In total, eight people were shot dead in Cherokee and Fulcon County on Tuesday.

A man accused of the crimes, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, told police he had a sex addiction and was trying to eliminate the temptation he thought the businesses posed, authorities said. The 21-year-old has been arrested and charged.

The shootings followed a year of increasing anti-Asian violence.

Community leaders say Asian Americans are being blamed for COVID-19, which was first found in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris met Asian American leaders in Georgia on Friday to express their condolences.

Mr Biden said it had been “heart-wrenching” listening to stories of fear among Asian Americans and Pacific islanders.

“We have to change our hearts,” he said. “Hate can have no safe harbour in America.”

On Saturday, crowds of people wearing masks and waving American flags stood in front of the Georgia State Capitol building carrying posters that read “we are not the virus” and “Stop Asian Hate”.

Two Democratic senators elected in January, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, were at the rally and led the demonstrators in a moment of silence.

“We gather today to honour and remember those who lost their lives and to demand justice,” Senator Ossoff said.

“Let us build a state and a nation where no one lives in fear because of who they are or where they or their family come from.”

Hyun Jung Grant was among those killed at Gold Spa in Atlanta. Her son, Randy Park, has set up a GoFundMe page to help raise money for him and his brother. The rest of their family is in South Korea.

“She was a single mother who dedicated her whole life to providing for my brother and I,” Randy Park wrote.

Since Tuesday, mourners have been placing bouquets and candles outside the spas where the victims were killed.

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The US president, 78, stumbled three times as he climbed the steps on to Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland this morning.

He and Vice President Kamala Harris were on their way to Atlanta, Georgia, to meet the community devastated by Wednesday’s shooting that left eight people dead.

Mr Biden, who is the oldest person ever to become US president, managed to get back up unaided after the falls.

Wearing a mask, he turned to salute the military officer standing on the tarmac below before boarding the plane.

The White House said the president is “just fine and did not even require any attention from the medical team who travels with him”.

“Nothing more than a misstep on the stairs,” a spokesperson added.

And he can take some comfort from the fact that at least two of his predecessors have had similar trouble with those seemingly crafty steps.

Back in 2015, Mr Biden’s former boss Barack Obama nearly fell down the stairs leaving the plane after returning to Washington from a golf trip in Florida.

Gerald Ford took a nasty fall upon arrival in a rainy Austria in 1975.

And away from Air Force One, Mr Biden’s fellow Democrat and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made headlines when she fell into the arms of her bodyguards during a 9/11 memorial service in 2016.

She later said she had been suffering from dehydration and pneumonia.

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Before leaving for Atlanta, Mr Biden expressed his sadness over the shootings in the city, of which the victims were mainly women of South Asian origin.

“While we do not yet know motive, as I said last week, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the ongoing crisis of gender-based and anti-Asian violence that has long plagued our nation,” he said in a statement on Twitter.

Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been arrested and charged with several counts of murder over the killings.

He has told detectives he was suffering from sex addiction and needed to eliminate any temptation by targeting spas and massage parlours.

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Communist Party foreign affairs chief Yang Jiechi shared with reporters their sharply different views of each other and the world at the beginning of the two-day talks in Alaska.

Relations between the world’s two largest economies were already tense before the two met thanks to trade disputes, the coronavirus pandemic, Beijing’s assertiveness over the South China Sea, and human rights in Tibet, Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

Mr Blinken said China’s actions “threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability”, adding: “That’s why they’re not merely internal matters, and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.”

But Mr Yang was having none of it, speaking for more than 15 minutes and criticising American democracy, its treatment of minorities, and its foreign and trade policies.

He said the US should “change its own image and stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world”, adding: “Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.”

He said US officials had spoken for too long in their opening remarks, they were “inhospitable”, and made “unreasonable attacks and accusations of Chinese domestic and foreign policies and provok(ing) quarrels”.

He added: “The United States uses its military force and financial hegemony to carry out long arm jurisdiction and suppress other countries.

“It abuses so-called notions of national security to obstruct normal trade exchanges, and incite some countries to attack China.

“Let me say here that in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength… the US side was not even qualified to say such things even 20 years or 30 years back, because this is not the way to deal with the Chinese people.”

Mr Blinken appeared annoyed, saying: “The Chinese delegation… seems to have arrived intent on grandstanding, focused on public theatrics and dramatics over substance.”

He added: “I’m hearing deep satisfaction that the United States is back, that we’re re-engaged.

“I’m also hearing deep concern about some of the actions your government is taking.”

Mr Biden became US president in January and his administration has yet to formulate its China policy but they have vowed to work with China when it is beneficial, citing climate change and the coronavirus pandemic as examples.

Mr Blinken also said he hoped China would persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

The administration has not said how it will handle the tariffs that were placed on Chinese goods under predecessor Donald Trump.

However, they have made it clear they will pay more attention to democratic values and allegations of human rights abuses by China.

Just days ago, Mr Blinken announced new sanctions over Beijing’s crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, something that prompted China’s state councillor Wang Yi to say: “Certainly this is miscalculated and only reflects the vulnerability and weakness inside the United States and it will not shake China’s position or resolve on those issues.”

A US official summed up the mood before the talks began by saying: “We’re expecting much of these conversations will be pretty, pretty tough.”

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Racism is persistent and pervasive in America’s history and present, but what about its future?

US correspondent Cordelia Lynch reflects on whether the US has reached a true turning point, with promises of institutional reform starting to come into effect, and the upcoming trial of Derek Chauvin throwing George Floyd‘s tragic killing into the spotlight once more.

All this in the context of Oprah’s explosive Harry and Meghan interview, where allegations of racism within the British royal family caused waves on both sides of the Atlantic.

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President Joe Biden says his administration will meet his goal of giving 100 million vaccine shots on Friday – six weeks ahead of schedule.

“I’m proud to announce that tomorrow, 58 days into our administration, we will have met our goal,” he said.

The president’s original target had been to reach that milestone at 100 days in office.

It was announced on 8 December, before the US had even one authorised vaccine for COVID-19.

By the time Mr Biden was inaugurated on 20 January, the US had already administered 20 million shots at a rate of about one million doses per day.

At the time, that rate led to complaints that his goal was not ambitious enough.

He quickly revised it upwards to 150 million doses in his first 100 days.

Now the US is administering about 2.2 million doses a day and the pace of vaccination is set to dramatically rise later this month because of an expected surge in vaccine supply.

A total of 65% of Americans who are 65 years and older have now received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine.

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The recording was captured by one of its two microphones and you can hear the noise of its six metal wheels driving across Mars’ surface.

“Hear that? That’s the sound of me driving over Martian rocks. This is the first time we’ve captured sounds while driving on Mars,” the NASA team posted on the rover’s Twitter feed.

The bangs, pings and rattles as it explores the Martian terrain forms part of a 16-minute raw audio feed released by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“If I heard these sounds driving my car, I’d pull over and call for a tow,” Dave Gruel, an engineer on the rover team, said.

“But if you take a minute to consider what you’re hearing and where it was recorded, it makes perfect sense.”

The one-tonne rover carries two microphones. One already has captured the sounds of wind and rock-zapping lasers, and the other the descent and landing. The second has also recorded Perseverance’s 90ft (27.3m) drive on 7 March.

The audio also contains an unexpected high-pitched scratching noise.

Engineers are investigating whether it was caused by electromagnetic interference or the rover’s movement.

“The variations between Earth and Mars – we have a feeling for that visually,” said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer who has helped drive NASA’s last four Mars rovers.

“But sound is a whole different dimension: to see the differences between Earth and Mars, and experience that environment more closely.”

NASA chose to land Perseverance near an ancient river delta and former lake known as the Jezero Crater, where it will drill deep down into the sediment of where water once flowed, collecting material that may hold signs of life.

The £1.9bn effort has already achieved much more than most, given how approximately half of all mankind’s missions to Mars have failed.

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Perseverance carries 19 cameras with it – more than any other interplanetary mission in history.

The rover is also kitted out with a navigation system to help it avoid dangerous boulders and ravines, a range of scientific instruments for performing experiments, and a miniature helicopter called Ingenuity that will become the first rotorcraft to fly on another planet.

The rock and soil samples Perseverance gathers won’t be analysed immediately, but will be sealed in tubes and left in a well-identified place on the planet’s surface for a future mission to collect.

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Agencies contributing to the assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence included the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center.

The assessment said extremists who promote white racial superiority are most likely to carry out mass-casualty attacks on civilians.

Investigators say they also have potentially frequent communications with extremists abroad who hold similar ideological beliefs and each seeks to influence the other.

The agencies said that recent political and social developments “will almost certainly spur” some domestic extremists “to try to engage in violence this year”.

These include claims by Republican former president Donald Trump and his supporters about fraud in November’s US presidential election, restrictions related to COVID-19, fallout from the 6 January Capitol riot, and conspiracy theories.

Other domestic extremist categories which concern government investigators include animal rights and environmental activists, anti-abortion protesters, anarchists and people who call themselves sovereign citizens who “believe they are immune from government authority and laws”.

Citing the report, House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff, a Democrat, said in a statement that while lone actors posed some of the most difficult challenges to detect, the violence also involved sophisticated cells and plots.

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner, also a Democrat, said in a statement that social media platforms had facilitated online radicalisation, helping white supremacists, violent extremist groups and militia movements to recruit, organise and in some cases, coordinate across continents.

US far-right and white supremacist groups sharply stepped up their distribution of racist or anti-Semitic fliers, posters, banners and other forms of physical propaganda last year, according to a study released on Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League.

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Speaking in her forthcoming docuseries – Demi Lovato: Dancing With The Devil – the 28-year-old said: “I lost my virginity in a rape. I called that person back a month later and tried to make it right by being in control, and all it did was just make me feel worse.”

She didn’t reveal the identity of the alleged offender, but said she knew the person and had to “see them all the time” after the attack.

Lovato also said that she told someone at the time, but the offender – who was male – “never got taken out of the movie they were in”.

Sky News has contacted the Disney Channel for comment.

Lovato said the experience was echoed years later, when she was raped by her drug dealer and “left for dead” during an overdose in 2018.

The star spent weeks in a recovery unit following the incident, which led to three strokes, a heart attack and brain damage, and followed six years of sobriety.

Speaking in interviews within the docuseries, Lovato called the attacks “textbook trauma re-enactments,” going on to explain: “I really beat myself up for years, which is also why I had a really hard time coming to terms with the fact that it was a rape when it happened.”

While she didn’t give specifics over the date or location of the alleged childhood rape, she said it took place while she was “part of the Disney crowd”.

Describing her experience, she said: “We were hooking up but I said: ‘Hey, this is not going any farther, I’m a virgin and I don’t want to lose it this way.’

“And that didn’t matter to them, they did it anyways. And I internalised it and I told myself it was my fault, because I still went in the room with him, I still hooked up with him.”

She also said pressure at the time to appear “pure” added to the pressure she felt, directly feeding into subsequent bulimia and self-harming.

Along with several other Disney stars of the time, Lovato wore a purity ring in the late 2000s, to publicly symbolise her commitment to waiting for sex until marriage.

Lovato said as a Christian, she had struggled at the time to recognise her experience as rape.

Referring to the recent Me Too movement – calling on women to expose past sexual abuse and harassment – she said she was speaking out now as she now felt “comfortable doing so”.

She said: “My #MeToo story is me telling somebody that someone did this to me, and they never got in trouble for it. They never got taken out of the movie they were in.”

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Lovato first appeared as a child actor in Barney & Friends, before starring in 2008 TV musical Camp Rock and its 2010 sequel Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam.

The singer and actress has been open about her past struggles with substance abuse, bipolar disorder and an eating disorder.

She previously released a documentary about her life called Simply Complicated on YouTube in 2017.

Following her overdose, Lovato made her comeback at last year’s Grammy awards and is now a spokesperson for the mental health app Talkspace. Last summer she revealed that she was engaged to American actor Max Ehrich.

Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil – which premiered at SXSW festival this week – is due to be released on YouTube on 23 March.

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A 21-year-old man suspected of carrying out all three shootings has been arrested.

The attacks began around 5pm local time, when five people were shot at Youngs Asian Massage Parlour in a strip mall near a rural area in Acworth, about 30 miles north of Atlanta, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Captain Jay Baker said.

Two people died at the scene and three were taken to hospital where two more succumbed to their injuries.

Around 50 minutes later, police called to reports of a robbery at the Gold Spa in the Buckhead neighbourhood of Atlanta found the bodies of three women.

While at the scene, they learned of a call reporting shots fired at another spa across the street, Aromatherapy Spa, and found a woman who appeared to have been shot dead inside the business.

Atlanta police Chief Rodney Bryant said the victims of the two attacks in the city appeared to be Asian.

Surveillance cameras picked up the same vehicle at all three shootings.

Around two hours after the last attack, police in Crisp County, 150 miles south of Atlanta, were informed that the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, was heading in their direction.

Crisp County Sheriff Billy Hancock said deputies and troopers set up along the interstate and “made contact with the suspect,” who was driving a 2007 black Hyundai Tucson, around 8:30pm.

A state trooper performed a PIT, or pursuit intervention technique, manoeuvre, “which caused the vehicle to spin out of control,” Hancock said. Long was then taken into custody “without incident” and was being held in the Crisp County jail.

The killings came amid a recent wave of attacks against Asian Americans that coincided with the spread of the coronavirus across the United States.

In New York an NYPD spokesperson told Sky News they are deploying counterterrorism officers to Asian communities throughout the city out of an abundance of caution following the Atlanta shootings.

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Mrs Obama described the allegations Meghan made during her interview with Oprah Winfrey as “heartbreaking to hear”.

But speaking to NBC News, she said it wasn’t totally unexpected.

“I feel like that was heartbreaking to hear, that she felt like she was in her own family – her own family thought differently of her,” she said.

Describing public service as a “bright, sharp, hot spotlight”, she continued: “As I said before, race isn’t a new construct in this world for people of colour, and so it wasn’t a complete surprise to hear her feelings and to have them articulated.”

Mrs Obama said she “prays for forgiveness and healing for them” and that the royals can use the interview as a “teachable moment for us all”.

During her and Prince Harry’s tell-all interview with Oprah, Meghan claimed that a member of the royal household had expressed concerns about the colour of their son Archie’s skin.

The Queen issued a rare statement two days after the interview was broadcast in the UK, saying the “whole family” was “saddened” by it.

While it said that the “issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning”, it appeared to cast doubt on the couple’s version of events by adding the words “whilst some recollections may vary”.

During a subsequent visit to a school in east London, the Duke of Cambridge was forced to defend his family, telling a Sky News reporter: “We’re very much not a racist family.”

On Saturday the Duchess of Cambridge was seen at a vigil for Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped and murdered on the way home from a friend’s house in London earlier this month.

Kensington Palace said Kate wanted to pay tribute with the unofficial visit and that “she remembers what is was like to walk around London at night before she was married”.

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