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.

Input: Consider Input: 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

Output: The U.S. Postal Service has advised people hoping to vote by mail to request the required envelopes by October 20 2020.


Input: Consider Input: Trump even suggested Thursday that the release could have been intentional. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the clearinghouse for the web of U.S. spy agencies, said it had ruled out the virus being man-made but was still investigating the precise source of the global pandemic, which has killed more than 220,000 people worldwide. Though scientists suggest the likeliest origin of the pandemic remains natural, that it spread from an infected animal to a human, Trump claimed to have seen evidence to support the theory that the origin was an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, the epicenter of the Chinese outbreak. He said the U.S. now “is finding how it came out.” “It’s a terrible thing that happened,” the president said. “Whether they made a mistake or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one, or did somebody do something on purpose.” The intel statement said the federal agencies concur “with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” “The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” In recent days the Trump administration has sharpened its rhetoric on China, accusing the geopolitical foe and vital trading partner of failing to act swiftly enough to sound the alarm about the outbreak or to stop the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. U.S. officials have said the Chinese government should “pay a price” for its handling of the pandemic. This all comes as the pace of Trump’s own original response continues to come under scrutiny, questioned as too meager and too slow. Earlier Thursday, before Trump’s comments, the Chinese government said that any claims that the coronavirus was released from a laboratory are “unfounded and purely fabricated out of nothing.” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang cited the institute’s director, Yuan Zhiming, as saying the lab strictly implements bio-security procedures that would prevent the release of any pathogen. “I would like to point out again that the origin of the virus is a complex scientific issue, and it should be studied by scientists and professionals,” Geng said. He also criticized those in the U.S. who say China should be held accountable for the global pandemic, saying they should spend their time on “better controlling the epidemic situation at home.” At the White House, Trump repeatedly blamed China for its handling of the outbreak, criticizing the country for restricting domestic travel to slow the virus but not international travel to keep it from spreading abroad. “Certainly it could have been stopped,” Trump said during an event in the East Room on his administration’s efforts to aid seniors during the outbreak. “They either couldn’t do it from a competence standpoint, or they let it spread.” “It got loose, let’s say, and they could have capped it.” Earlier this month, Trump addressed the lab theory saying, “More and more, we’re hearing the story.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added at the time, “The mere fact that we don’t know the answers — that China hasn’t shared the answers — I think is very, very telling.” Pompeo also pressed China to let outside experts into the lab “so that we can determine precisely where this virus began.” While Trump and Pompeo have made their feelings clear, a U.S. intelligence official disputed the notion that there was pressure on agencies to bolster a particular theory. The intelligence official was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue and spoke only on condition of anonymity. Scientists say the virus arose naturally in bats. Even so, Pompeo and others have pointed fingers at an institute that is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It has done groundbreaking research tracing the likely origins of the SARS virus, finding new bat viruses and discovering how they could jump to people. “We know that there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a handful of miles away from where the wet market was,” Pompeo said two weeks ago. The institute has an address 8 miles, or 13 kilometers, from the market that is considered a possible source. U.S. officials say the American Embassy in Beijing flagged concerns about potential safety issues at the lab in Wuhan in 2018, but they have yet to find any evidence the virus originated there nearly two years later. Scientists studying the virus for months have made clear they believe it wasn’t man-made but are still working to determine a point at which it may have jumped from animals to humans. Early attention focused on the live-animal market in Wuhan where the first cases were reported in December. But the first person identified with the disease had no known connection to that market. Kristian Andersen, who studies the virus at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, puts the odds of it being accidentally released by the Wuhan lab at “a million to one,” far less likely than an infection in nature. But virus expert David O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said he thinks too little is known to rule out any source, except the idea the virus was man-made. Finding the source is important, he said, because it may harbor the next pandemic virus. The U.S. was providing funding to the Wuhan lab for its research on coronaviruses, Michael Morell, former acting director and deputy director of the CIA, said Thursday. He said State Department cables indicate that there have been concerns in past years among U.S. officials about the safety protocols at that lab. If the virus did escape from a Chinese lab, it not only reflects negatively on China but also on the United States for providing research funding to a lab that has safety concerns, Morell said during an online forum hosted by the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security at George Mason University. “So if it did escape, we’re all in this together,” Morell said. “This is not a gotcha for China. This is a gotcha for both of us.” ___ Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann in Washington and Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

Output: Trump speculates that China released virus in lab ‘mistake’.


Input: Consider Input: The World Health Organization on Wednesday made the emergency declaration for the year-old outbreak, a rare move that usually leads to more global attention and aid. More than 1,600 people have died in what has become the second-worst Ebola outbreak in history. Health experts worry about what would happen if Ebola reaches South Sudan as the shattered nation tries to recover from a five-year civil war that killed nearly 400,000 people and displaced millions. Many health facilities were badly damaged or destroyed, and unrest continues in parts of the country despite a fragile peace deal signed in September. Last month a 41-year-old woman was discovered with Ebola in northeastern Congo, just 70 kilometers (43 miles) from South Sudan. She had traveled 500 kilometers from Beni, the epicenter of the outbreak, despite having been exposed to the virus and warned not to travel. South Sudan has sent a health team to strengthen surveillance at one of its busiest border posts, Kaya in Central Equatoria state, near where the woman’s case was confirmed. Hers was the closest confirmed case to South Sudan since this outbreak was declared. “The risk of cases of Ebola coming across the border into South Sudan is very high,” said Sudhir Bunga, South Sudan country director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “A person who comes into contact with a confirmed case of Ebola in (Congo) could travel to South Sudan, or any neighboring country, undetected during the 21-day incubation period and spread the disease once contagious.” That recently happened in neighboring Uganda, a more stable country with a more developed health system and experience with past Ebola outbreaks, as millions of people flow across borders in the densely populated region. Three people died in Uganda before other family members were taken back to Congo for treatment and Ugandan officials quickly declared the country was again free of the disease. Ebola’s spread into South Sudan would pose more of a challenge. Even though Ebola preparedness, including vaccinations for some health workers, began several months ago the current phase of the country’s $12 million response plan is just 36% funded, according to a report this month by the country’s health ministry. Fighting in places such as Central Equatoria has hampered efforts to prepare for Ebola. The United Nations’ migration agency manages 15 screening sites along the border but three others have yet to be established in part because of access challenges. Many South Sudan communities lack the basic resources to respond to one of the world’s most notorious diseases. The phone network in Central Equatoria is limited, meaning most people cannot call the emergency help line. Many hospitals don’t have staff trained to deal with the virus or the isolation wards needed to control its spread. The country is about 60% ready to deal with a potential Ebola outbreak, Richard Lako with South Sudan’s national Ebola task force has told The Associated Press. But he expressed concern about the border: “There are forest areas between communities in South Sudan and the Congo and these people can’t be screened from the other side. It’s a big worry if those people sneak in and we have a case. It’ll take us time to get in and control the issue.” South Sudan’s prevention efforts include educating communities to dispel myths about Ebola that have posed a major challenge for disease responders in Congo. Health workers in South Sudan’s border towns are going door-to-door trying to inform people, with support from WHO and people who responded to West Africa’s devastating outbreak in 2014-2016 that killed more than 11,000 people. At one animated training session earlier this year in an army barracks outside Yei, a major city in western South Sudan near the Congo border, two U.N. staffers playfully bumped elbows, showing how to greet others without shaking hands. Ebola is spread via close contact with bodily fluids of those infected. “Don’t touch each other, don’t play with saliva, yours or someone else’s,” a WHO staffer from Sierra Leone said. This month diplomats and other officials made a special visit to Yei, one of the hardest-hit cities during South Sudan’s civil war, to observe Ebola preparations. “It is really the most important place in South Sudan right now,” U.S. Ambassador Thomas Hushek said, according to the U.N. mission in South Sudan. “This is where we are most worried about what might happen.” ___ Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa


Output: War-weakened South Sudan tries to prepare for Ebola.