Updated 6:50 a.m. ET

Beijing’s top legislative body has unanimously passed a sweeping national security law for Hong Kong, a controversial move that could effectively criminalize most dissent in the city and risks widening the rift between China and western countries who have criticized the law.

The news was first reported by local Hong Kong media: cable televsion station NOWNews; the city’s public broadcaster; and a slew of newspapers, including Wei Wen Po and Ta Kung Pao, two pro-Beijing outlets which often signal official Chinese policy.

Hours later, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported President Xi Jinping had already signed the measure into law. Xinhua said it will be incorporated into Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution, and become effective Wednesday, the anniversary of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover from British to Chinese Rule.

National security cases relating to subversion, secession, terrorism or foreign interference can now be tried by a special agency, likely to bet up within Hong Kong’s police force, and subject to a more constrained judicial process in which Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed chief executive can select the judges overseeing the cases. The law also allows Beijing to set up its own security force on Hong Kong soil to investigate security cases and collect intelligence.

“The legal firewall, if you like, that separates the two systems [of Hong Kong and Beijing] is now gone,” said Alan Leong, a former chair of Hong Kong’s bar association and chair of Hong Kong’s Civic party. “We are allowing the long arms of the Chinese Communist Party to reach Hong Kong.”

Beijing has defended the law by arguing such a measure is needed to restore stability to Hong Kong, which has been rocked by sometimes violent protests over the last year stemming first from a now-shelved extradition bill and general dissatisfaction with Beijing’s heavy-handed governance.

Pro-Beijing legislators in Hong Kong tried to pass a similar but more limited national security measure in 2003 but the measure was rescinded after an estimated half-million peaceful protesters took to the streets in opposition.

This time, Beijing took no chances. It announced in May that its own parliament would ram through the legislation in a swift and secretive process that has bypassed Hong Kong’s own legislative council.

In passing the law in Beijing, China is making clear its legal system is paramount.

The end of Hong Kong self-governance?

Per the terms of its handover to Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong was promised 50 years of limited autonomy under a principle called “One Country, Two Systems.” Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, and its decades of independent judicial rulings protecting civil rights were to take precedence over Beijing’s governance until at least 2047.

But legal experts say the national security law demonstrates how Beijing sees its own political diktat as now superseding Hong Kong’s rule of law.

“China gets to determine when its interests are involved and when a [legal] interpretation is warranted,” said Cora Chan, an associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong. “The [national security law] opens up a window into widespread interference in people’s lives and potentially penetrates into a lot of activities that contribute to a lot of the vibrancy of civil society and the character of this financial center.”

Breaking with procedure, a public draft of the law was not made available before it was passed in Beijing. Instead, in the weeks leading up to the law’s passage, even proponents in Hong Kong were left to parse scant details fro Chinese state media about what the law would entail.

“That is just completely contrary to the notions of law that we had in Hong Kong, which is law as an accessible, transparent process, where before you enact a law you discuss, you get the draft out, you debate it,” said Wilson Leung, a commercial litigator and a council member of Hong Kong’s bar association, which has criticized the national security law and demanded greater transparency in the drafting process.

Beijing has also pushed ahead with the law despite sanctions from the United States and criticism from other western countries. The U.S. ended its preferential trading status with Hong Kong in May, saying the city no longer had any autonomy from mainland China, and has slapped visa restrictions on Chinese officials in Hong Kong. (China announced it would put retaliatory visa restrictions on Americans who exhibit “egregious conduct” toward Hong Kong.) The United Kingdom, Hong Kong’s former colonial ruler, has offered a path toward citizenship for up to 3 million Hong Kong residents.

It is not yet clear how strictly the law will be applied in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has defended the law, asserting earlier this month that the measure “will only target an extremely small minority of illegal and criminal acts and activities.”

Yet Lam also admitted that Hong Kong officials had not seen the full proposed text of the national security law in the weeks leading up to its passage. On Tuesday morning, as Hong Kong outlets began reporting the law had passed, Lam refused to comment, saying that it would be “inappropriate” to do so given the legislative body was still meeting in Beijing.

The fallout from the law is already being felt in Hong Kong.

Sales of VPN software, used to circumvent China’s Internet censors and evade some measures of digital surveillance, have skyrocketed.

Hundreds of outspoken Twitter accounts run by Hong Kong residents have been voluntarily deleted in the last few days as people rush to clear any potentially incriminating web-browsing history and online political posts.

And mere hours after the national security bill was approved, at least two opposition political parties announced they had effectively dissolved themselves.

Activist Joshua Wong and fellow activists Agnes Chow and Nathan Law announced their resignations from Demosisto, the youth political party they founded in 2016, on Facebook Tuesday. They resolved to continue their activism individually.

Andy Chan, an activist who advocates for outright independence from Beijing, also said he was disbanding the Hong Kong branch of his political party and shifting operations to Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

“Great changes are coming….no one can be sure about their tomorrow, ” Wong wrote on his Facebook page.

The head of the World Health Organization is warning that the COVID-19 pandemic is actually speeding up and he criticized governments that have failed to establish reliable contact tracing to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Speaking at a briefing in Geneva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “We all want this to be over. We all want to get on with our lives. But the hard reality is this is not even close to being over.”

“Although many countries have made some progress, globally the pandemic is actually speeding up,” he said.

He said the solution is the same as it has been since the early days of the pandemic: “Test, trace, isolate and quarantine.”

“If any country is saying contact tracing is difficult, it is a lame excuse,” he said.

According to the latest tally from Johns Hopkins University, there have been more than 10 million confirmed coronavirus infections worldwide since the virus was first identified in China late last year, with more than a half-million deaths. The U.S. alone accounts for more than one-quarter of all confirmed cases, with nearly 126,000 deaths.

“[The] lack of national unity and lack of global solidarity and the divided world … is actually helping the virus to spread,” Tedros said. “[The] worst is yet to come.”

“I’m sorry to say that, but with this kind of environment and conditions we fear the worst,” he said.

The head of WHO’s emergencies program, Mike Ryan, said there had been “tremendous work” toward a coronavirus vaccine but said there’s no guarantee of success.

In the U.S., a spike in coronavirus infections has been driven in part by people unwilling to heed public health guidelines to wear masks and continue social distancing.

Currently, the U.S. leads the world in both coronavirus infections and COVID-19 deaths. Brazil ranks second in the number of infections, followed by Russia, India and the United Kingdom.

President Trump has been highly critical of the WHO, accusing it of helping China cover up the extent of the pandemic within its borders. Earlier this month, the president announced that the U.S. was “terminating” its decades-long relationship with the WHO and would withdraw vital U.S. funding.

Updated at 1:51 p.m. ET

Members of Congress in both parties demanded answers on Monday about reported bounties paid by Russian operatives to Afghan insurgents for targeting American troops.

The stories appeared to have taken even the most senior lawmakers off guard, and they said they wanted briefings soon from the Defense Department and the intelligence community.

“I think it is absolutely essential that we get the information and be able to judge its credibility,” said Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee.

The story is unfolding along two parallel tracks in Washington, based on two key questions:

First, what actually has taken place — and have any American troops been killed as a result of Russian-sponsored targeted action? And second: Who knew what about the reporting on these allegations that has flowed up from the operational level in Afghanistan?

The White House tried to defend itself over the weekend on both counts, arguing that senior intelligence officials aren’t convinced about the reliability of the reports and that they never reached President Trump or Vice President Pence personally.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who usually receives some of the most sensitive intelligence briefings as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight leaders in Congress, said she too hadn’t been informed and sent a letter Monday requesting a briefing for all members of the House soon.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called for a briefing for all members of the Senate.

Pelosi cited reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post that suggested that Trump has been aware of the bounty practice since earlier this year but he and his deputies haven’t acted in response.

“The administration’s disturbing silence and inaction endanger the lives of our troops and our coalition partners,” she wrote.

Another top House lawmaker demanding more information was Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Republicans’ No. 3 leader in the chamber.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Monday that members of Congress have been invited to the White House to learn more about the bounty allegations.

McEnany said that lawmakers from the “committees of jurisdiction” had been invited by White House chief of staff Mark Meadows but she did not detail who specifically would attend or who would brief them or when.

McEnany repeated that there was “no consensus” about the allegations within the intelligence community and that it also includes some “dissenting opinions.”

McEnany suggested that intelligence officials decided to keep the bounty payment allegations below Trump’s level until they were “verified,” as she put it, but those details were not clear.

Custody of the information

Although Trump and John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence, both said the president hasn’t been briefed about the alleged bounty practice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not address whether aspects of the reporting had been included in written briefings submitted to the president.

McEnany did not directly address a question about written briefing materials on Monday.

Past accounts have suggested that Trump doesn’t read many of his President’s Daily Briefs and prefers to hear from in-person intelligence presenters — but even then, according to the recent book by former national security adviser John Bolton, Trump does more talking than listening.

This has added to questions about practices within the administration for passing intelligence to the president that he might not like or wish to hear about.

For example, former officials have said they learned not to talk with Trump about Russian interference in U.S. elections, about which the president has been critical and skeptical.

Another example included reports that suggested Trump had received warnings about the coronavirus in his daily briefing but hadn’t absorbed them; the White House has detailed two specific briefings Trump received about the virus early this year.

Richard Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence who temporarily held the post before Ratcliffe’s confirmation, said on Twitter that he wasn’t aware of any reporting about the alleged bounty practices.

Tension with intelligence services

The game of who knew what when is an old one in Washington but which is further complicated now by Trump’s longstanding antipathy with the intelligence community.

The president has feuded with his aides and advisers over their assessments about Russia and other issues such as North Korea’s nuclear program.

There have been reports for years about Russian paramilitary or intelligence activity in Afghanistan with implications for American forces. A top general said Russian operatives were helping the Taliban with weapons or supplies. Former Defense Secretary James Mattis also said he worried about it.

The full picture never emerged, but as the situation on the ground in Afghanistan evolved, so did the practices in Washington to ingest, process and brief intelligence in a capital that has endured a number of tense episodes involving the spy agencies.

It isn’t yet clear what practices the intelligence agencies may have adopted to process intelligence like that connected to the alleged bounty program and whether they were continuing to evaluate it — or different agencies might have reached different conclusions, as sometimes happens.

In other words, did the Defense Intelligence Agency or one of the military services find evidence about the bounty practice in Afghanistan, but there hasn’t yet been confirmation about the intentions of Moscow from the eavesdropping National Security Agency or human spy-operating CIA?

The involvement of overseas allies also might complicate the processing and reporting. Britain’s Sky News reported that British military forces also may have been targeted in exchange for bounties paid by Russian forces and that members of Parliament want clarity from Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

What was clear Monday is that members of Congress want to resolve these questions fast. The House Armed Services Committee’s Thornberry said that the safety of American and allied troops could depend on it.

“When you’re dealing with the lives of our service members, especially in Afghanistan — especially these allegations that there were bounties put on Americans deaths, then it is incredibly serious,” he said. “We in Congress need to see the information and the sources to judge that ourselves, and it needs to happen early this week. You know, it will not be acceptable to delay.”

NPR congressional correspondent Claudia Grisales contributed to this report.