TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: He’s not sure when the second-year starter will be healthy enough to be cleared to play. Allen was placed in the NFL’s concussion protocol after taking a helmet-to-helmet hit by Patriots defensive back Jonathan Jones in the opening minute of the fourth quarter of a 16-10 loss to New England on Sunday. Putting aside the three interceptions Allen threw, McDermott’s biggest question was why Jones wasn’t ejected. “There’s no room in football for that,” McDermott said. “I thought he should have been thrown out. But other than that, I’m not going to get into that. That’s for the league to get into.” The hit occurred when Allen scrambled out of the pocket and burst through a hole up the middle while facing third-and-8 at the New England 45. He gained 7 yards before Jones closed in on him, lowered his helmet and struck the quarterback in the crown of his helmet. Jones was flagged for a personal foul for unnecessary roughness. Allen lay on the field for several minutes before hopping up on his own. He was briefly evaluated on the sideline before being escorted up the tunnel. Allen was spotted in the locker room chatting with teammates following the game. NFL officiating chief Al Riveron told a pool reporter the decision to not eject Jones came because the hit did not rise to the level of the league standard for disqualification. “There was a foul called and obviously the penalty stood, but we did not feel this contact rose to that level,” Riveron said, who also noted Jones was turning his head just before hitting Allen. Bills safety Micah Hyde questioned the official’s judgment saying he or any of his teammates would have been ejected for a similar hit on New England’s Tom Brady. “That’s our quarterback. We ride or die with him,” Hyde said. “To see that happen, Josh didn’t slide, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter if you’re a running back, you can’t head to the head.” Jones defended the hit saying it was never his intent to hurt Allen. “No malice or intent. Just a part of football,” Jones said. “We’re just running around playing football. I hope he’s OK. I’m going to check on him.” Allen finished going 13 of 28 for 153 yards, and scored on a 1-yard touchdown dive. Allen’s uncertain status leaves Buffalo with veteran backup Matt Barkley the only quarterback on the active roster in preparing to play at Tennessee next weekend. Buffalo then enters its bye week. The loss prevented Buffalo (3-1) from getting off to its first 4-0 start since 2008. Though the Bills defense held Brady in check, their offense was busy coughing up the ball at critical moments for the third time in four games. Allen threw three interceptions, two of which translated into a touchdown and a field goal. Punter Corey Bojorquez also had a punt blocked by J.C. Jackson, which led to Matthew Slater returning it 11 yards for a touchdown to put the Patriots up 13-0 in the first quarter. McDermott was unhappy with Allen’s continuing string of committing turnovers. He’s now thrown six interceptions and lost two fumbles in four starts this season. “He’s a young quarterback and sometimes they have to learn those lessons. Those are hard lessons and we have to continue to coach it up,” McDermott said. The game was decided on Buffalo’s fourth turnover with 1:27 left. Facing third-and-9 on the New England 39, Barkley was pressured by linebacker Kyle Van Noy, who got his hand on the quarterback’s chest. That forced Barkley to throw the ball up into the air, and have it easily picked off by Jamie Collins. The loss spoiled a stout effort by a Bills defense which limited the Patriots to just 11 first downs and 224 yards. Brady finished 18 of 39 for 150 yards and an interception. He was picked off by Hyde in the end zone on third-and-goal from the 2 in the second quarter. Brady’s 45.9 passer rating was the sixth lowest of his career and lowest since finishing with a 34 rating in a 27-20 loss to Indianapolis on Nov. 5, 2006. Barkley lamented how the Bills let the Patriots off the hook. “Especially with the way our defense played and where we had the ball at the end of the game, it’s tough,” Barkley said. “This is a tough one.” ___ More AP NFL: https://apnews.com/NFL and https://twitter.com/AP_NFL

SOLUTION: Bills fall to Pats, and lose QB Josh Allen to head injury.

PROBLEM: The Health Department said Wednesday that different variations of the virus are circulating in different parts of the state. The agency says 21 pneumonia and flu deaths have been reported so far this season. Last season, 237 New Mexicans died of pneumonia and/or influenza. Symptoms may include rapid onset of illness with fever, cough, sore throat, headache and/or muscle aches. New Mexico Health Secretary Kathyleen Kunkel says with the holidays approaching, it’s important that people take preventive measures such as getting vaccinated, covering coughs and staying home when sick. Officials say the peak of the flu season is still to come.

SOLUTION: Health officials: Flu activity widespread in New Mexico.

PROBLEM: The invention of the shopping cart during the Dirty Thirties altered how consumers shopped for groceries by removing the weight of accumulated goods from the equation. Thanks to the new wheeled assistance, those looking to reprovision could shop longer and for greater quantities than in the days when prospective purchases were all toted by hand. But the newfangled gadgets also created yet another common field upon which harmful bacteria and viruses could be easily passed from one person to another, because the handles of shopping carts are grasped by a great many people day in and day out. And, of that horde of shoppers, some will undoubtedly be carrying some nasty bugs on their unwashed hands. Yet, just as we rarely think about giving our purses, briefcases, and backpacks a good scrub-down, so do shopping carts fly under our germ awareness radar. The very folks that fuss with disposable toilet seat covers often won’t think twice about manhandling a grocery cart around a store for half an hour, even though the surface they’re hanging onto so fiercely for that interval has likely been coughed on, sneezed on, and grasped by shoppers who’d just finished handling packages of raw chicken and meat, or who just weren’t the sort to wash their hands all that often. As for the fold-out child’s seat found in most carts, even though it is routinely graced by the diapered bottoms of infants, it remains the cart’s transport region of choice for fruits and vegetables, items that are often eaten uncooked or unwashed. According to a four-year study conducted by the University of Arizona’s Environmental Research Lab and sponsored by Clorox, grocery carts are veritable petri dishes teeming with human saliva, mucus, urine, fecal matter, as well as the blood and juices from raw meat. Swabs taken from the handles and child seats of 36 grocery carts in San Francisco, Chicago, Tucson, and Tampa showed these common surfaces to rank third on the list of nastiest public items to touch, with only playground equipment and the armrests on public transportation producing more disgusting results. In terms of playing host to germs and bacteria, the carts are far worse than public bathrooms, which at least are cleaned more often. Bacteria and viruses such as E.coli, staphylococcus, salmonella, and influenza can live on grocery carts, a sorry fact most shoppers are blissfully unaware of. There are efforts afoot to render these surfaces less germ-laden. In March 2007, a bill (A4109) was introduced into the New Jersey State Assembly calling for supermarkets to provide shoppers with sanitary wipes to clean off their carts. In February 2007, Arkansas passed its “Health-Conscious Shopper Act” (HB1040), which encourages businesses in that state to voluntarily provide consumers with sanitation wipes to use on the carts. Nice-Pak Products of Rockland County, New York, the company that enhanced your fried chicken eating experience with Wet-Naps, has devised a wipe specifically for use in sanitizing shopping cart handles and child seats. Its SaniCart is designed to remove salmonella, staphylococcus, and other germs from such surfaces. As of late 2005, more than 6,400 supermarkets were using them. Meanwhile, another system on the market focuses on cleaning the entire cart rather than just parts of it. PureCart is a sort of drive-through washer that sanitizes the whole contraption. It works by coating the carts with a safe mist of a peroxide-based disinfectant, the same solution used to clean dialysis machines and poultry processors. Critics of the various efforts to clean up the carts point out that a great many things routinely used by the public also harbor germs and viruses, therefore targeting the handles and child seats of shopping carts will not render the common world free of contagion. While it is true that which causes illness also lurks upon the latches of bathroom stall doors, elevator buttons, and stairwell handrails (to name just a few bacterial hot spots), those shared surfaces are generally handled relatively fleetingly compared to the interval the average person hangs onto the handle of a shopping cart or the length of time a leaky-diapered baby or a food item is left resting on the cart’s fold-out seat. Those looking for a less technological approach to staving off the nasties ferried about by their shopping buggies should attempt to fall into the habit of always washing their hands as soon as they return home from any retail foray and eschewing touching their faces or blowing their noses in the interim. In April 2007, the truth about the nasty state of shopping carts was bent to a hellish purpose when an e-mailed rumor about Hispanics polluting the wheeled conveyances with staph infections spread through Guntersville, Alabama. In that anonymous note, Dr. John Packard Jr., a local pediatrician, was falsely described as having advised a patient that her baby, along with twelve other children, had picked up the potentially deadly contagion from an infected cart at a local grocery store. The doctor was moreover reported to have said Hispanics had put it there, themselves being immune to that form of bacteria. Hispanics have no special immunity to staphylococcus. All the statements attributed to Dr. Packard were not his; they were the invention of the letter’s anonymous writer. As for the wave of illness that had supposedly felled thirteen children who had come into contact with the sickness-laden carts, Packard assured the community no such infection existed and that the alleged incidents never happened. Additional Information: Shared surfaces most favored by germs:

SOLUTION:
Handles of shopping carts are laden with germs.