Divya Gopalan

More than 20 pro-democ­ra­cy ac­tivists have ap­peared in a Hong Kong court ac­cused of join­ing or or­gan­is­ing a gath­er­ing on June 4 to mark the 1989 Tianan­men Square mas­sacre – the gath­er­ing was pro­hib­it­ed due to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.

The Min­istry of For­eign Af­fairs re­futes claims that the 12 de­tained peo­ple were democ­ra­cy ac­tivists and said they were try­ing to sep­a­rate Hong Kong from Chi­na.

Some fear cells col­lect­ed from nasal and throat swabs for coro­n­avirus test­ing can also be used to gen­er­ate DNA pro­files.

Up to 60 health­care pro­fes­sion­als will be part of a team based in the ter­ri­to­ry’s first makeshift hos­pi­tal.

As in­ter­na­tion­al crit­i­cism grows over new mea­sures threat­en­ing Hong Kong’s au­ton­o­my, Bei­jing warns oth­ers to stay out of its af­fairs.

Coro­n­avirus clus­ter at the city’s biggest whole­sale mar­ket trig­gers strict lock­down.

As Hong Kong re­ports few new dai­ly cas­es, ma­jor state ex­am­i­na­tion to go ahead with virus mea­sures in place.

Sin­ga­pore and Hong Kong ex­tend trav­el and busi­ness re­stric­tions and mass mi­gra­tion has been banned in In­done­sia ahead of Ra­madan.

South Ko­rea and Chi­na in­ten­si­fy mea­sures in a bid to stem the virus.

Demon­stra­tors say the con­ces­sion will not stop them from protest­ing against what they see as an un­just lead­er­ship and Chi­na’s in­flu­ence.