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.
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Question: The two on Thursday toured a Lowndes County neighborhood where residents say the sewage system regularly overflows into their yards and homes. They then held a town hall in Hayneville. Charlie Mae Holcombe, 70, of Hayneville, said heavy rains are always a sign of trouble. Holcombe described the problems she faced as Gore and Barber spoke with her in her driveway. She said the toilets in her house will begin to bubble as a sign the sewage system is about to backup, sometimes filling her yard — including the area around a child’s swing set — and her house with raw sewage. “They have had to come and pump it out of my yard with the pump truck,” Holcombe said. “It’s backing up, even in my bathtub. The sewage has run over all in the house.” Her home in Lowndes County is in an area that has been plagued by sewage problems and concerns about potential illness. “I have heard about it and seen pictures of it for a long time, but it was shocking to see it in person,” Gore said of the conditions he saw. Alabama’s Black Belt region gets its name for the dark rich soil that once gave rise to cotton plantations. But the type of soil makes it difficult for traditional septic tanks, in which wastewater filters through the ground, to function properly, said Alabama State Health Officer Scott Harris in an interview with The Associated Press. The region’s intense poverty and inadequate municipal infrastructure contribute to the problem. “Sewage is typically handled at a local level... These counties haven’t always been able to do that,” Harris said. Catherine Coleman Flowers, an activist who has worked on rural environmental issues in the county for years, said wastewater sanitation problems are not limited to Alabama’s Black Belt. “It’s all over the country,” Flowers said, adding that climate change, with heavy rains and rising water tables, will make it worse. Holcombe said she’s not sure what it means, but when a red light flashes at a sewage treatment lagoon across the street, it is a reliable sign that her yard will flood. In addition to overwhelmed septic and sewage systems, some homes in the rural county are on “straight pipe” systems where sewage runs untreated from home to yard. Harris said a May survey of almost 200 Lowndes County households found that two to three percent of the households were on straight pipe systems. Holcombe’s home sits not far from the state highway where voting rights marchers walked from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Barber noted the proximity to the key sites of the civil rights movement and said the environmental issues are about the continued fight for justice. The town hall, held at a community center in Hayneville, focused on a number of environmental issues. Birmingham resident Jimmy Smith described living near a Superfund site in Birmingham. Others described concerns about landfills, straight pipe sewage systems and coal ash disposal in the Black Belt. At the town hall, Gore criticized what he described as the continued resistance from power companies and politicians to switching to renewable forms of energy such as solar energy. “It’s really a disgrace that this far Southern state with abundant sunshine is deprived of the advantages of the solar revolution being enjoyed all over the world,” Gore said.

Answer: Environmental justice issues focus of town hall.


Question: "With an increasing number of coronavirus cases across the country, President Donald Trump pointed to a metric that reflects more favorably on his administration’s pandemic response. On June 23, Trump tweeted, ""Cases up only because of our big number testing. Mortality rate way down!!!"" Cases up only because of our big number testing. Mortality rate way down!!! https://t.co/bKFmgOLEGZ His argument that tests are the only reason for rising cases is not accurate. But on the trend for mortality, Trump has a point. Epidemiologists told PolitiFact that due to wide variations in testing patterns, the data doesn’t offer a clear look at how likely someone is to die from the virus if they are infected with it. Gaps in testing leave too many undiagnosed cases to reliably determine a person’s likelihood of dying from the coronavirus, much less whether the likelihood of dying has risen or fallen over time. Instead, researchers say, the most solid metric for assessing Trump’s statement is the number of new coronavirus deaths reported per day. The number of daily deaths from coronavirus has been falling consistently since peaking in late April. In fact, even as infections have risen since early June, deaths have not. (The orange line in the following chart shows the seven-day rolling average of coronavirus deaths, which smooths out data variations.) At the peak in late April, more than 2,000 were dying from coronavirus on a typical day. In late June, it’s less than 600. That’s still a large number of deaths every day. All told, roughly 115,000 have died from COVID-19 to date. The White House told PolitiFact that the per-capita number of deaths in the United States is also lower than it is in several advanced industrialized countries in Europe that were hard hit by the virus. According to Johns Hopkins University, the number of coronavirus deaths per 100,000 population is about 37 for the United States, compared with 65 in the United Kingdom, 61 in Spain, and 57 in Italy. But other European countries have lower death rates for COVID-19 than the United States does, including the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark. So why are deaths falling? There may be several reasons, and for now, they’re somewhat speculative. One possibility is that the initial wave of infections disproportionately reached more patients with weaker immune systems, including those in nursing homes, or more vulnerable Americans who hadn’t yet taken up effective social distancing. By contrast, more recent waves of infections may be reaching younger and healthier people who are better able to survive an infection. Another possibility is that we’re ""getting better at treatment and keeping people alive,"" said Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University’s College of Public Health. Still, epidemiologists caution that deaths are a lagging indicator. The disease often takes two to three weeks to run its course, meaning that one day’s crop of new infections tends to drive the deaths that occur two to three weeks later. ""We might not expect an increase in the death rate until approximately 21 days from when we started to see an increase in cases,"" said Brooke Nichols, an infectious disease modeler at the Boston University School of Public Health. So far, the age breakdown for deaths has been fairly consistent — people older than 65 accounted for 81% of coronavirus deaths at the mortality peak in mid-April, and that age group still accounted for 82% of in mid-July, a time when the total number of deaths had fallen significantly, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since we’re about two weeks into the national rise in infections, scientists will be watching to see if deaths start increasing a week from now. Trump said that mortality from coronavirus is ""way down."" This is one of the few coronavirus measurements that Trump can point to with optimism. The number of deaths has remained substantial, at a bit below 600 per day by mid-to-late June, but that’s more than two-thirds lower than the peak of about 2,000 daily deaths in late April. The number of coronavirus deaths per day has continued to fall in June even as the number of cases has risen. Trump’s statement is accurate for now, though it’s too soon to know whether the recent rise in new cases will produce an uptick in deaths by early July."

Answer: As of June 23, the COVID-19 death rate is “way down.”


Question: The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency added the lakes, rivers and streams to its draft list of “impaired waters” that will go to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The 3,416 waterways represent 56% of the state’s waters. The list has been steadily growing over the past decade as researchers evaluate more waterways across the state annually. The popular stretch of the St. Croix River between Taylors Falls and Stillwater, which forms part of Minnesota’s border with Wisconsin, made the proposed updated list because of high phosphorous levels. The stretch includes Minnesota’s William O’Brien State Park and rugged bluffs. “We are very disappointed to see this section of the St. Croix River is proposed to be listed as impaired,” said Deb Ryun, executive director of the St. Croix River Association. “But this potential impairment designation is a reminder that continual work and public action will be necessary to preserve and protect the … St. Croix we all know and love.” The St. Croix was one of the first rivers designated under the national Wild and Scenic Rivers program. The 20-mile stretch from Stillwater south to Prescott, Wisconsin, made the impaired list in 2008 due to excess phosphorus. Most phosphorus, which spurs algae growth, comes from runoff from agricultural or urban areas. Phosphorus levels in the St. Croix actually have been decreasing in recent years due to better controls on wastewater treatment plants and better farming and forestry practices. Julie Galonska, superintendent of the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, challenged the idea that the river is deteriorating. She characterized the impairment as an “administrative twist” that resulted from new standards the MPCA recently adopted, not a big increase in pollution. Miranda Nichols, the MPCA’s impaired-waters list coordinator, said that the newly designated stretch had not previously been evaluated for nutrients and algae under the new standards. Although the section of the St. Croix north of Stillwater made Minnesota’s list, it won’t be on Wisconsin’s, Nichols said. Each state sets its own water-quality standards, and Wisconsin has a less stringent phosphorus standard — 90 micrograms per liter compared to Minnesota’s 40, she said. Lakes, rivers and streams on Minnesota’s impaired list have a range of problems, including excess mercury, bacteria, phosphorus, nitrate and other pollutants, as well as struggling fish and insect populations. About one-third of Minnesota’s waterways are considered impaired for recreational use because of high bacteria in streams and phosphorus in lakes. The public has until Jan. 14 to comment on the draft list. Public meetings are planned around the state in December. The MPCA plans to submit the list to the EPA by April 1.

Answer:
Part of St. Croix River makes Minnesota impaired waters list.