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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A strong earthquake has hit areas of Japan devastated by the tsunami 10 years ago, that saw thousands lose their lives.

The quake hit the coast about 220 miles (350km) north of Tokyo at 6.26pm local time (9.26am UK) and had a magnitude of 7, the USGS said. Japan’s Meterological Agency said the quake was 7.2 in magnitude.

There were warnings it had generated a one metre-high tsunami.

The Onagawa nuclear plant, just eight miles (12km) from the epicentre, has been halted and Tohoku Electric Power Co said it is checking for any irregularities, the broadcaster NHK said.

Tokyo Electric Power said the company was also checking the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station that was wrecked by the massive March 2011 quake, which led to nuclear meltdowns and the surrounding area deserted of people.

Several of the towns in Miyagi prefecture, including Onagawa and Ishinomaki, were hit badly by the 2011 tsunami and magnitude 9 quake have taken years to recover.

Miyagi Prefecture is said to have been suffering power outages in some areas, and at least one of the bullet trains that criss-cross Japan at high-speed has been halted.

Shizue Onodera told NHK from the shop where she works in the city of Ishinomaki: “It was a really bad, long shaking from side-to-side. It was even longer than the quake last month, but at least the building here is all right,”

“Lots of bottles smashed on the floor,” she said.

Footage from inside the bureau of NHK in Sendai – about 40miles (65km) from the epicentre – showed a plaque suspended from the ceiling shaking for about 30 seconds.

The quake could be felt in Tokyo about 250 miles (400km) south of the epicentre.

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But there is not much here to keep them alive.

A human tide of 300,000 Tigrayans are now camping in this beleaguered city at six schools, a local college and any number of half constructed buildings which dot the city.

A senior UN official told Sky News that 50,000-60,000 arrivals have turned up in the past few weeks alone.

After four months of warfare between Ethiopia’s national defence force and fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), more than 500,000 Tigrayans have lost their homes.

Almost 60,000 have sought refugee status in neighbouring Sudan.

The majority here have made a hazardous journey from western Tigray. Some have been forced to flee their homes, others have been banished by militias from the neighbouring region of Amhara.

The US government, amongst others, has condemned the violence and declared these evictions ‘ethnic cleansing’.

At Tsehaye Elementary, buses and trucks piled up with people’s basic possessions, stop outside the school’s front gate every few minutes.

We stopped one woman called Letay Teweldebrehan who had arrived in Shire with her daughter just before nightfall.

“It must be a difficult time for you,” I said.

“Yes, very much, I cannot explain it. We came because of the war. We have been robbed of our things and our animals were taken.”

She told me she was a civil servant from a city called Humera and I asked why she felt she had to leave.

“I work in water development but I have not received my salary for the last four months. We don’t have water, no electricity or medicines. Life is not possible.”

As she readied herself for the night ahead, I asked where she thought she was going to sleep.

“I don’t know where. I have left my bed behind.”

There is no space left in the classrooms and the school playground is packed with families wrapped in blankets or balanced on bits of school furniture.

But if Ms Teweldebrehan does find a few square feet she will struggle to find anything else on offer.

Atsede Kidane, a mother of three, has been camping at the school for the past six weeks and she says the interim administration which now runs this region has not provided the residents with a single item of food.

She said: “Since registering here on 28 January I haven’t received a thing. My children are dying of hunger. We’ve had nothing so far.

“People are getting sick because they’re hungry. People are dying.”

Humanitarian organisations could not get into Shire until early March and although Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has now given them “unfettered access” in Tigray they must operate in the region at their own risk.

His government declared the “law and order operation” – launched against the people who ran Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – a success in late November and it is not clear why it has been so slow to offer aid organisations access.

The delay raises important questions – has the central government been trying to hide serious human rights violations conducted by Ethiopian troops – as well acts committed by allied soldiers from Eritrea and Amhara region of Ethiopia?

Alternatively, does this foot-dragging reflect the fact that Ahmed’s administration has failed to bring large parts of the region under its control?

These matters are no concern of a priest called Teklehaimanot, who has brought his family of eight to Tshaye Elementary School.

His 28-year-old son, Fitsum, contracted a mental illness in the third year of university and his parents have found him difficult to control in the camp. They have decided to chain him to a wooden beam.

“It’s very difficult, we cannot sleep. At night, he tries to go out and he bothers the children, so we have to chain his hands and legs.”

Priest Teklehaimanot said they could not flee their home in a town called Tesgede because they could not leave Fitsum alone.

When the feared Amhara militia called ‘Fano’ turned up, they took everything the family possessed.

“This is my son, because of son, I cannot go anywhere. I don’t even have clothes.

“This is what I have. Everything has been taken, this is it.”

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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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It was January 2020. Vera Pekhteleva, a 23-year-old university student, had told her boyfriend their relationship was over.

She was living elsewhere and had found somebody new. When the grey metal door in a dingy corridor on Kemerovo’s Leningradsky Proskpekt shut behind her, she would not leave the flat again alive.

This week the case against her ex-boyfriend, Vladislav Kanyus, also 23, was sent back to the prosecutor’s office so that it could be resubmitted on charges of murder with particular cruelty.

Before remanding the case, the judge listed each of the 111 injuries Ms Pekhteleva sustained in the three-and-a-half-hours before Kanyus finally strangled her with the cord from an iron.

Kanyus fidgeted in the dock. He said he didn’t object to the tougher charges. He hadn’t meant to kill her, he said, he just wanted her screams to stop.

Ms Pekhteleva’s case hit the headlines last month after a domestic violence campaigner released audio files of the phone calls made by neighbours to police in the hours before she died.

You can hear her screaming in the background. The neighbours called emergency services seven times. They told the police operator it sounded like a “slaughterhouse” in there.

“Can you hear how she’s screaming behind the door?”, the neighbours say.

The operators, women themselves, appear indifferent.

“What am I supposed to do?”, one of them says. A male voice screams: “Where are the police? She’s getting f***** killed in there”, to which she replies, “the police will come, there’s no need to swear”.

By the time the neighbours broke the door down, Ms Pekhteleva was already dead. The police had still not arrived.

“For a year I tried my best not to listen to the recordings,” says Vladimir Pekhtelev, Vera’s uncle. “But I couldn’t help it in the end, they were on the TV.”

Only since the release of those recordings were charges brought against the call centre operators as well as the police officers on duty.

The potential penalty on grounds of criminal negligence was also increased from a fine to a possible five-year jail term.

Publicity works. “Society has helped the authorities look more closely at the case,” Mr Pekhtelev says. “Now it is up to the judges.”

Sky News approached the Kemerovo police force and local investigative committee for comment but has yet to receive a response.

Ms Pekhteleva’s murder was horrific but it was not unusual.

In 2018, the government statistics agency recorded a total of 8,300 women killed. That works out at 22 a day. Contrast that with the UK rate of one woman murdered every three days.

Like in Britain, NGOs say the majority of those happened in the home. The official number for domestic violence murders for 2018 was just 253.

Most European countries, especially given a widely reported increase in domestic violence during the pandemic, are toughening their laws. Russia is going the other way.

In 2017 Russia decriminalised first instance domestic battery, meaning anything which doesn’t end up in hospital is classified as an administrative offence. There is no specific category for violence by a relative. The penalty is the same as being punched by a stranger on the street.

“It’s much more dangerous when the threat exists in your home which is meant to be a safe place,” says Diana Barsegyan of the anti-domestic violence advocacy group, Nasiliu.net.

“Plus the victim must prove everything themselves and often the police don’t respond or come to investigate. They’re not educated, they don’t understand that violence can come in many forms. They don’t, for example, understand the idea of rape in a marriage.”

Working at Nasiliu.net just got that bit harder.

In December last year it was added to the justice ministry’s list of foreign agents, which now includes a wide range of civil society organisations.

All of its campaign material including guidance on shelters or hotlines for battered women now needs a gigantic “foreign agent” stamp on it.

“It’s a huge problem,” Ms Barsegyan says. “All our supporters understand it’s just a stupid law and we’re not agents of another country, but for people who don’t know it’s like a giant red flag, it marks us out as an enemy.”

There are important voices helping. Yuri Dud, Russia’s most influential YouTuber, just posted his support for Nasiliu.net on his Instagram page and asked his followers to help fund the organisation.

Margarita Gracheva, whose husband cut off her hands days after she begged police to protect her from him, is using her painfully won prominence to get the nation talking in a new TV show about domestic violence.

State media may avoid a host of issues but horrific domestic violence cases like Ms Gracheva’s and Ms Pekhteleva’s do make and stay in the headlines, especially when the failings of law enforcement are so clear to see.

But Russia is still very far from the concept of “male allies”. There is an old saying in Russia: “If he beats you, he loves you.” Many still believe it.

Ruslan Mellin is a trauma surgeon in the city of Kemerovo where Ms Pekhteleva was killed.

He says around 15% of the patients he operates on are the victims of domestic violence. When he’s back home, he draws them and the horrific sets of injuries they’ve sustained – each face with its own terrible tale.

“Faces are my passion,” he says. “It is not hard to draw them, it is hard to look at them doing my work, day in, day out.”

There is the 16-year-old girl whose partner attacked her with an axe, leaving her in a pool of her own blood. When she didn’t die, he threw her in the cellar for a month so that her injuries grew and healed into an appallingly mutilated face.

There is the emaciated creature whose partner brought her to the hospital only to sneak her out via an emergency exit when he realised her injuries would be reported to police.

“She reminded me of a dog that had been beaten up so often that she was ready do anything as long as nobody touched her and gave her food and water,” Mr Mellin says.

He doesn’t have any answers. “I don’t follow politics, I don’t know what kind of tools the authorities may have to influence the abusers. But I do wish something would change.”

Russia’s authorities do have plenty of tools to influence abusers but they don’t use them. Even as civil society tries to step forward, Russia has a leadership which looks back.

Efforts to protect women are seen by conservative lawmakers as an infringement on the rights of the family.

Regulation to punish political dissent is being rushed through at breakneck speed but the law to criminalise domestic violence languishes in parliament.

It is a criminal offence now to defame a veteran but it is not one to beat up your wife.

And without a progressive and systematic response to the problem of domestic violence from parliament to the courts and the police, Russia’s women will continue to die at the hands of those close to them.

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While the vaccine has been bankrolled by the American pharmaceutical giant, the science itself is the work of BioNTech, a German company founded by married couple and dedicated physicians Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci.

Dr Tureci was working on a way to harness the body’s immune system to tackle tumours when the pair learned last year of a mystery virus infecting people in China.

Over breakfast, they decided to apply the technology they’d been researching for two decades to the new threat, dubbing the effort “Project Lightspeed.”

Both COVID-19 vaccines Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna use messenger RNA (mRNA) to send genetic instructions to the human body’s cells for making proteins that prime it to attack the coronavirus.

The same principle can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumours.

“We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA,” Dr Tureci told the Associated Press.

Asked when such a therapy might be available, she replied: “That’s very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines (against) cancer at a place where we can offer them to people.”

On Friday, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded the wife and husband one of the country’s highest decorations, the Order of Merit, during a ceremony attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“You began with a drug to treat cancer in a single individual,” Mr Steinmeier told the couple. “And today we have a vaccine for all of humanity.”

Dr Tureci said ahead of the ceremony that getting the award was “indeed an honour”, but insisted developing the vaccine was the work of many.

“It’s about the effort of many: our team at BioNTech, all the partners who were involved, also governments, regulatory authorities, which worked together with a sense of urgency,” she said.

“The way we see it, this is an acknowledgement of this effort and also a celebration of science.”

Coming from humble beginnings as children of immigrants, scientists and entrepreneurs Professor Sahin, 55, and Dr Tureci, 53, are now among the 100 richest Germans, with the value of their company BioNTech soaring to $21bn (£16bn) in the wake of the vaccine breakthrough.

Mr Sahin, who was born in Turkey and is a trained doctor, is the chief executive officer of BioNTech, and turned his focus to researching immunotherapy.

Dr Tureci, who is the company’s chief medical officer, was born in Germany and is the daughter of a Turkish physician who migrated to the country from Istanbul.

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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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Paris is among 16 regions of France facing new lockdowns from midnight tomorrow, the country’s prime minister Jean Castex has announced.

He said the nation was in a third wave because of coronavirus variants.

Schools will remain open under the latest measures, but all non-essential shops will be required to close.

The lockdown will last for a month.

French authorities have gone to great lengths to avoid re-imposing the strictest measures, having previously opted for weekend lockdowns and nightly curfews instead.

Skyrocketing case numbers, however, along with a slow vaccine rollout has forced the government to bolster its strategy.

It comes as France on Thursday reported a further 34,998 cases of COVID-19 – down slightly from the more than 38,000 new infections the day before.

Another 268 people have also died, bringing the country’s total fatality toll to 91,679.

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