China: Thousands of people in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, went on the rampage at the weekend in protest at the Chinese government's inability to control the spread of Sars, write Jasper Becker Beijing Dan McLaughlin Moscow
Reports of the violence coincided with the health ministry's announcement of nine further deaths, taking the number of fatalities in China above 200.
Thousands rallied in front of a local government building in Xiande which has been turned into a quarantine centre for visitors from Beijing and other areas affected by the virus.
The police said the protesters were angry because the building lacked the medical equipment and trained staff to protect the community.
The SARS crises has begun to ease in Hong Kong but the mystery virus is beginning to wreak havoc in Taiwan where almost as many new cases are appearing now as in Beijing.
Taiwan has reported 14 new cases of the virus, for a total of 116, quadruple what it was two weeks ago. Another 184 people have been listed as suspected case, and eight have died from the virus in Taiwan.
Hong Kong reported eight new cases, the fewest since it began daily reports in mid-March.
The city has reported 184 deaths from SARS, second after China, which had reported a total 197 fatalities.
"This week is critical, and we will see cases going to the peak if there is no third hospital outbreak," Taiwan's Deputy Health Minister, Mr Lee Long-teng, told the press.
Although there are still no direct links between Taiwan and China, travellers between the two have quickly spread the disease, a rather dramatic and for some worrying sign of how the two sides are now linked together.
On Friday Taiwan politicians passed legislation allowing prison sentences of up to three years for people who knowingly infect others with SARS.
In Russia, the first four suspected victims of the SARS virus were in quarantine last night, and a swathe of the country's far east closed its busy border with China.
The four people had been staying in a hotel in Blagoveshchensk, a city where hundreds of traders criss-cross the border every day between Russia's Amur region and China. Traffic between the two countries through the Amur region was banned yesterday, and police sealed off the hotel to be disinfected.
Meanwhile, new research shows SARS is more resilient than first thought and can survive for weeks outside the human body.
The research, published by the Geneva-based World Health Organisation, suggests it may be possible for SARS to spread through contact with contaminated objects and not just through direct contact with an infected person.