instruction:
Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.
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Paragraph: Amid increasing concern over the United States Postal Service’s efficiency leading up to the 2020 U.S. elections, a CBS News host’s tweet warned voters seeking to take part by mail.“USPS says you should give mail in ballots at least 14 days round trip,” Tony Dokoupil wrote on July 26 2020. “No guarantees. So if you plan to vote by mail, election day isn’t November 3rd. It’s October 20th. Or sooner. Don’t be one of the *tens of thousands* of people whose vote wasn’t counted in 2016.”. @USPS says you should give mail in ballots at least 14 days round trip. No guarantees.So if you plan to vote by mail, election day isn’t November 3rd.It’s October 20th.Or sooner.Don’t be one of the *tens of thousands* of people whose vote wasn’t counted in 2016.— Tony Dokoupil (@tonydokoupil) July 24, 2020The postal service has in fact made that statement to not only Dokoupil but other news organizations and reporters; the advisory appeared in a Washington Post story published on July 15 2020:Local elections offices are hiring temporary workers to process absentee ballots, and some local elections boards are adding options for voters to do curbside drop-offs of their mail ballots on Election Day.The Postal Service is also recommending that voters request their ballots at least 15 days before Election Day and mail their completed ballots at least one week before the due date.The advisory was also mentioned in a story republished on news sites for local Fox TV network affiliates on July 27 2020:“We recommend that jurisdictions immediately communicate and advise voters to request ballots at the earliest point allowable but no later than 15 days prior to election date,” USPS told FOX via email. “The Postal Service also recommends that voters contact local election officials for information about deadlines.”Dokoupil himself reported on the potential problem for mail-in ballots in a story for CBS This Morning; CBS created two batches of 100 mock mail-in ballots apiece from around several zip codes in Philadelphia and sent them to the same local P.O. box, which served as a stand-in for an actual election office.A week after sending his mock ballots from mailboxes around the city, Dokoupil went to retrieve them at the P.O. box to find that most of them were not inside. Postal staff later retrieved several of them, telling him that “they had them somewhere else.”However, Dokoupil did note that official mail-in ballots carry an official logo differentiating them from the regular mail CBS used for its reporting. According to the story:Out of the initial batch mailed a week earlier, 97 out of 100 votes had arrived. Three simulated persons, or 3 percent of voters, were effectively disenfranchised by mail by giving their ballots a week to arrive. In a close election, 3 percent could be pivotal.Four days after mailing the second batch of mock ballots, 21 percent of the votes hadn’t arrived.According to Postal Service recommendations, “voters should mail their return ballots at least one week prior to the due date.”However, nearly half of all states still allow voters to request ballots less than a week before the election.A USPS spokesperson, Martha Johnson, told us that the agency is asking both voters and election officials to be mindful of how long it takes postal workers to transport, process and deliver ballots as well as “the time that it takes for voters to consider and prepare their ballots, and the time that it takes for a ballot to be transported, processed, and delivered back to the election official.” The agency’s delivery standards, she said, have not changed. She also reiterated the agency’s guidance for requesting mail-in ballots:We recommend that customers who opt to vote through the U.S. Mail must understand their local jurisdiction’s requirements for timely submission of absentee ballots, including postmarking requirements. Voters must use First-Class Mail or an expedited level of service to return their completed ballots. In order to allow sufficient time for voters to receive, complete and return ballots via the mail, and to facilitate timely receipt of completed ballots by election officials, we strongly recommend that jurisdictions immediately communicate and advise voters to request ballots at the earliest point allowable but no later than 15 days prior to the election date. The Postal Service recommends that domestic, non-military voters mail their completed ballots back to the election officials at least one week prior to their state’s due date. The Postal Service also recommends that voters contact local election officials for information about deadlines.Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor for the advocacy group Democracy Fund, told CBS that her group estimated that between 80 million and 100 million United States voters would receive their ballots via mail in 2020. Prior to joining the non-profit organization, Patrick served on the Commissioner on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration under Barack Obama’s presidential administration.“States like Ohio, you can request your ballot on Saturday up until noon for Tuesday’s election,” said Patrick, who has also served as a former federal compliance officer for the elections department in Maricopa County, Arizona. “That is the worst possible thing. You are setting up the voters with false expectations, and you’re setting them up to fail.”A separate analysis published by NPR in July 2020 found that 65,000 absentee or mail-in ballots cast in primary elections until that point had been rejected because they arrived after the deadline.“That’s the sort of thing that makes me wary about what’s going to happen in November when we get an even larger influx of people who haven’t voted, or haven’t voted by mail in the past,” said Charles Stewart, a political scientist at the at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Obama himself added to the discussion about mail-in voting on July 28 2020, when he tweeted a graphic supplied by another group, Vote Save America, displaying the state-by-state deadlines for requesting a ballot. According to that graphic, the deadline for every state not exclusively voting by mail falls after the fifteen-day advisory issued by the U.S. Postal Service:The USPS told CBS in a statement:We employ a robust and proven process to ensure proper handling of all Election Mail, including ballots. This includes close coordination and partnerships with election officials at the local and state levels. As we anticipate that many voters may choose to use the mail to participate in the upcoming elections due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are conducting and will continue to proactively conduct outreach with state and local election officials and Secretaries of State so that they can make informed decisions and educate the public about what they can expect when using the mail to vote. As part of these outreach efforts, we will discuss our delivery processes and will consult with election officials about how they can design their mailings in a manner that comports with postal regulations, improves mailpiece visibility, and ensures efficient and cost-effective processing and delivery.Dokoupil’s story also followed reported concerns over the appointment of Louis DeJoy — a businessman and fundraiser for U.S. President Donald Trump — to oversee the USPS as Postmaster General in June 2020.“On the surface, there’s a real worry about cronyism and patronage and whether someone is being put into place to carry out an agenda,” American Postal Workers Union president Mark Dimondstein told the Post. “We hope that’s not the case.”The newspaper also reported:DeJoy told employees to leave mail behind at distribution centers if it delayed letter carriers from their routes, according to internal USPS documents obtained by The Washington Post and verified by the American Postal Workers Union and three people with knowledge of their contents, but who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.“If the plants run late, they will keep the mail for the next day,” according to a document titled, “New PMG’s [Postmaster General’s] expectations and plan.” Traditionally, postal workers are trained not to leave letters behind and to make multiple delivery trips to ensure timely distribution of letters and parcels.Trump himself has repeatedly claimed — falsely — that voting by mail is inherently suspect and vulnerable to fraud, to the point that Twitter flagged two of his tweets on the issue in May 2020 for containing “potentially misleading information.”Update, July 29 2020 9:19 a.m. PST: Updated with comment from the US Postal Service.Comments Claim: The U.S. Postal Service has advised people hoping to vote by mail to request the required envelopes by October 20 2020.
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Did the United States Postal Service Urge Mail-In Voters to Request Envelopes by October 20th?


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Paragraph: A recent count found 350 million purple sea urchins on one Oregon reef alone — more than a 10,000% increase since 2014. And in Northern California, 90% of the giant bull kelp forests have been devoured by the urchins, perhaps never to return. Vast “urchin barrens” — stretches of denuded seafloor dotted with nothing but hundreds of the spiny orbs — have spread to coastal Oregon, where kelp forests were once so thick it was impossible to navigate some areas by boat. The underwater annihilation is killing off important fisheries for red abalone and red sea urchins and creating such havoc that scientists in California are partnering with a private business to collect the over-abundant purple urchins and “ranch” them in a controlled environment for ultimate sale to a global seafood market. “We’re in uncharted territory,” said Scott Groth, a shellfish scientist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. “You can’t just go out and smash them. There’s too many. I don’t know what we can do.” The explosion of purple sea urchins is the latest symptom of a Pacific Northwest marine ecosystem that’s out of whack. Kelp has been struggling because of warmer-than-usual waters in the Pacific Ocean. And, in 2013, a mysterious disease began wiping out tens of millions of starfish, including a species called the sunflower sea star that is the only real predator of the ultra-hardy purple urchin. Around the same time, the purple urchins had two excellent breeding years — and with no predators, those gametes grew up and are now eating everything in sight. “You can imagine all of these small urchins growing up, each one of them looking for food, desperate for food. They’re literally starving out there,” said Steven Rumrill, lead shellfish expert at Oregon’s wildlife agency. “I’ve seen some big-scale fluctuations in the populations of sea stars and urchins, but never on this magnitude.” Scientists are not yet sure if climate change is responsible for the sea urchin explosion, but they suspect it plays a role in the cascade of events that allowed the purple urchins to boom. And kelp, already under siege from warming waters, is not as resilient as it once was, said Norah Eddy, an associate director at the Nature Conservancy California’s oceans program. “We’re going to see climate change as a big driver of changes in kelp forest as we move forward, and we are already seeing that,” said Eddy, who is leading an effort to use drones to map and monitor Northern California’s last remaining kelp forests. The devastation is also economic: Until now, red abalone and red sea urchins, a larger and meatier species of urchin, supported a thriving commercial fishery in both states. But 96% of red abalone have disappeared from California’s northern coast as the number of purple sea urchins increased six fold, according to a study released this week by the University of California, Davis. Last year, California closed its red abalone fishery, which poured an estimated $44 million into the coastal economy per year, and Oregon suspended permits for its 300 abalone divers for three years. The commercial harvest of red sea urchins in California and Oregon also has taken a massive hit. “That’s a huge economic loss for our small coastal communities,” said Cynthia Catton, a research associate with the University of California, Davis Bodega Marine Lab. “In California, there were 30,000 to 40,000 participants in (the abalone) fishery every year for decades, and for the first time ever that fishery had to close.” And while the purple urchins have eaten themselves into starvation as well, unlike other kelp-dependent creatures, the species can go into a dormant state, stop reproducing and live for years with no food. That means the only way to restore the kelp is to remove or destroy the purple urchins. Scientists estimate that in Oregon alone, it would take 15 to 20 years to remove all 100 million pounds (45 million kilograms) of purple urchins recently surveyed on just one large reef. While urchins are in starvation mode, the edible part — known as roe — shrivels, making them commercially worthless. Against this backdrop, conservationists, commercial urchin harvesters, scientists and private interests are coming together with an unusual plan: Pay underemployed red sea urchin divers to collect the shriveled, but living, purple sea urchins and transfer them to carefully tended urchin “ranches” to be fattened up for sale to seafood markets around the world. One company, Urchinomics, is already working on urchin ranching projects in Japan, Canada and California and sees a future where the overwhelming demand for wild urchin roe is replaced by a taste for human-raised purple urchins collected from the seafloor, allowing kelp forests to rebound. “We’re turning an ecological problem into an ecological opportunity and an economic opportunity,” said Brian Takeda, the Urchinomics CEO. “It’s the first time we’ve ever had an economic incentive to get these destructive urchins out of the water.” In Oregon, red urchin divers are a tiny artisanal collective, but they are also exploring ways to try to turn the glut of destructive purple urchins to their advantage. Oregon’s urchin fishery had a boom year last year, when red urchins were scarce in California but before their purple cousins had spread north. Now, they too are hurting. Rumrill, the shellfish expert from Oregon, supports efforts to harvest excess urchins but strikes a less optimistic note when it comes to saving the kelp. “That’s a promising technique. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that we’re going to solve this large-scale ecological problem, this literal perfect storm of events, by eating our way out,” he said. “It’s just too big a problem.” ___ Chea reported from Mendocino County, California. ___ Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccus . Claim: Swarm of sea urchins wreaks destruction on US West Coast.
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Tens of millions of voracious purple sea urchins that have already chomped their way through towering underwater kelp forests in California are spreading north to Oregon, sending the delicate marine ecosystem off the shore into such disarray that other critical species are starving to death.


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Paragraph: The young royals released 10 films Thursday as part of their “Heads Together” campaign to change the national conversation about mental health. The videos feature celebrities and members of the public talking about the breakthrough conversations that helped them come to terms with their mental health problems. The former England cricket captain Andrew Flintoff and former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, are among those featured speaking about their experiences with anxiety or depression. The royals said they hope the stigma surrounding mental health problems can be lifted. They urged people to talk more openly about these issues. “When you realize that mental health problems affect your friends, neighbors, children and spouses, the walls of judgment and prejudice around these issues begin to fall,” they said in a statement. Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity SANE, said public awareness campaigns are more powerful when the celebrities promoting them have personal experience with the issue being highlighted. “Princes William and Harry speak from their experience of loss and sorrow” she said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. The support of the young royals is important in raising awareness about mental health, she added. William and Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997, when the princes were 15 and 12 years old. The films can be viewed on the Heads Together website and YouTube page and are promoted on Facebook, Twitter and Google. Claim: Britain’s young royals promote conversation on mental health.
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Britain’s Prince William, his wife, Kate, and his brother Prince Harry are spearheading a campaign to encourage people to talk openly about mental health issues.