitarian ship in a Sicilian port with 274 African migrants on board to say Italy needs “to make our borders armor-plated.” He called on Conte to resign “if he isn’t able to defend Italy and Italians.”The rise in infections to around 150 from just a handful a week ago comes at a bad moment for Conte’s administration, already under fire for failing to mount a coherent response to the spread of the virus. As Conte chairs a series of marathon meetings in Rome to counter the spread of the disease, his plan for tax reforms and investments to restart an ailing economy has stalled, and now businesses are set to be affected by measures against the virus.Italian 10-year government bond yields rose the most in more than a month and the benchmark stocks index fell the most since September 2018 as the government dealt with the spread of the virus. The FTSE MIB was down 4.2% at 9:23 a.m. in Milan.Conte’s government was censured by Beijing for an early ban on all flights to and from China, a decision criticized by Walter Ricciardi, a member of the World Health Organization’s executive council, because it stopped authorities from tracing arrivals as travelers could use stopovers to reach Italy.Efforts to contain the coronavirus could have been initially thwarted by difficulty in identifying the roots of the spread.Almost all of Italy’s cases are linked to a 38-year-old man who sought treatment at a hospital in the Lombardy region on Feb. 18. While there, he infected dozens of patients and medical staff, who then spread it further afield. Tracking efforts initially focuses on a friend of the man, a businessman who had returned from China, but tests proved negative and the origin of the contagion remains a mystery. A fourth death from the virus was reported in Lombardy on Monday, Ansa news agency said.“Conte is on difficult ground: He’s got to find an explanation for the big spread of the virus,” said Sofia Ventura, a political science professor at Bologna University, which announced it’s closing Monday along with other universities and schools in the northern Emilia-Romagna region.Conte hasn’t ruled out suspending the Schengen agreement that allows free movement between the borders of European Union members. To guarantee “maximum protection,” the government would take “any measure to safeguard the health of citizens,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a EU summit in Brussels on Friday. The League called for a suspension of Schengen.Austria’s state railroad temporarily halted traffic from Italy across a key Alpine crossing on Sunday, with a train from Venice to Munich held on the Italian side of the Brenner Pass after authorities received information that two people aboard had flu-like symptoms. Rail traffic had resumed as normal by Monday.Salvini’s political calculation is clear. While his League is the country’s most popular party, he was interior minister in Conte’s first coalition when his effort last year to force fresh elections backfired. He now has to contend with the resurgence of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party, which has leapfrogged ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.“Borders are the perfect issue for Salvini, and he’s out for revenge, with his ally and rival Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy party rising in opinion polls,” said Ventura of Bologna University.In his Facebook video, Salvini zeroed in on African migrants like the ones who landed in Sicily, saying “God forbid” one of them turned out to be a virus-carrier.Conte and Salvini skirmished over the spread of the virus, with the premier saying on La7 television that the only leader he had not managed to reach to discuss the issue was Salvini despite phoning him and sending him a message. “If he’d had the goodness to reply, I’d have explained to him why more severe measures couldn’t be taken earlier,” Conte said.At the port of Pozzallo, the latest migrants to attempt the deadly journey from north Africa were placed in isolation on Sunday, while the crew were confined to the ship. None of the cases in Italy so far have been linked to African migrants.Health authorities still don’t know the origin of the disease’s spread, according to emergency commissioner Angelo Borrelli.“It’s difficult to express forecasts for the spread,” he said. “The only concrete and valid measure to be taken is therefore the one of closing off territories.”Conte himself was left acknowledging that he hadn’t expected the surge.“I was surprised by this explosion of cases, which had been kept under control until a short time ago,” he told RAI television Sunday. But he insisted: “The line of maximum precaution has paid off, even though it doesn’t appear so.”(Updates with shares in fifth paragraph, fourth death in eighth paragraph.)\--With assistance from Alessandro Speciale, Marco Bertacche and Chiara Remondini.To contact the reporters on this story: John Follain in Rome at jfollain2@bloomberg.net;Jerrold Colten in Milan at jcolten@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Karl Maier, Andrew DavisFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Big things happened at the Munich Security Conference.

KABUL/HERAT (Reuters) - Afghanistan confirmed its first case of the coronavirus in the western province of Herat on Monday, declaring a state of emergency in a territory bordering Iran which itself reported a sharp rise in cases. Dozens of cases of the virus, which originated in the central Chinese province of Hubei in December, have been confirmed in Iran where 12 people have died, the highest death toll outside of China. "I ask people to try to stay at home and restrict their movements," Health Minister Ferozuddin Feroz told reporters, referring to Heart, the gateway to Iran.

(Bloomberg) -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is heading into Israel’s third back-to-back election struggling to recoup the hundreds of thousands of votes his party has lost since the country descended into political gridlock a year ago. It could be tough to finally defeat his challenger without them.In recent weeks, Netanyahu has parleyed at the White House and the Kremlin, met with once-hostile Muslim leaders now seeking better relations with Israel, and touted a consumer-friendly economic program trying to boost his party’s showing in the March 2 vote.But even then, most polls consistently showed his Likud party slightly trailing former military chief Benny Gantz’s centrist Blue and White bloc, even after the prime minister pulled out his Trump card: winning U.S. approval to annex war-won territory the Palestinians want for a state.President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, which allows Israel to extend its sovereignty over 30% of the West Bank, thrilled many in Netanyahu’s right-wing camp and was supposed to be the springboard that would finally catapult him to victory after two inconclusive elections. That excitement quickly soured after the Trump administration said the process could take months, and wouldn’t begin before the vote, as Netanyahu had promised.Leaders of Israel’s right wing now doubt that their decades-long dream will ever materialize at all, and that could cost Netanyahu support.Why would someone from the settlements “vote for Netanyahu a third time if he doesn’t see anything tangible happening?” Israel Ganz, head of the Mateh Binyamin council -- one of the regions waiting to be annexed -- said in an interview in his West Bank office. “The prime minister has to understand that in order to get people out of their homes they have to see something happen. Call Trump and say, ‘If you don’t give me anything, I’ll lose the elections.’”With his campaign failing to gain traction, and voters burdened by election fatigue after three ballots in 11 months, Netanyahu’s messaging has shifted to turnout, much as it did in the last gasp of his 2015 campaign, when he whipped up 11th-hour support by warning of Arab voters coming out “in droves.” New polls showing Likud edging ahead, though the shift is not enough for the right-wing camp to form a government.“At the moment, the shift is fairly small and doesn’t change the overall picture,” said Simon Davies, a Tel Aviv-based pollster at Number 10 Strategies. “Netanyahu will hope it is an indicator of a growing trend over the next week, though he will also worry it galvanizes higher turnout among Blue and White supporters.”Likud lost about 300,000 votes last election, even after it swallowed up one rival party and persuaded a second to drop out of the running. If stay-at-home Likud supporters come out to the polls this time to recoup that loss, “we’ll cruise to victory,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Army Radio last week. The 300,000 supporters he spoke of would roughly equal eight more seats in Israel’s 120-member parliament.Netanyahu’s nationalist and religious camp is as many as seven seats short of a parliamentary majority, according to polls published last week. Pollsters cite a mix of apathy and discontent with the Israeli leader, who goes to trial on March 17 to face bribery and fraud charges.If the surveys don’t bode well for Netanyahu, then they don’t show a clear pathway to power for Gantz, either, even after two closely spaced revotes.“Everything is so baked in now that it’s very difficult to see movement anywhere on the map,” Davies said.“The game is going to be played out in the horse trading” during coalition talks, he said.(Updates with new polls in seventh paragraph)\--With assistance from Ivan Levingston.To contact the reporter on this story: Yaacov Benmeleh in Tel Aviv at ybenmeleh@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Nayla Razzouk at nrazzouk2@bloomberg.net, Amy Teibel, Michael GunnFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won Saturday's Nevada caucuses decisively, after winning the New Hampshire primary and essentially tying former Mayor Pete Buttigieg for first in Iowa. So Sanders is the Democratic frontrunner, and he also leads nationally in a new CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday, drawing the support of 28 percent of Democratic primary voters. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) jumped to second place in the poll, at 19 percent followed by former Vice President Joe Biden (17 percent), former Mayor Mike Bloomberg (13 percent), and Buttigieg (10 percent).> NATIONAL POLL: Among Democratic primary voters nationwide, Sanders is leading in overall preference to be their nominee. https://t.co/I6v444cU2i pic.twitter.com/wK4KR3jQI3> > — CBS News Poll (@CBSNewsPoll) February 23, 2020Warren came in fourth place in the Nevada caucuses, but a large majority of Nevada Democrats cast their early ballots before Wednesday night's Democratic presidential debate, and half the respondents in the CBS poll — taken Feb. 20-22, between the debate and the caucuses — were most impressed with Warren's performance. Warren's campaign also reported raising $14 million between the New Hampshire primary and Saturday.> NATIONAL POLL: 50% of Dem primary voters rated Warren's debate performance as impressive, ahead of all the other candidates, with Sanders named by 42%. Bloomberg was at the bottom, with just 15% saying his performance impressed them. pic.twitter.com/ei58XxQlmN> > — CBS News Poll (@CBSNewsPoll) February 23, 2020CBS News has Biden leading in the next primary, South Carolina, but the big test will be Super Tuesday, March 3. And only 42 percent of Democratic primary voters have definitely made up their minds about who they will vote for, the poll found. At the same time, 69 percent of Warren's supporters are enthusiast about her candidacy followed by Sanders (65 percent), Biden (53 percent), and Buttigieg (52 percent). Democratic voters pick Sanders (57 percent) and Warren (53 percent) as the candidates who will fight the most for people like them.A majority of all surveyed voters told CBS News/YouGov that President Trump will definitely (31 percent) or probably (34 percent) win re-election, even though in hypothetical head-to-head matchups, Sanders, Biden, and Warren all narrowly beat Trump.YouGov conducted the poll Feb. 20-22 among 10,000 registered voters, including 6,598 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents likely to vote in the primary. The margin of error for the entire poll is ±1.2 percentage points and for the Democrats, ±1.7 points.More stories from theweek.com Conservative activists are reportedly sending Trump lists of 'disloyal' government officials to fire CNN analyst: Republicans 'may regret' hoping Sanders wins nomination The stunning Southern Baptist controversy over Donald Trump and Russell Moore, explained

Sanders said on CBS' "60 Minutes' that Castro "transformed the society," but critics were quick to slam the interview as ignorant.

China's top legislative committee on Monday began deliberating a proposal to ban all trade and consumption of wild animals, a practice believed responsible for the country's deadly coronavirus outbreak. The official Xinhua news agency said the proposal was submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC). "It aims to completely ban the eating of wild animals and crack down on illegal wildlife trade," it said.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has submitted his resignation to the king, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Monday, amid talks of forming a new coalition to govern the country. Mahathir, 94, assumed office in May 2018 for his second stint as prime minister. A spokesman from the prime minister's office declined to comment, saying only that a statement will be issued soon.