The third season of Netflix’s The Crown attempts the impossible: changing the entire cast viewers had grown to love from the first two seasons. At first it’s jolting to see Queen Elizabeth as depicted by Claire Foy transform into the more mature and dour Olivia Colman in a year of the show’s time. 

The playground of St. Barnabas Church in Klang, Malaysia, rings with children’s shrieks and laughter. Children clad in the navy-and-white uniforms that signify ElShaddai Refugee Learning Centre arrive in shuttles to join their friends. Girls in white hijabs chat while sitting on seesaws. Groups of boys stand in circles playing a game pushing each other off-balance. Another group of girls plays jump-rope with a makeshift rope made of rubber bands as a crowd of younger students watches. 

For many Americans, classic Disney films defined their childhoods. Yet in Asia, a different animation studio captured the imagination of a generation: Japan’s Studio Ghibli. Founded in 1985 by directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli has produced 20 animated films full of the fantastical and whimsical, the realistic and the thought-provoking.

Editor’s Note: WORLD will periodically update this interactive timeline as the coronavrius pandemic unfolds.

On the evening of April 30, CTBC Brothers faced off against the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions in a stadium in the southern city of Tainan. Typically, baseball games in Taiwan are noisy affairs with rowdy crowds and cheerleaders beating drums and leading call-and-response chants as spectators chomp on sweet Taiwanese sausages and fried chicken. 

November 17

A 55-year-old in China’s central Hubei province is the first known person to contract the disease COVID-19 caused by the new coronavirus (according to Chinese government data revealed in March 2020).

December 8

Date established by the World Health Organization (WHO) of the first confirmed case of COVID-19 reported by Chinese authorities. An analysis of the first 41 patients found 27 had direct exposure to a Wuhan seafood market, although this case did not.

Halfway through Angela Hsu’s Austria trip in early March, the coronavirus outbreak in Europe began to intensify and the cities on her itinerary started shutting down. During her first few days in Austria, locals seemed unfazed by the novel coronavirus. But by the time she, her dad, and two family friends left on March 16, the country had more than a thousand cases and was enacting emergency policies. Their flight back to her home in Taiwan was canceled, but they were able to book seats on a nearly empty China Airlines flight the same day.