UPDATE | Biden orders flags lowered in light of mass shooting in California rail yard

UPDATE | Officers responding to San Jose shooting did not kill gunman, police say

🤨 David Chipman, Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, refused to say during a Senate Judiciary hearing whether Hunter Biden should be prosecuted for an illegal firearms purchase in 2018.

🗣 “If I’m confirmed as ATF director, it will be my responsibility to enforce all federal laws without political favor,” Chipman said without specifically addressing the Biden question. “I do not know any factors in this particular case, but I am familiar with the press account of it.”

❗️ Biden to meet Queen Elizabeth on June 11 in first trip abroad since assuming office, report says

While some are silent about the real number of those who violated the Capitol, others have compared this event to a terrorist attack.

⚠️ HuffPost’s senior White House correspondent S.V. Dáte called the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol “1000 percent worse” than the 9/11 attack

🖋 Following the example of the governor of Alabama, Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp has issued an executive order that bans requiring a COVID-19 passport to enter the state.

✍️ The order also prohibits state agencies and properties and state service providers from requiring such a passport. In addition, it bans the use of data from the Georgia Registry of Immunization Transactions and Services from being used in a COVID-19 passport program

🇺🇸🇪🇬US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has expressed gratitude to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi for his mediation efforts in the recent conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip-based Hamas Islamist movement, US Department of State's spokesperson Ned Price said.

🍔 A McDonald’s restaurant in Illinois is offering a “free iPhone” as an incentive for new hires, a move that has prompted netizens to lash out at the global company.

😁 Imagine working there for 6 months just to get an iPhone 5c as a bonus

🇨🇳🇺🇸Chinese Vice Premier Liu He and US trade representative Katherine Tai discussed on Thursday the development of the bilateral trade and agreed to maintain further contacts, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce says.

Check out our brief summary of some of the latest news:

▪️An 11-hour standoff in Texas ended early Thursday with a suspect being taken into custody and three police officers being wounded.

▪️Joe Biden has told the nation's spy agencies to redouble their efforts to obtain more info on the origins of COVID.

▪️Ex-Pentagon official who investigated UFO data has accused DoD of discrediting him.

▪️A woman in Ohio has won the $1 million jackpot in the state's “Vax-a-Million” lottery.

▪️Facebook will no longer take down posts containing claims that COVID-19 is a “man-made or manufactured” virus.

💻 The US has unveiled new cybersecurity requirements for pipelines.

Now, pipeline owners and operators have to report both confirmed and potential cybersecurity incidents to the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Companies will also be required to designate a cybersecurity coordinator who is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

What else can be done to avoid the fate of the Colonial Pipeline?

💵 Joe Biden is set to propose a $6 trillion budget for the 2022 fiscal year, according to a report in the NYT. This is expected to pay for upgrading infrastructure and expanding the social security net. He is also proposing raising funds for national defense.

If approved, the budget would take the US to its highest sustained levels of federal spending since the Second World War.

❗️BREAKING: Biden promises to release report on COVID origins in full unless there's something he's not aware of

Biden earlier revealed that the US intelligence community was divided on the matter of COVID-19’s origins. He ordered the agencies to sort the matter out and come up with a final report in 90 days.

❗️BREAKING: Office of Director of National Intelligence says it does not know exact origins of COVID-19 virus – statement

The exact origins of the coronavirus infection are presently unknown, but two most likely scenarios are that the pathogen either emerged naturally through animal transmission or was a result of a lab leak, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement on Thursday.

The FBI has released posters in Hebrew and Yiddish in New York.

In doing so, the bureau is trying to encourage ethnic communities to report hate crimes and information they have about anti-Semitic incidents, according to William F Sweeney Jr, assistant director in charge of the agency’s New York Field Office.

⚡️The Biden administration has informed Russia that it will not rejoin the Open Skies Treaty, the Associated Press reported, citing officials. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov about the decision on Thursday, according to the report.

🇮🇷 🇺🇸 Washington will “carefully review” its sanctions regime against Iranian oil exports if Tehran returns to the 2015 nuclear agreement, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Thursday.

Talks on the Iran nuclear deal have been ongoing since early April. The negotiations are expected to wrap up by the end of May.

Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

Breaking News! Massive numbers of dead people “voted” in the 2020 Presidential Election, far greater than anyone has known or seen before. Some of these “dead people” even applied for an application to vote. This is just one of the many fraudulent aspects of the 2020 Presidential Election. People are just now beginning to understand!

⛔️ Six House Republicans and one Libertarian were stripped of their committee duties after entering the Augusta building without masks, despite the fact that the governor, Janet Mills, had canceled the state's mask mandate.

🗣 "We replaced them with Democrats because I'm not going to keep replacing Republicans on committees because they continue to defy the policy," Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau said.

🤔 A rather convenient way of putting more Democrats on the committees of the House of Representatives, don't you think?