Trump condemns far-right groups over Charlottesville violence

The US President describes racism as "evil" as he bows to pressure to address white supremacist groups following clashes.

     

Donald Trump has condemned white supremacists and other hate groups following violent clashes in Virginia over the weekend in which a woman was killed.

The US President was under increasing pressure to address the violence in Charlottesville, with politicians from both sides criticising his failure to condemn far-right organisations.

At a news conference at the White House on Monday, Mr Trump said: "Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.

"Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans."

Mr Trump said anyone found to have acted criminally would be held "fully accountable", adding that: "No matter the colour of our skin we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God."

At the weekend, Mr Trump had claimed "many sides" were involved in the violence, but stopped short of condemning white supremacists.

The US President has been at his New Jersey golf club on a "working vacation", but returned to Washington on Monday to sign an executive action on China's trade policies.

Richard Spencer, president of white nationalist think tank the National Policy Institute, dismissed Mr Trump's condemnation.

He told Sky News: "It has a lot of kumbaya and a lot of nostalgia to it, 'we need to rediscover these bonds we've had together', does anyone really believe that?

"I do think there was an American nation that did act as one, that had fewer divisions, that emerged probably by the time of the Great War.

"No one identifies as a white supremacist or anything like that. I'm not the KKK, I don't engage in violence and I don't want to rule over other races.

"It's very easy to say things like 'racism is evil'. Everyone throughout world history had a sense of who they were, they had a sense of maintaining their community and their family and their nation and their civilisation etc.

"It's very silly to say things like that and I just can't take it seriously."

On Monday, attorney general Jeff Sessions said the death of paralegal Heather Heyer, 32, who was killed when a car ploughed into a group of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, "does meet the definition of domestic terrorism in our statute".

He told ABC: "You can be sure we will charge and advance the investigation towards the most serious charges that can be brought, because this is an unequivocally unacceptable and evil attack that cannot be accepted in America."

The man arrested over Ms Heyer's death - 20-year-old James Fields - appeared in court on Monday on a second-degree murder charge. He was held without bail.

It comes as Merck chief executive Kenneth Frazier - one of America's most prominent black executives - quit the US President's American Manufacturing Council over Mr Trump's response to the violence.

:: Leaders condemn 'repulsive' far-right protests

In a tweet announcing his resignation, Mr Frazier said: "America's leaders must honour our fundamental views by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal."

The US President hit back, saying that now that "Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma has resigned from the President's Manufacturing Council, he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!"

Several executives from top US companies have stepped down from a number of presidential advisory councils in protest over Mr Trump's policies.

:: Quitting boss encapsulates American Dream

:: Neo-Nazi site given 24 hours after Heyer post

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Walt Disney chief executive Robert Iger quit the Strategic and Policy Forum in June after Mr Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

Ticks are here to stay. But scientists are finding ways to outsmart them

Thanks, Holly Gaff. Soon, anyone straining to tweeze off a mid-back tick can find answers to the obvious question: What if humankind just went after the little bloodsuckers with killer robots?

Gaff, who calls herself a mathematical eco­epidemiologist, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., is one of the few people collecting real field data on the efficacy of tick-slaying robots. This summer, she’s been supervising a field test of a terminator named TickBot deployed to try making mowed grass safe for children. Researchers will start analyzing results in early fall.

Ticks make formidable enemies. “Almost every control measure that has been tried has failed, and has failed miserably,” Gaff says. “We are slowly coming to embrace the fact that you cannot eradicate ticks.” What human ingenuity might do, however, is manage the risks and — dream big! — make ticks irrelevant.

That’s an urgent hope. Data from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., have for two years suggested 2017 will be a high risk one for Lyme disease in the Northeastern United States. Of the various illnesses that North America’s ticks pass along, Lyme is the most common, caused by a squiggle of a parasite called Borrelia burgdorferi. The disease can bring on an eerie red bull’s-eye rash, flulike misery and risks of long-term neurological and joint troubles if not treated early. In 2015, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tallied about 30,000 confirmed cases. Considering gaps in case reporting, some estimates put the number closer to several hundred thousand.

So bring on the robots and other science revenge fantasies. It’s time to rethink humankind’s defenses against ticks. Pesticides and tick checks just aren’t doing the trick.

There may be ways to attack ticks without touching a single molecule of their die-hard little bodies. Ecologists have made progress in tracing what ticks need from the woods and lawns where they lurk. For instance, researchers believe that it was a bumper crop of acorns in 2015 that, through a Rube Goldberg series of consequences, created conditions for a perfect tick storm two years later. Breaking key ecological connections could knock back the tick menace in the future.

Molecular biologists are focusing on tick survival tricks. Researchers are looking for weak spots inside tick guts and trying to take advantage of ticks’ reckless abandon in mating. Biology is proving as important as electronics in the robot line of defense.

Ticks attack

First, a quick intro to ticks.

Unlike mosquitoes, ticks are pure vampires, consuming nothing but blood. Mosquitoes get colloquially called vampires, but blood is just their version of a pregnancy craving, a female-only nutrient gorge to aid reproduction in an adult life of sipping flower nectar.

For most of the troublesome tick species in North America, including the black-legged ticks that spread Lyme, blood is the elixir that lets them transition to the next life stage — from larva to nymph to adult. And after a single meal, an adult female can lay 1,000 or even 15,000 eggs without anything else to eat for the rest of her life. Hard ticks, the Ixodidae family, which includes the black-legged variety, typically have only two or three meals of any kind during the entire two or three years they live.

Soft ticks are gluttons, relatively speaking. Many move into mammal dens for a bedbug lifestyle. These ticks hide and, whenever they get hungry, just crawl over to the resident dinner.

For ticks without live-in prey, many “quest,” as the ambush is called. Ticks climb to some promising spot like the top of a grass blade, raise their front legs and just wait until something brushes by. But there are also ticks that hunt vigorously, even pursuing human prey.

A visit to Dennis Bente at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston is unforgettable, in part because of a video of a Hyalomma tick chasing down one of Bente’s collaborators. The tiny brown creature scurries like a frantic ant in an almost-straight line over bare dirt, onto a boot and finally into a hand reaching down to grab it. This hunter doesn’t live in North America.

Ticks can spread a wide variety of diseases. Despite its name, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which brings a higher risk of fatality than Lyme, is more common in the central United States and the South than in the Rockies. Other tickborne diseases are lately getting attention: A tick-bitten baby in Connecticut in April became the state’s first reported victim of the rare, but potentially fatal Powassan virus, thought to enter the bloodstream in just 15 minutes after a tick starts feeding. And medical journals are publishing discussions of whether a tick bite might lead to a sudden, deadly allergy to red meat. With a possible threat even to our beloved hamburger, new approaches to fending off ticks can’t come soon enough.

What can we learn about Mercury’s surface during the eclipse?

On the morning of August 21, a pair of jets will take off from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to chase the shadow of the moon. They will climb to 15 kilometers in the stratosphere and fly in the path of the total solar eclipse over Missouri, Illinois and Tennessee at 750 kilometers per hour.

But some of the instruments the jets carry won’t be looking at the sun, or even at Earth. They’ll be focused on a different celestial body: Mercury. In the handful of minutes that the planes zip along in darkness, the instruments could collect enough data to answer this Mercury mystery: What is the innermost planet’s surface made of?

Because it’s so close to the sun, Mercury is tough to study from Earth. It’s difficult to observe close up, too. Extreme heat and radiation threaten to fry any spacecraft that gets too close. And the sun’s brightness can swamp a hardy spacecraft’s efforts to send signals back to Earth.

But Messenger only scratched the surface, so to speak. It analyzed the planet’s composition with an instrument called a reflectance spectrometer, which collects light and then splits that light into its component wavelengths to figure out which elements the light was reflected from.

Some Important Health Tips You Need To Know

Here are some very important tips you need to know for maintaining a healthy life