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The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said 7.1 million people were screened at U.S. airport checkpoints from Thursday through Sunday. Friday was the highest single travel day since March 2020, when COVID-19 slashed air travel demand, as 1.96 million people were screened.

Last week, AAA forecast travel to jump by 60% for the Memorial Day holiday period, with 37 million people expected to travel 50 miles (80 km) or more from home, AAA Travel said.

United Airlines said it was forecasting Monday to be its busiest travel day since March 2020. For the five-day holiday period, it was forecasting 1.34 million passengers - but still down from 2.3 million over the same period in 2019.

Tracking firm GasBuddy said Sunday's U.S. gasoline demand jumped 9.6% above the average of the previous four Sundays, the highest Sunday demand since summer 2019.

The 2021 total, which is still 13% below that of 2019, includes 34.4 million people traveling by car, AAA said,

Patty Doxsey, 63, of Red Hook, New York, was set to take a 10-hour drive with her husband on Monday for a week-long camping stay at Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee in hopes of seeing a synchronous firefly light show.

The couple, both vaccinated, had planned to go last year until the pandemic scotched their trip, she said.

"I am so excited," said Doxsey, a reporter for the Daily Freeman in Kingston, New York. "It has been a long, long year, and we like to travel."

By Sunday, 50.5% of Americans had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The number of new coronavirus cases plummeted from a seven-day average of more than 250,000 a day in early January to about 18,900 on Saturday, the lowest number since the emergence of the pandemic in March 2020, the CDC said.

Top Memorial Day travel destinations this year were Las Vegas and Orlando, Florida, AAA said.

REMEMBERING THE WAR DEAD

The Memorial Day holiday on Monday is also a solemn occasion for remembering the country's war dead, and many of this year's military ceremonies were still being held virtually.

The biggest commemoration, the National Memorial Day Parade in Washington, which was presented online last year as the virus raged, was returning somewhat back to normal this year with a mix of in-person and virtual events, organizers said.

Instead of a traditional parade on Constitution Avenue, the march was filmed on May 3 on the National Mall with no onlookers and will be blended with other taped performers in a special television program.

"We're fully expecting to be returning to normal next year," said Kenny Cunningham, a spokesman for the American Veterans Center, a non-profit educational organization.

New York City's Staten Island borough held one of the country's relatively few live-and-in-person parades on Monday with floats and marching bands.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took part in a traditional wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

"Duty, honor, country - they lived for it, they died for it. And we, as a nation, are eternally grateful," Biden told the crowd, including families gathered to remember loved ones who lost their lives in military service.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely in New York; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg and David Shepardson; Editing by Diane Craft, David Gregorio and Peter Cooney)

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'All we have left is Rand Paul': Russian state TV bemoans lack of GOP supporters after Trump's exit - Raw Story

Rand Paul said on Saturday that he was concerned that US funds were still being used by China to develop biological weapons.

Paul told Fox News Jenine Piro on Saturday:

Paul argued that China was likely to have used acquisition of function: mutating a virus that normally propagates only between animals, jumping to humans or jumping with dong dong. And can be potentially more dangerous or deadly.

A Kentucky senator pointed out that all Democrats agreed when he proposed to stop funding the study, arguing that there is a lot of evidence now showing the institute. ..

Paul and former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have warned that ongoing research and experiments are underway at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), raising another alleged fatal virus leak. doing.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said on Saturday that he was concerned that China was still conducting biological weapons tests with US funding.

The comment is due to increasing evidence that the coronavirus was developed in China and leaked from the Wuhan Virology Institute as a biological weapon.

Pompeo told Fox News on Friday that the WIV was conducting a top-secret military investigation.

Former Donald Trump aide also claimed that there was huge evidence that the virus causing COVID-19 had escaped from Chinese laboratories.

I can say for sure that military operations were carried out in parallel with the good old civilian studies they claimed, because they knew they were engaged in PLA-related efforts within the institute. We have, Pompeo said. Interview with Fox.

They refused to tell us what it was, refused to explain their nature, and refused to allow access to the World Health Organization. The concealment alone , Suggests that there is much more we need to know.

The virology laboratory is still in operation. Perhaps we are still doing the same kind of research that could have led to the virus escaping the laboratory, he said. ..

Pompeo said, Only the Chinese Communist Party knows the answer. The world deserves the answer and they have to tell us. I hope there is bipartisan pressure to demand and be held accountable. .

Former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on Friday that the Wuhan Virology Institute is conducting secret military research.

He spoke after President Joe Biden ordered a 90-day intensive investigation to re-examine the possible cause of the laboratory leak in the pandemic.

Its a real shame that they took the position that they couldnt see anything here early on, Pompeo said in response to a new study.

Im glad theyre watching this now. I hope this will be a serious investigation when they say that the intelligence community will give them 90 days to look into this. Has been considering this for a very long time, he said.

Former CIA spy director Pompeo has been driving lab leak theory since the early days of the pandemic.

Since I first talked about this last spring, in the spring of 2020, I knew there was a huge amount of evidence that it had escaped from the Wuhan Institute, he said on Saturday.

We know that there were people who got sick there, scientists who got sick there. They knew they were doing research on the acquisition of function.

Workers at the Wuhan Virology Institute can be seen in February.The lab was put under new surveillance as experts eventually took the lab leak seriously as a possible cause of a pandemic.

This administration has to take after this. I hope they continue the work we have been working on, Pompeo said. This is an important task. To prevent it from happening again, we need to know how this happened.

This is not the first time Pompeo has claimed a relationship between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Chinese military.

During the last few days of the Trump administration, the State Department, led by Pompeo, issued a statement that the United States has determined that WIV is cooperating with the Chinese military in publications and top secret projects.

WIV has been involved in top-secret research, including laboratory animal testing, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.

Laboratory accidents involve only a few individuals in their initial exposure and can resemble spontaneous occurrence if exacerbated by an asymptomatic infection, he said.

This means that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 at the Wuhan Institute of Veterans Affairs and tried to reverse engineer the virus version to hide its traces in order to make it appear to have evolved naturally from bats. It follows the explosive words of new research that are allegedly shown.

A 22-page treatise exclusively obtained by the DailyMail.com will be published in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery.In it, researchers describe months of forensic analysis of experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Veterans Affairs between 2002 and 2019.

The authors of the paper, Professor Angus Dalgreish of the United Kingdom and Dr. Birger Srensen, a Norwegian scientist, said they had prima facie evidence of retroengineering in China for a year, but ignored by scholars and major journals. It is written that it was done.

The shocking allegations of this study, obtained by the DailyMail.com prior to its publication, include accusations of intentional destruction, hiding, or contamination of data at a Chinese laboratory.

On Wednesday, Biden ordered 17 national laboratories run by the Ministry of Energy to assist intelligence agencies in a 90-day sprint to investigate whether the virus had leaked from a Chinese laboratory.

White House officials told CNN that the lab was being used for its ability to process large amounts of data using advanced supercomputers.

The government has not disclosed the exact type of data submitted for analysis, but experts say it is likely to be previously collected information, such as signal interception or biological evidence. ing.

Intelligence agencies regularly collect more raw data than analysts can effectively investigate, and applying advanced algorithms to look for patterns in large datasets brings new breakthroughs. there is a possibility.

President Joe Biden has ordered a major government laboratory to participate in an investigation into the true origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The device can be found at the Livermore National Laboratory in California. It is one of the 17 national laboratories called in to assist intelligence agencies in data processing.

White House officials told CNN, We want science to dominate this. We use all the resources of the intelligence and scientific community to root the problem. Try to reach.

Biden is also calling on US intelligence and its allies to look for new information that could reveal whether China has concealed a leak in the lab.

Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton said the Biden administrations response was better than not late, but far from enough.

Our intelligence community has been considering this for 15 months. They did a good job, but in the end the answer was in the hands of Chinese Communists and people working in American intelligence. Not, he told Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

Mr Cotton said Beijing officials did not reveal how the pandemic began. We are clear about what is happening at the Wuhan Institute as they clean up. You should insist on not being difficult, he said.

Situational evidence has long questioned the Wuhan Virology Institute, where researchers are known to be experimenting with coronavirus strains of bats similar to those responsible for COVID-19.

China early claimed that the virus had not leaked from the laboratory and that the crossover to humans must have occurred in Wuhans wet market, which sells live animals.

It may have been driven by hostility to Donald Trump. He accepted the institutes leak theory early on. Mainstream US media and scholars called it a conspiracy theory. ..

However, new evidence, including reports of three Wuhan Institute of Victims workers becoming seriously ill with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019, forced a calm reassessment among suspicious people.

Dissatisfaction with China increased after China said this week that it would not participate in further investigations by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Biden accused China of announcing a new intelligence survey and told allies that China will participate in an international survey based on complete and transparent evidence and provide access to all relevant data and evidence. Pressure to do it.

Rand Paul says U.S. funding is still worried about getting Chinese to run a biological weapons program

Source link Rand Paul says U.S. funding is still worried about getting Chinese to run a biological weapons program

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Rand Paul says US funding is still "worried" about getting Chinese to run a biological weapons program - Texasnewstoday.com

Rand Paul revealed he would not be getting the COVID-19 vaccine. The senator from Kentucky said he sees no point in getting vaccinated because he already had COVID-19.

"Until they show me evidence that people who have already had the infection are dying in large numbers or being hospitalized or getting very sick, I just made my own personal decision that I'm not getting vaccinated because I've already had the disease and I have natural immunity," Paul said in an interview Sunday on WABC's radio show "The Cats Roundtable."

Paul, an ophthalmologist, was thefirst-known senator to be diagnosed with COVID-19 when he contracted the virus in March 2020.

The senator's stance goes against the Centers for Disease Control's recommendations that those who have already had COVID-19 nonetheless get vaccinated. According to the CDC, experts are uncertain how long natural immunity lasts. There is also a rare risk that those who've already had COVID-19 could become infected again.

He has frequently clashed with Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden and touched on the topic during his interview on Sunday. "We've had round after round," Paul admitted.

Paul added that he believes no one should be forced to be vaccinated: "In a free country, you would think people would honor the idea that each individual would get to make the medical decision, that it wouldn't be a big brother coming to tell me what I have to do," Paul said.

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Paul's remarks come as vaccine rates appear to be slowing across the country. Earlier this month, CBS News found that many states weren't ordering all the available COVID-19 vaccine doses allocated to them by the federal government.

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Rand Paul says he won't get vaccinated because he's already ...

The New York Times

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computers camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with. This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the GPA contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the GPA, Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times School officials said she ranked third in her class. Sullivan disagreed. She could not find a local lawyer who would agree to take on her case. A firm in Dallas told her it would, she said, but estimated the case could cost her $75,000 far more than she could afford. Instead, she figured out how to write a request for an injunction and represented herself in the 394th District Court of Texas. She believed that her GPA could, in fact, have been higher than one or both of the students ahead of her, making her worthy of the title salutatorian or even valedictorian. She and her parents had protested her rank for the past month, and she claimed that the school intentionally did not invite her to an awards event where top students were honored. The school district has said that it calculated her grades repeatedly, and that each time Sullivan still ranked third. In a statement on Friday, school officials declined to discuss the allegations raised by Sullivan, saying the district was not at liberty to discuss the individual student. Although we respectfully disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit, the statement said, we take student and parent concerns very seriously and will continue to address the students concerns. It is not entirely unheard-of for disputes over top spots in high school graduating classes to escalate to litigation. The competition over such accolades can be an intense, even ruthless, zero-sum game. And in the fight to be valedictorian, there is more at stake than just bragging rights. In Texas, the highest-ranking high school graduates can receive free tuition for their first year at in-state public institutions. Sullivan and her parents were inspired by a case last year in Pecos, Texas, about 100 miles from Alpine, where two students claimed to be valedictorian amid confusion over a glitch in the schools tabulations. One of the students with professional legal representation filed for a restraining order and sought an injunction to block Pecos High School from naming its valedictorian. After Sullivan could not get a lawyer, her parents were disappointed but willing to drop the matter. But she refused. She got advice and records from the family in the case in Pecos, using the petition in that case as a guide to start writing her own. Her parents her father, a rancher; her mother, a forensic interviewer read it over and helped her tidy up the language. We arent even close to being lawyers, Sullivan said. In Alpine, a town of roughly 6,000 people in Texas Big Bend Country, some who know Sullivan said they were surprised she would take this on. There are other ways to spend ones last summer before college. (She plans to attend the College of Charleston in South Carolina and major in biophysics with the aim of going into medicine.) But she had always been serious about school and a bit steely in her resolve. Shes already going to college, she already has scholarships, said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Sullivans mother and whose sons are close in age to Sullivan. She worked really hard for this, and I think all kids deserve to know where they fall in the pecking order. Kids have to show their work, Todd added. Why doesnt the school have to show their work? She said she offered some advice to Sullivan ahead of her hearing: Be herself. Be respectful. Dont let the other side get you off your game. Sullivan conceded some nervousness before the hearing, especially after filings from the school districts lawyers cited a slew of legal precedents and were peppered with terminology she did not know. But overall, she was confident. I have all the evidence, she said. I have all the facts. And no one knows it as well as I know it. All sorts of cases land in the 394th District Court, whose jurisdiction covers five counties roughly equivalent in size to the country's nine smallest states combined. The court hears criminal cases, divorce proceedings, and now a fight over high school grading. Judge Roy B. Ferguson has a reputation for taking the judicial medley in stride. His courtroom had a flash of viral fame in February when a video clip of a lawyer trapped behind a filter that made him appear to be a fuzzy white kitten in a Zoom hearing boomeranged around the internet. (Im not a cat, the lawyer said.) Ferguson found the humor in it. He added a reference to the unlikely episode to the courts website and accepted an invitation to discuss it at a symposium on remote judicial hearings in Poland. In a recent criminal proceeding, when a lawyer apologized for audio complications, Ferguson replied, Youre not a cat, so youre one step ahead! With Sullivan, he was patient and explained procedure in a way he would not have to with a professional. When she asked a question that was too broad, he encouraged her to narrow the scope. (He often presides over high school mock trials, among them, the State of Texas v. Luke Skywalker.) Kelley Kalchthaler, a lawyer representing the school district, argued that Sullivan had not exhausted the districts grievance process. We dont think the court has jurisdiction over this case, she said, and all parties should be dismissed. She also raised objections to much of the evidence Sullivan wanted to include, contending that it was hearsay or questioning the relevance to the case. In several instances, Ferguson agreed. All right, Ms. Sullivan, are you ready to present evidence in support of your request? Ferguson said. You bear the burden here for this temporary injunction. Sullivan laid out her case. Its not an accurate reflection of my high school career, she said of her final transcript, so its already done irreparable damage. She wanted an independent audit of honor graduates grades. She did not get that on Friday. Ferguson ruled that the dispute needed to go through the school districts grievance process. Still, the case was not closed. If she was not pleased with the outcome, the judge told her, she could come back to court. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. 2021 The New York Times Company

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Rand Paul blamed pop star Richard Marx for threatening ...

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations top infectious disease expert, once again found himself embroiled in a heated back-and-forth with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) during a Tuesday Senate coronavirus hearing, this time over accusations that he funded a Wuhan lab to develop COVID-19.

Paul, who signaled on Monday that he was going to grill Fauci on the subject, alleged that gain-of-function research to mutate animal viruses to infect humans at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been funded by the National Institutes of Health, something that Fauci strongly disputed. With all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan institute, Bidens chief medical advisor said.

Paul, however, continued to suggest Fauci was personally involved in bioengineering and weaponizing COVID-19, prompting an exasperated Fauci to push back. I do not favor gain-of-function research in China. That is not correct, he said, eventually adding: You are saying things that are not correct!

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Dr. Fauci Clashes With Rand Paul on COVIDAgain