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Deputy Brandon Shirley, 26, was working an off-duty security job at Rockford Lane Auto Sales when he was ambushed, LMPD says.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. Louisville Metro leaders from around Jefferson County are sharing condolences after a deputy was murdered.

Deputy Brandon Shirley, 26, was working an off-duty security job at Rockford Lane Auto Sales at around 2:30 a.m. Thursday when someone shot him. Shirley died while at the hospital.

Louisville Metro Council President David James issued this statement about Deputy Shirley's death:

On behalf of the Metro Council, I offer our thoughts and prayers to those who are now in mourning following the death of Deputy Brandon Shirley. The Jefferson County Sheriffs Office is one of the many law enforcement partners we have in Metro Louisville who serve and protect our community. Deputy Shirley answered the call to keep all of us safe and uphold the law. He leaves us at an age too young. This is a reminder of all the dangers faced by those who decide to wear a badge. We grieve with those who all knew him and pray for his family in their time of mourning. If anyone in our city knows who is responsible for this senseless act, please help LMPD and the Jefferson County Sheriffs Office bring this person to justice.

Shirley received a medal of valor for his work during protests in 2020, specifically his work responding to the shooting of photographer Tyler Gerth and helping arrest the person who shot him, Sheriff Aubrey said.

Tyler Gerth's family released this statement on the death of Deputy Brandon Shirley:

"Our hearts break for Deputy Shirley and his family and for a life taken far too soon due to senseless gun violence. On the night Tyler died, Deputy Shirley rushed from his post inside the Hall of Justice and toward the crowd where shots were being fired and tried to provide first aid for Tyler. We will forever be grateful for his heroic actions that night. We pray that his loved ones can find peace in the face of such devastating loss."

"Our entire city grieves with the family of Sheriffs Deputy Brandon Shirley, as well as with his Sheriffs Office family & our public safety community. This is another senseless, tragic act of violence, & LMPD will work tirelessly to bring accountability."

Governor Andy Beshear tweeted this about Shirley's death:

"Britainy and I extend our thoughts and prayers to the family of Deputy Brandon Shirley, and to the brave members of the Jefferson Co. Sherriffs [sic] Department. We are forever grateful for Deputy Shirleys bravery, selflessness and dedication to the people of the commonwealth. ^AB"

In a tweet, Louisville Metro Police asked the community to keep the sheriff's department in their thoughts and prayers:

Councilwoman Jessica Green issued this statement:

I am so saddened to learn of this tragic loss to our community. Brandon Shirley was a wonderful person who was dedicated to his family and his community. I would see him around the courthouse routinely and he was a light to all who knew him. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family as they grieve during this very sad time.

Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Louisville Division:

"Our thoughts are with the Jefferson County Sheriffs Office and the family and friends of Deputy Brandon Shirley who was ambushed and murdered early this morning. Deputy Shirley was killed while protecting our community. His service and ultimate sacrifice will long be remembered. The ATF community mourns the loss of a fellow law enforcement officer and will continue to assist JCSO and LMPD until justice is served for Deputy Shirley and his family."

Councilwoman Keisha Dorsey issued this statement:

"There is an overwhelming sadness in our hearts today as we collectively grieve the tragic and painful loss of one of our sons. Deputy Brandon Shirley deserved better. We must do better to ensure all of our children and neighbors have the opportunity to live in healthy and safe environments. My staff and I will continue to work toward this effort in any and all ways. But today, my immediate thoughts and prayers are with Deputy Shirley's family."

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul:

"Kelley and I mourn the tragic death of Jefferson Co. Deputy Sheriff Brandon Shirley. His family will be in our thoughts and prayers. Deputy Shirley was a decorated hero of an officer. I call on those who direct hatred and anger toward our police to realize there will be consequences to words and actions when directed against law enforcement."

US Representative John Yarmuth

"Shocked and saddened by the killing of Jefferson County Sheriffs Deputy Brandon Shirley this morning. My thoughts are with Deputy Shirleys family, loved ones, and colleagues as they cope with this tragic loss."

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Louisville Metro leaders, Tyler Gerth family, Beshear react to the murder of Jefferson County Deputy Brandon Shirley - WHAS11.com

Dr. Anthony Fauci and U.S. Senator Rand Paul during the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on July 20, 2021. Image: J. Scott Applewhite/Stefani Reynolds (Getty Images)

U.S. Senator Rand Paul will make a criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the infectious diseases department at NIH. Pauls threat was first announced on Sean Hannitys Fox News show on Tuesday night and came after Fauci pushed back against the senators aggressive questioning during a senate committee hearing in Washington D.C.

I will be sending a letter to the Department of Justice asking for a criminal referral because he has lied to Congress, Senator Paul told Sean Hannity.

Paul, a senator from Kentucky, alleges that U.S. funding of research on infectious diseases in Wuhan, China at the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have played a role in the covid-19 pandemic thats ravaged the world over the past year and a half, sickening at least 191 million people and killing over 4.11 million.

Senator Paul says hes worried that so-called gain-of-function research was conducted in Wuhan that may have led to the novel coronavirus being developed artificially and released into the world, intentionally or not. Gain-of-function research is when an organism is genetically modified to have a new ability, such as agricultural crops being more resistant to pests.

In this case, the allegation from Senator Paul is that something like covid-19 may have been developed as a deadly virus in that Wuhan lab, something thats incredibly hard to prove and a question for which we may never get a proper answer.

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We have scientists that will line up by the dozens to say that the research he was funding was gain-of-function. [Faucis] doing this because he has a self-interest to cover his tracks and to cover his connection to on lab, Paul told Hannity on Tuesday night.

Now, does he deserve all of the blame? No. Theres still some conjecture as to whether or not it came from the lab. But hes lying about whether or not he funded function research and yes, he should be punished, Paul continued.

Earlier in the day, Dr. Fauci and Senator Paul got into a heated argument during a Senate Committee hearing on Tuesday. Paul accused Fauci on lying and Fauci shot back that he didnt understand what he was talking about.

Where does this leave the debate between Senator Paul and Dr. Fauci? The argument comes down to how you define gain-of-function research. If your definition of gain-of-function research only includes the creation of scary super-viruses, then the NIH flatly denies it did any such thing.

NIH has never approved any grant to support gain-of-function research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans, the government agency told the Washington Post earlier this year.

But if your definition of gain of function includes a much more broad idea, such as developing drought-resistant crops, then the U.S. government has certainly funded this type of research.

While its entirely possible that Fauci may face consequences for allegedly lying to Congress, it would be highly unusual, given the way that government officials were treated under the Trump regime.

As just one example, the head of DHS Kirstjen Nielsen, lied repeatedly to Congress about the existence of a family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. Nielsen insisted on more than one occasion that the Trump regime didnt have such a policy, which turned out to be a tremendous lie. Nielsen was never charged for lying to Congress.

While its important to determine the cause of the covid-19 pandemic around the world, there are still plenty of concerns closer to home. The U.S. has seen a dramatic surge in cases during recent weeks and the virus is expected to continue devastating communities of Americans that have not been vaccinated.

The U.S. recorded over 61,900 new cases of covid-19 on Tuesday, with 298 deaths. And while its great that many Americans have gotten vaccinated, there are still millions who are susceptible to this terrible disease, including children who are not eligible for the vaccines.

Link:
Rand Paul Says He'll Make Criminal Referral Against Dr. Fauci

Sen. Rand Paul was told to "get f---ed" during a virtual town hall meeting.

The Kentucky senator was taking calls from constituents when one caller named Alexis Toon said, "Hi Senator, I'm a proud Kentucky citizen, and I just wanted to tell you to get f---ed."

Paul and his aide momentarily pause before the aide says, "Alright, we'll go ahead to our next question."

Toon posted the exchange on TikTok with the caption, "for some unknown reason they called and asked if I'd like to join the town hall Q&A so I took the opportunity and ran with it."

The video has since been removed.

It's not clear why Toon took issue with the Republican senator, but Paul has often been criticized for the stances he has taken during the pandemic.

He has said he will not be getting a COVID-19 vaccineand has encouraged people who have had the virus or been vaccinated to "throw your mask away."

COVID-19 cases have been rising in Kentucky in counties with low vaccination rates.

Paul has also often clashed with Dr. Anthony Fauci, recently butting heads during a heated Senate hearing on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Kentucky senator will be up for reelection in 2022, running against former Kentucky state legislator Charles Booker.

See the original post here:
Sen. Rand Paul confronted by foul-mouthed constituent during a virtual town hall meeting - Business Insider

A decadelong debate over pandemic preparedness that has divided some of the worlds leading biologists into opposing camps, for and against so-called gain-of-function research in which deadly pathogens that could cause pandemics are artificially enhanced for study in the lab has all but ground to a halt in the past week, thanks to Sen. Rand Paul.

Thats because the Republican senator from Kentucky politicized the argument last week, by cherry-picking expert opinions from critics of the research who call it too risky to pursue, to publicly accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci of lying to Congress, when he said that his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had never funded gain-of-function studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Pauls made-for-television broadside against Fauci thrilled Fox News hosts and colleagues like Rep. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who has also pushed the debunked conspiracy theory that research financed by Faucis agency, which some experts describe as gain-of-function, could have led to the development of SARS-CoV-2, the deadly coronavirus that causes the disease Covid-19, in the Wuhan lab. Fauci rejected Pauls claim that research carried out in Wuhan before 2017 with some support from the NIAID met the definition of gain-of-function and pointedly explained that it was impossible to make SARS-CoV-2 from the coronavirus used in that study.

Almost as soon as the heated exchange concluded, the senators staff uploaded a truncated version of the video on his YouTube channel under the headline, Dr. Fauci Caught Lying about NIH Funding in Wuhan.

That video was edited by Pauls staff so that it ends before Fauci responded to the senators harangue by saying, I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating, senator, because if you look at the viruses that were used in the experiments it is molecularly impossible to result in SARS-CoV-2.

On social networks, Republican operatives unconcerned with the facts like Richard Grenell, the Twitter troll who served as Donald Trumps director of national intelligence for three months cheered on Pauls attack.

But Pauls false claim that Faucis supposed support for gain-of-function studies gave him responsibility for 4 million people dying around the world from a pandemic, and the ensuing frenzy in the conservative media, also caused some previously outspoken biologists who have made the case against such experiments to fall silent.

In the wake of Pauls attack on Fauci, several prominent scientists who question the wisdom and safety of gain-of-function experiments in which biologists deliberately create pandemic-causing pathogens in the lab in order to better prepare to combat them should they evolve in nature refused to speak to me on the record. One after another, they said Pauls patently false claim that Fauci was to blame for the pandemic, and his selective outrage at gain-of-function research only when conducted in China, made it all but impossible for them to say anything about the pre-pandemic experiments in Wuhan without being vilified by partisans.

One biologist who supports such research told me that he would have liked the opportunity to correct what he called misinformation about the experiments, but had been worn down by death threats.

To recap, at a hearing in May, Paul first accused Fauci of having supported gain-of-function research in Wuhan, which the senator, who is also a doctor, misleadingly defined as experimenting to enhance the coronaviruss ability to infect humans. In fact, the coronavirus that researchers experimented on between 2014 and 2017 at the Wuhan Institute, with some financial support from the NIAID, was from a strain found in bats that is not closely enough related to SARS-CoV-2 to have been used to fabricate the virus that causes Covid-19 in a lab.

Fauci also insisted that his agency, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, had never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

When Fauci returned to the senate committee last week, Paul confronted him with the words of Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and a longtime critic of gain-of-function studies, who told the conservative magazine National Review that Faucis testimony in May was demonstrably false, since, in Ebrights opinion, the experiments at the Wuhan Institute, indirectly funded by the NIAID as part of a project to head off a pandemic, were unequivocally gain-of-function in nature.

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, used a visual aid to accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci of lying to Congress during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on July 20, 2021.

Photo: Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images

Fauci insisted that the biologist Paul cited was simply wrong, saying experts at the National Institutes of Health had evaluated the Wuhan project and concluded that the experiments there did not meet the criteria for gain-of-function research used by the United States government.

The exchange between Paul and Fauci got even more heated when the senator seemed to imply that this research funded by Faucis agency could have led to the development of SARS-CoV-2, the deadly coronavirus that causes Covid-19, in the Wuhan lab.

As Fauci correctly noted, that speculation was wildly misleading, since it was molecularly impossible for the type of coronavirus used in the pre-2017 experiments to have been manipulated in the lab to create SARS-CoV-2.

On that point, even some of the most outspoken critics of gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens agree with Fauci. Kevin Esvelt, an MIT biologist who told PolitiFact in May that the experiments conducted in the Wuhan study should be considered gain-of-function also emphasized that those experiments definitely did NOT lead to the creation of SARS-CoV-2.

(Esvelt, who worries that viruses developed through gain-of-function experiments in a lab could one day be used as weapons, told The Open Mind on PBS in March that whether the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic came from an animal or came from a lab, it was not designed to be a weapon because anyone good enough to make this thing could make a more devastating weapon.)

Paul was also rebuked in May by Marc Lipsitch, a microbiologist and professor of epidemiology at Harvard University who brought together hundreds of scientists and experts in law and ethics in 2014 to call for a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments that could create highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses in laboratories.

Lipsitch wrote in a Twitter thread that in his attack on Fauci in May, Paul had FALSELY claimed that the working group Lipsitch assembled had characterized work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as gain-of-function. While he and many members of the working group support proper investigation of SARS-CoV-2 origins including the lab leak hypothesis and continue to oppose many forms of GOF research, he added, it is just fabrication to say we have made any statement as a group about work in Wuhan.

Fauci did not get a chance to explain during the hearing what the scientific basis was for the determination by NIAID biologists that the experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, described in a paper published in 2017, were not subject to a temporary pause on the funding of gain-of-function research imposed during the Obama administration in 2014, which was lifted in 2017 after Trump became president.

But in a statement provided to The Intercept on Monday, NIAID explained the reasoning behind its review of the experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute on behalf of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit in New York that works with researchers in China to study viruses that have the potential to jump from bats to humans. The agency wrote that its scientists had concluded the pre-2017 experiments in Wuhan were not barred by the temporary pause on gain-of-function research, because they were not reasonably expected to increase transmissibility or virulence of these viruses in humans.

Under the grant, EcoHealth Alliance proposed research to create chimeric viruses by placing a small portion of newly identified, evolutionarily distant, bat coronaviruses into another well characterized bat coronavirus that has never been demonstrated to infect humans called WIV1, NIAID wrote. The purpose of this work was to examine whether the newly discovered viruses were able to use the human ACE2 receptor like WIV1 and other SARS-related coronaviruses already do. In the context of these experiments, this well-characterized bat coronavirus would be considered the parental strain against which the function of the new chimeric viruses would be assessed. With this comparison, the newly created chimeric viruses did not gain any function relative to the parental strain; the chimeric viruses did not replicate in cell culture any better than the parental WIV1. In addition, research that had been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals demonstrated that viruses similar to those proposed under the grant had reduced pathogenicity as compared to the parental viruses. For these reasons, it was not reasonably anticipated that the viruses involved in research under the grant would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route, and therefore did not meet the criteria for gain-of-function research described in the research funding pause.

See more here:
Rand Paul's Attack on Fauci Chills Scientific Debate Over Gain-of-Function Research - The Intercept

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has long been one of the biggest champions of individual rights in Congress, and his reinduction of theDefense of Environment and Property Act further solidifies that status. According to a statement from Pauls office, the legislation restores common sense to federal water policy by redefining navigable waters, excluding ephemeral or intermittent streams from federal jurisdiction, and restraining the power the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers hold over American landowners.

Essentially, hes hoping to get government off the backs of farmers and landowners.

Previous iterations of this bill have been brought before lawmakers, namely in 2019, 2015, and 2012. Democrats and environmental groups such as The Wildlife Society have traditionally pushed back against this kind of legislation.

The Defense of Environment and Property Act of 2021:

While some would have us believe we can only protect the environment by giving the federal government more control over Americans lives, my bill shows we can act while still respecting Americans private property rights and the Constitutions limits on federal power, said Paul. Kentuckys farmers and coal industry suffered when the Obama administration implemented its burdensome WOTUS rule. Though the Trump administration replaced that rule, we know the new Biden administration will certainly try to return us to an unworkable scenario again. Thats why its now more important than ever to make an actual change to the law to fix the problem, and protect our land and invaluable industries.

U.S. Rep. David Rouzer (R-NC) plans to introduce companion legislation in the U.S. House. The Senate version of the bill is cosponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Im proud to support this legislation by Senator Rand Paul that ensures no bureaucrat in Washington can dictate what our farm families, small businesses, local governments, and citizens can do on their property after a significant rainfall. This bill solidifies the clarity provided by the Trump Administrations Navigable Waters Protection Rule and prevents the EPA from reimposing overly burdensome and unnecessary regulations that would negatively impact our farm families, job creators and communities, Rouzer said.

You can read the Defense of Environment and Property Act in its entirety here.

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Rand Pauls new bill would give more property freedom to farmers - AGDAILY