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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Question: Paragraph: Voters in both Western states approved ballot initiatives in 2012 allowing personal possession and use of marijuana by anyone aged 21 and or older for purposes of just getting high, though public consumption of pot remains illegal. In January the world’s first state-licensed retail marijuana outlets opened for business in Colorado, and stores in Washington are set to follow suit later this year. Both states are among 20 that have already removed criminal sanctions for medical use of marijuana. The federal government still classifies marijuana as an illegal narcotic, but the Obama administration has given states new leeway to experiment with legalized cannabis. In Denver’s Civic Center Park near the state capitol, revelers on Sunday gathered to hear music and listened to speakers during a weekend event that organizers billed as the “world’s largest 4/20 rally.”  The date of April 20, or 4/20, corresponds to the numerical code widely recognized within the cannabis subculture as a symbol for all things marijuana. Police officers standing by on the fringes of the Denver festival issued 63 citations on Sunday, most for smoking pot in public - a ticket that carries a fine of $150. About half as many were cited on Saturday, police said. At least eight individuals were taken to a detoxification facility for treatment during the two days, police said. Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson said officers have refrained from wading into the crowd to arrest violators, but instead were citing people who openly defied the public consumption ban. “Those ticketed were blatantly in violation of state law and city ordinances,” Jackson said. Organizers of the rally and city officials beefed up security at the event after three people were wounded by gunfire at last year’s rally. Separately, the Cannabis Cup, a trade show sponsored by High Times magazine, drew sold-out crowds over the weekend at a Denver convention venue. The two-day event featured marijuana sampling and workshops, such as how to open a pot shop, cultivation tips, and how to talk to children about weed, according to the event’s website. Rachel O’Bryan, spokeswoman for Smart Colorado, an organization that advocates for stricter enforcement of marijuana laws, said the cannabis industry needs to do more to police its own. “People are flouting the law by openly consuming,” she said. “We’re concerned about the message that sends to our kids.”  In Seattle, several hundred people who paid $15 a head crowded the cavernous interior of a former brewery where Rainier Beer was made for decades to attend a 4/20 gathering organized by sponsors of the city’s annual Hempfest rally. Reggae music played over loudspeakers and the air inside was thick with the sweet, skunky odor of cannabis. But no police were visible at the event, which organizers deliberately held on private space leased from the brewery owners in an industrial section of the city south of downtown. The gathering featured a workshop on how to roll a joint with an entire ounce (28 grams) of marijuana - the legal limit for personal possession in the state - as well as vendors selling pipes and other paraphernalia, and a blind-toke test in which participants tried to distinguish between different strains of pot by sampling them. Attendees ranged from middle-aged baby boomers to a younger crowd from the so-called millennial generation. A cheer from the crowd went up at precisely 4:20 p.m. local time, as many attendees milling about outside lit joints and pipes simultaneously, sending puffs of smoke into the air followed by raucous fits of coughing. One woman in the crowd accepted a joint handed her from a bearded bystander. “You look just like Jesus,” she exclaimed in an apparent reference to the event coinciding with Easter Sunday. “How does it feel to be risen?”  Doug Medina, 54, said he traveled hundreds of miles with his wife and daughter from Billings, Montana, to Seattle for the 4/20 weekend celebrations there. “It feels a little more open than it did five or 10 years ago,” he said while smoking a joint outside the brewery. Claim: Marijuana fans pack 4/20 events in Colorado, Washington state.

Answer: Thousands of marijuana enthusiasts gathered in Colorado and Washington state over the weekend for an annual celebration of cannabis culture with rallies, concerts and trade shows in the first two U.S. states to legalize recreational marijuana.


Question: Paragraph: "In a discussion on MSNBC's  Hardball  program about whether the government ought to consider prosecuting people involved in enhanced interrogation techniques used on some terror suspects, former U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Republican from California, argued that the issue really comes down to waterboarding. ""And,"" he said, ""waterboarding is not torture."" In fact, said Hunter, a Vietnam veteran and former candidate for president, ""We waterboard, incidentally, hundreds of our own military personnel. They waterboard themselves in training to toughen themselves up."" He added, ""The Geneva Convention .. .was analyzed by the lawyers in place, and they came to the conclusion, especially about waterboarding, because that's the primary thing, that, since we do it to our own soldiers, by the hundreds, incidentally, and it doesn't hurt them, and they — and it makes them tougher, and it doesn't hurt anybody — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gained weight after he was waterboarded — we decided that, since we do that to our own soldiers in training... we‘re not going to consider that torture. "" Hunter later challenged host Chris Matthews saying, ""But the point is, if we do it, are we torturing American soldiers? You have to answer yes if you consider waterboarding to be torture."" Matthews said the difference is that U.S. service people know they are in training. They know they aren't going to be killed. ""That captured person who is one of our enemies has no idea what we‘re doing when we submit him to water torture."" Said Hunter: ""If we use it with our own soldiers in training, as we do waterboarding, then it should be allowed with people who have killed thousands of Americans."" We decided to examine Hunter's claim about waterboarding our service personnel as part of their training and found that he is right. U.S. special operations troops have, in the past, sometimes used a form of waterboarding as part of survival exercises, called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training. The idea is to prepare them in the event they are ever captured and interrogated with such means. According to reports in the  New York Times  and  Vanity Fair,  the CIA adopted some of the interrogation techniques used on terror suspects from that SERE training, including the use of waterboarding. According to the  Vanity Fair  story, three-week SERE training for the U.S. soldiers included waterboarding, forced nudity, extreme temperatures, sexual and religious ridicule, agonizing stress positions, and starvation-level rations. The story quotes Michael Rolince, former section chief of the FBI's International Terrorism Operations: ""You're not going to die, but you think you are."" But while the techniques may have been derived from SERE training, a different, more intense brand of waterboarding was used on terror suspects, according to recently released CIA documents. According to a May 7, 2004, CIA Inspector General special report on interrogation techniques used on terror suspects, which has some parts redacted, ""OIG’s (Office of the Inspector General's) review of the videotapes revealed that the waterboard technique employed at (redacted) was different from the technique as described in the DoJ (Department of Justice) opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was in the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed. At the SERE School and in the DoJ opinion, the subject’s airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contest, the Agency interrogator (redacted) continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique differed from that used in SERE training and explained that the Agency’s technique is different because it is 'for real' and is more poignant and convincing."" The report also says the CIA's Office of Medical Services has characterized the SERE waterboarding as ""so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant."" The office said its frequency and intensity raised questions about whether it was effective or medically safe. So we think Hunter misleads a bit by equating waterboarding in training of military personnel with the technique used on terror suspects. According to the CIA inspector general's report, the technique used on the suspects was more powerful and convincing. And in the case of one terror suspect, it was used 183 times, often in rapid succession. So to argue the technique isn't torture because it is used on American servicemen as part of training ignores that it was not used in the same way. Still, Hunter is correct that the U.S. military has waterboarded servicemen as part of survival training. And so we rule his statement ." Claim: We waterboard, incidentally, hundreds of our own military personnel. They waterboard themselves in training to toughen themselves up.

Answer: Duncan Hunter says we have waterboarded our own military as part of training exercises


Question: Paragraph: "Deep in the May 2016 Texas Supreme Court ruling that upheld and critiqued the current school funding system is encouraging news about the performance of Texas students. On Page 58 of the majority opinion, Justice Don Willett (who subsequently showed up among individuals that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said he’d consider to succeed Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court) refers to a November 2005 decision by the court that required lawmakers to change the system. At the time of the West Orange-Cove II ruling, Willett writes, ""the percentage of students meeting the college-readiness standards of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board stood at 28% in English and 42% in math. Those figures stood at 65% and 66% in 2013,"" Willett continues. Did Texas high school graduates get so much more college-primed that fast? Best we could tell, the cited figures track with state test results tracked by the Texas Education Agency. Then again, as few as 26 percent of Texas high-school graduates lately show a readiness for college according to a couple of other respected metrics. Texas Success Initiative With help from Texas Education Agency officials, we found figures very close to what Willett presents in the 2016 majority opinion. According to the agency, in 2004, 29 percent of students fulfilled college readiness standards for English language arts and 43 percent did so for math while in 2013, 65 percent of students met readiness standards for English, 66 percent for math. With rare exception, according to the agency, the percentage of students fulfilling each readiness standard escalated steadily through the intervening years. And most recently, in 2014, 68 percent of students met the English readiness standards with 67 percent doing so in math, the agency says. We wondered what the percentages meant. They reflect student test results, TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson advised, in keeping with a state law that requires college and universities to assess incoming high school graduates for their readiness to take college courses and offer remedial instruction as needed. Under the program, called the Texas Success Initiative, the TEA has reported on the readiness of high-school students by calculating the share of students who meet related expectations on the state-mandated English language arts and math 11th grade/exit-level Texas Assessment of Knowledge & Skills. Asked if perhaps standards loosened between 2004 and 2013, Culbertson pointed out by email that in each of the years, a student classified as ready for college needed ""scale scores of 2200"" on each relevant TAKS including a 3 (out of a possible 4) on the writing portion of the English test. To our inquiry, Shannon Housson, TEA director of performance reporting, said by phone the 124 percent and 54 percent respective improvements in students meeting the readiness standards over nine years reflected schools and students adjusting to and, in some cases, mastering the English and math TAKS, which were given from 2003 through 2011 before yielding to the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. At its inception, Housson said, the TAKS added up to a ""significant increase in rigor"" for students accustomed to the previous state-mandated exams. ""I remember the angst in the schools,"" Housson said, as teachers and others came to terms with the new focus on ""higher-order thinking skills"" linked to the state-set curriculum rather than simply academic skills. Finally, Willett’s citation of the 2005 court decision on school finance led us to look back at how that opinion by Justice Nathan Hecht presented the percentages of students meeting the readiness standards. In the ruling, Hecht showed results for all students plus break-outs suggesting considerable performance lags among African American, Hispanic and Limited English Proficient students. Results for 2013 suggest such gaps have closed quite a bit except among students the state deems English Language Learners. Texas Students With Test Scores Suggesting College Readiness, 2004 and 2013 Subject All Students African-American Hispanic White LEP/ELL* English (2004) 29% 19% 20% 36% 3% Math (2004) 43% 21% 29% 56% 13% English (2013) 65% 55% 60% 74% 14% Math (2013) 61% 51% 55% 71% 12% *Limited English Proficient/English Language Learners SAT, ACT scores There are other ways to gauge college readiness. In 2014, nearly 34 percent of the state’s students who took the pre-college SAT (or 32 percent of public school students taking the test) did well enough to demonstrate a readiness for college work without remediation, according to the College Board, which associates an SAT score of 1550 out of 2400 with a 65 percent probability of obtaining a first-year college GPA of B- or higher. The same year, among 60 percent of 116,147 Texas high school graduates to take the ACT scored well enough to show a readiness for college English, the Iowa-based group says, with 47 percent doing so in math and 36 percent demonstrating readiness in science--and only 26 percent clearing all the tests’ college-readiness benchmarks. ACT says its readiness benchmarks are ""scores on the ACT subject-area tests that represent the level of achievement required for students to have a 50% chance of obtaining a B or higher or about a 75% chance of obtaining a C or higher in corresponding credit-bearing first-year college courses."" Our ruling Willett, writing for the court majority, said that before 2005, ""the percentage of"" Texas high-school students meeting the coordinating board’s college readiness standards ""stood at 28% in English and 42% in math. Those figures stood at 65% and 66% in 2013."" This statement doesn’t acknowledge readiness metrics such as ACT or SAT scores. But it almost perfectly reflects the state’s tallies of high school graduates in 2004 and 2013 who scored high enough on state English and math tests to be considered college-ready. – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing." Claim: "Before 2005, ""the percentage of"" Texas high school ""students meeting the college readiness standards of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board stood at 28% in English and 42% in math. Those figures stood at 65% and 66% in 2013."

Answer:
"Willett, writing for the court majority, said that before 2005, ""the percentage of"" Texas high-school students meeting the coordinating board’s college readiness standards ""stood at 28% in English and 42% in math. Those figures stood at 65% and 66% in 2013."" This statement doesn’t acknowledge readiness metrics such as ACT or SAT scores. But it almost perfectly reflects the state’s tallies of high school graduates in 2004 and 2013 who scored high enough on state English and math tests to be considered college-ready."