Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis issued statements saying they will vote against Dourson to serve as head of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Environmentalists and Senate Democrats have vehemently opposed Dourson, a toxicologist with close ties to the chemical industry. That means only one more Republican “no” vote would likely be needed to torpedo his nomination. Moderate GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told reporters Thursday she is also leaning against supporting Dourson, but has not yet made a final decision. The White House and EPA did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday or Thursday. Despite the fact he hasn’t yet been confirmed by the Senate, Dourson has already been working at the agency as a senior adviser to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. The agency’s press office did not respond to emails seeking how much he is being paid. The Associated Press reported in September that Dourson has for years accepted payments for criticizing studies that raised concerns about the safety of his clients’ products, according to a review of financial records and his published work. Past corporate clients of Dourson and of a research group he ran include Dow Chemical Co., Koch Industries Inc. and Chevron Corp. His research has also been underwritten by industry trade and lobbying groups representing the makers of plastics, pesticides, processed foods and cigarettes. Burr and Tillis, both of whom are considered reliably pro-business conservatives, cited Dourson’s past work and worries among their home-state constituents about tainted drinking water in opposing his nomination. “Over the last several weeks, Senator Tillis has done his due diligence in reviewing Mr. Dourson’s body of work,” said a statement from Tillis’ office. “Senator Tillis still has serious concerns about his record and cannot support his nomination.” Marine veterans and their families blame decades-old contamination of wells at a North Carolina base with solvents and dry-cleaning chemicals for infant deaths and serious health problems that include cancer. More recently, concerns have been raised about undisclosed discharges of chemicals used to manufacture Teflon and GoreTex into the Cape Fear River, a source of municipal drinking water for Wilmington and other southeastern North Carolina communities. Dourson worked at the EPA for more than a decade, leaving in 1994 as the manager at a lab that assessed the health risks of exposure to chemicals. The following year, he founded Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, a private toxicity evaluation nonprofit organization that tests chemicals and produces reports on which chemicals are hazardous in what quantities. Dourson’s views toward industry are consistent with others Trump has selected as top federal regulators. Among them is Pruitt, who in March overruled the findings of his agency’s own scientists to reverse an effort to ban chlorpyrifos, one of the nation’s most widely used pesticides. Court records show Dourson and his work have often been called on when his corporate clients are seeking to fend off lawsuits. DuPont was accused of polluting a West Virginia town with Perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a chemical that the company’s internal tests had long ago concluded was toxic. Corporate officials discussed hiring Dourson as part of a strategy to defend themselves. Dourson led a team that found in 2002 that PFOA levels up to 150 parts per billion were safe, a level higher than was found in testing of 188 private wells and springs. That was also well above the 1 part per billion that Dupont’s own scientists had concluded could be considered safe years before. The EPA now says that only 70 parts per trillion of PFOA are acceptable — or only 0.05 percent of what Dourson’s team said was safe. DuPont and a former subsidiary, Chemours Co., later paid $761 million to settle 3,550 lawsuits stemming from its use of the chemical. Chemours is the company whose spills of a chemical called GenX, a replacement for PFOA, are now at issue in North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. “I will not be supporting the nomination of Michael Dourson,” said Burr, the state’s senior senator. “With his record and our state’s history of contamination at Camp Lejeune as well as the current GenX water issues in Wilmington, I am not confident he is the best choice for our country.” The stand was quickly praised by environmental advocacy groups that rarely find common ground with the two Tarheel Republicans. “No one who has spent decades arguing on behalf of the chemical industry for weaker safety standards should be charged with reviewing chemicals for the EPA,” said Scott Faber, a senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “It would be like putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department.” ___ Follow Associated Press environmental reporter Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck
Trump EPA nominee opposed by GOP senators from NC.

"The New England Patriots might wish this entire business of under-inflated footballs would vanish in a puff of smoke, but it’s a boon for physics teachers who have found themselves suddenly relevant in the world of sports. Patriots coach Bill Belichick, a self-declared non-scientist, held a pre-Super Bowl news conference where he attempted to explain why a football inflated indoors would lose pressure after being used outside. ""When the footballs are delivered to the officials' locker room, the officials were asked to inflate them to 12.5 pounds per square inch. What exactly they did, I don’t know,"" Belichick said. ""When the footballs go out on to the field into game conditions ...  That’s where the measurements would be different than what they are, possibly different, than what they are in a controlled environment."" Belichick said when Patriot staffers tested this, they found that the balls ""were down approximately one-and-a-half pounds per square inch."" There are too many unknowns to resolve Deflategate, as this flap is called. But we couldn't help but give Belichick's main assertion the PunditFact treatment. The question in this case is what physics tells us about Belichick’s point. Could conditions outside (basically temperature and humidity) bring down the pressure of a football by about 1.5 pounds per square inch? A quick recap The Patriots advanced to the Super Bowl on Jan. 18, 2015, by defeating the Indianapolis Colts 45-7. But by the next day, the most interesting number wasn’t the point spread, but the inflation pressure of the Patriots’ footballs. Under NFL rules, each team provides 12 balls, and about two hours before the game, an official verifies that they are inflated to the regulation pressure range of 12.5 to 13.5 pounds per square inch. At half-time, the NFL re-checked the Patriots’ footballs -- reportedly at the request of the Colts but there’s a bit of conflicting information on this -- and found 11 of the 12 were under inflated. By how much? That’s unclear. Some reports say by 2 pounds per square inch. Others say while one ball might have measured that low, the rest were only about 1 pound under. One other essential variable: The temperature on game day was around 50 degrees. No one knows the exact inside temperature. Most people assume it was about 70 degrees. Doing the math After Belichick spoke, ABC News turned to Bill Nye, the popular explainer of all things scientific, to assess the coach’s claim. ABC played up Nye's verdict that Belichick's words ""didn’t make any sense,"" but from the video, it sounds as though Nye was talking about Belichick's claim that rubbing the footballs would change the pressure, not the impact of temperature. CBS Sports relayed a tweet from another science luminary, physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson who also expressed skepticism. ""For the Patriots to blame a change in temperature for 15 percent lower-pressures, requires balls to be inflated with 125-degree air,"" Tyson wrote. CBS reported that ""Every 10 degree drop in temperature (F) results in about .2 PSI loss in a football."" According to CBS, that meant the weather would account for just a 0.4 pound of pressure loss, and tied that conclusion, loosely, to an Ohio State University physicist. We’ll get back to that CBS story (and its flaws) in a bit. On the other side of the ledger, USA Today interviewed Bowdoin College physics professor Dale Syphers who declared that a drop from room temperature in the 70s down to 40 degrees would reduce the pressure in a football by 1.3 pounds per square inch. The Daily Beast turned to the chair of the Physics Department at Boston College who said that with a 30 degree drop in temperature -- 75 down to 45 degrees -- you would expect the ball pressure to fall by by 1.54 pounds per square inch. Finally, the world of physics is divided between the theoretical physicists and the experimentalists. The physicists cited in the news worked with formulas. HeadSmart Labs, a private firm in Pittsburgh, tested actual footballs. It found that footballs inflated at 75 degrees, then cooled to 50 degrees lost 1.1 pounds of pressure. The lab took one more step. Since it was raining on game day, the staff dampened the balls. This led to a drop of an additional 0.7 pounds of pressure for a total of at least 1.8 pounds per square inch. The physics teachers come off the bench Enter Robert Hilborn of the American Association of Physics Teachers. The Harvard-trained physicist showed in detail how a law of physics, the ideal gas law, applied to the Patriots’ footballs. When a gas cools, it contracts. The ideal gas law helps us put numbers to that relationship between pressure and temperature. Math alert: We’re going to show you pretty much everything, so you can do it yourself at home. ""As almost every chemistry and physics student knows, the ideal gas law tells us that Pf = Pi (Tf/Ti),"" Hilborn wrote. The final pressure Pf equals the initial pressure Pi times the final temperature divided by the initial temperature Tf/Ti. Plugging in the numbers is simple, so long as you keep two things in mind. First, the pressure isn’t the pressure you see on your pressure gauge. It’s that amount plus the pressure of the atmosphere that’s all around you. It might feel counterintuitive, but when a football comes off the assembly line, before it's ever pumped up, it actually has an internal pressure that you wouldn't notice because it's the same as the pressure we always ignore. That's the pressure that comes from all those miles of air in our atmosphere pushing down on us. That pressure averages around 14.7 pounds per square inch. When you pump air into the football, you are adding pressure on top of the 14.7 that are already there. In Hilborn's math, you'll see he's added in the atmospheric pressure. The other key step is to measure the temperature in Celsius and count from absolute zero. That’s the Kelvin scale. Hilborn used a starting temperature of 70 degrees and a final temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit and a starting pressure of 12.5 pounds per square inch. ""Those numbers give us 27.2 psi for Pi, 294 K for Ti, and 283 K for Tf resulting in Pf = 26.2 psi for the total pressure and a corresponding gauge pressure of 11.5 psi, about 1 psi below the NFL lower limit."" In short, taking the balls outside would bring the pressure down 1 pound per square inch. Hilborn then accounted for the rain that day. Cooling the moist air inside the footballs would shed another 0.2 pounds per square inch. ""Combining the air temperature change effect with that of water vapor gives us a total of 1.2 psi, not too far from the figure of 1.4 psi given in one of the early NFL statements,"" Hilborn wrote. Hilborn’s results are pure math, and they are largely in line with the test results from the lab in Pittsburgh. The results in other news reports We were troubled by the CBS item that came up with a much lower number of 0.4 pounds per square inch due to a lower outdoor temperature. But when we called Prof. Michael Lisa, the Ohio State University physicist quoted in the CBS article, Lisa said, ""CBS got it wrong."" Lisa sent us this chart that you can download showing that for each 10 degrees drop in temperature, pressure drops 0.5 pounds. (The chart’s different lines show that the higher the starting pressure, the greater the impact of falling temperature.) We found that news reports that undercut the Patriots’ explanation used a high number for the loss of pressure. CBS said the footballs lost 2 pounds of pressure. Ditto for a Toronto Sun article. If it turns out that there really was a loss that large, then those arguments hold up. For the moment, we are simply assessing whether the physics back up what Belichick said and he used the 1.5 pound figure. Lisa also affirmed Hilborn’s analysis. ""That AAPT guy did a nice job,"" Lisa said. Nevertheless, Hilborn himself said no one should rush to judgment. ""A conservative conclusion is that temperature changes alone can account for much of the under-inflation,"" Hilborn wrote. ""But until more accurate information is available about the preparation of and measurement of the footballs’ air pressure, we should not assert that conclusion with a great deal of certainty."" The NFL is investigating and at some point, all the numbers might be known. Or not. Hilborn told PunditFact that the accuracy of the pressure gauges is unclear. One number that will be of interest is the starting pressure for the Colts’ footballs. It's possible they may have deflated as well, but stayed within the legal limits. Our ruling Belichick said that moving the footballs from indoors to outdoors could explain the loss of about 1.5 pounds per square inch of pressure. Experimental and mathematical results are in that ballpark. Lab tests said air temperature alone could bring down the pressure by 1.1 pounds. The ideal gas law predicted a 1 pound loss. The rain that day would explain at least another 0.2 pound shift and possibly as much as 0.7. We lack firm numbers on the actual pressure drop in the Patriots footballs, as well as precise information on the starting and ending temperatures. Within the limits of what the physics alone can tell us at this point, the math gets us pretty close to what Belichick said. With allowances for the uncertain data."
"Atmospheric conditions could push a football’s pressure ""down approximately one-and-a-half pounds per square inch."

When Senator John McCain passed away from cancer in his home state of Arizona in August 2018, a memorial service was held for him in the capital city of Phoenix, then his remains were transported to Washington, D.C., to lie in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Another memorial service was held for the late senator in Washington before he was laid to rest at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis. One of the more prominent elements of the news coverage surrounding John McCain’s death and funereal services was the “disrespect” that critics maintained President Donald Trump had shown towards the late senator, with whom Trump had feuded:  Leadership from two prominent veterans groups blasted White House officials for “disrespect” in their response to the death of former Arizona Sen. John McCain, insisting the Navy veteran deserved more national recognition. Flags at national buildings were lowered when McCain’s death was announced but raised just two days later, bucking a tradition of honoring well-known members of Congress for longer periods of time. President Donald Trump also did not issue an official proclamation marking McCain’s passing, instead writing a tweet that stated, “my deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!” AMVETS officials said McCain — “a war hero, twice a presidential contender, and a national treasure who devoted his entire adult life to protecting and improving the American way of life” — deserved more. “It’s outrageous that the White House would mark American hero John McCain’s death with a two-sentence tweet, making no mention of his heroic and inspiring life,” Joe Chenelly, AMVETS national executive director, said in a statement. “By lowering flags for not one second more than the bare minimum required by law, despite a long-standing tradition of lowering flags until the funeral, the White House is openly showcasing its blatant disrespect for Senator McCain’s many decades of service and sacrifice to our country as well as the service of all his fellow veterans.”  It was something of a surprise to many onlookers, then, to learn afterwards that McCain’s body had been flown to Washington on a U.S. government Boeing C-32A typically reserved for the use of the vice president or first lady — an act which would typically require the approval of the President himself. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, however, as President Trump had issued a statement days in advance (only after being pressured to do by intense public disapproval, critics maintained) accommodating the  family’s request by authorizing the use of military transport for Senator McCain’s remains:  Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain’s service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment. I have asked Vice President Mike Pence to offer an address at the ceremony honoring Senator McCain at the United States Capitol this Friday. At the request of the McCain family, I have also authorized military transportation of Senator McCain’s remains from Arizona to Washington, D.C., military pallbearers and band support, and a horse and caisson transport during the service at the United States Naval Academy. Finally, I have asked General John Kelly, Secretary James Mattis, and Ambassador John Bolton to represent my Administration at his services. Washington television station WUSA described the flight that carried John McCain to Washington for the last time: JOINT BASE ANDREWS, MD — Members of the National Guard loaded the flag-draped casket into the familiar state blue and white aircraft, a symbol of American power serving presidents, vice presidents and first ladies for 20 years. The aircraft normally designated “Air Force Two” carried John McCain and his family to Washington, D.C. as he made his final flight across the country. The plane arrived with clear airspace just before 8 p.m., as President Donald J. Trump held a campaign-style rally in a different time zone, 700 miles away. McCain’s Air Force Boeing C-32A is indeed equipped to carry the president on short-range trips, and is usually reserved for the vice president or first lady. McCain’s motorcade left Andrews for an undisclosed location, awaiting the casket’s procession to the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. The trip marked the first time McCain returned to the Washington area since he left for Arizona, a week before Christmas 2017.

"Senator John McCain's remains were carried to Washington, D.C., on a Boeing C-32A airplane commonly used as ""Air Force Two."