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: The health department said at least 16 patients admitted to the 210-bed Mount Carmel Grove City hospital after its opening April 28 have been diagnosed with Legionnaires’. The disease is a severe form of pneumonia that’s caused by inhaling tiny water droplets containing the legionella bacteria. One of the patients, a 75-year-old woman, died. Hospital president Sean McKibben said in a statement Thursday that the disease outbreak happened because of inadequate disinfection of the hot water system prior to the hospital’s opening. He said a permanent supplemental disinfection system with constant monitoring and controls has been installed. ___ Information from: The Columbus Dispatch, http://www.dispatch.com

SOLUTION: Outbreak of Legionnaire’s blamed on hot water system.

PROBLEM: As he did following last month’s Las Vegas massacre of 58 people, Trump resisted any discussion of gun control during a news conference in Tokyo, where he was beginning his first presidential trip to Asia. Instead, Trump characterized the shooting as a “mental health problem at the highest level.” Yet White House officials said Trump is unlikely to call for a specific policy response, as he did after last week’s Islamic State group-inspired truck attack, which killed eight people in New York City. Devin Kelley, the Texas gunman, was discharged from the Air Force several years ago for assaulting his spouse and a child, the Air Force said. “This was a very — based on preliminary reports — a very deranged individual. A lot of problems over a long period of time,” Trump said when asked about the shooting as he and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held a joint news conference. Trump’s more muted response to gun violence contrasts with his swift call for legislative and military action following the Oct. 31 truck attack in New York City. Within hours of a rental truck ramming through a crowded bicycle path and into a school bus, Trump called for Congress to “immediately” repeal the diversity visa lottery program that suspect Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbekistan citizen, used to enter the country in 2010. Trump also claimed that the U.S. had already stepped up its retaliation against the Islamic State group after the attack. “We are hitting them 10 times harder,” he said Friday. After the Las Vegas shooting, Trump and aides said it was inappropriate to consider a policy response while people were still grieving. Despite days later suggesting openness to outlawing the bump stock device that allowed Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock to fire at near-automatic rates, the Trump administration has shown no signs of urgency. “He has asked that that process be reviewed, and we’re waiting on some of the details of that to take place,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Oct. 27 when asked about bump stocks. “But a decision hasn’t been finalized on that. ” Trump, who supported gun control before reversing his position to enter the Republican presidential primary, courted the National Rifle Association’s endorsement in 2016, and earlier this year became the first president in three decades to speak at the gun group’s annual convention. In February, Trump signed legislation reversing an Obama-era regulation that would have made it harder for Americans with mental illnesses to buy a gun. Under the Obama rule, the Social Security Administration would have been required to send in the names of beneficiaries with mental impairments who needed a third party to manage their financial affairs. The rule would have affected an estimated 75,000 beneficiaries who would have been added to the national background check database. The attack happened in South Texas on Sunday morning when a man dressed in black tactical-style gear and armed with an assault rifle opened fire inside a Baptist church in a small community, killing 26 people and wounding 20 others in the deadliest mass shooting in state history. As Kelley left the scene, authorities said, he was confronted by an armed resident. Kelley later was found dead in his vehicle. Trump said, “Fortunately somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise it (wouldn’t) have been as bad as it was. It would have been much worse.” Investigators believe Kelley shot himself. ___ Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Catherine Lucey and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.

SOLUTION: Trump: Texas mass shooting is about mental health, not guns.

PROBLEM: Get used to it. The polar vortex has been wandering more often in recent years. It all started with misplaced Moroccan heat. Last month, the normally super chilly air temperatures 20 miles above the North Pole rapidly rose by about 125 degrees (70 degrees Celsius), thanks to air flowing in from the south. It’s called “sudden stratospheric warming.” That warmth split the polar vortex, leaving the pieces to wander, said Judah Cohen, a winter storm expert for Atmospheric Environmental Research, a commercial firm outside Boston. “Where the polar vortex goes, so goes the cold air,” Cohen said. By Wednesday morning, one of those pieces will be over the Lower 48 states for the first time in years. The forecast calls for a low of minus 21 degrees (minus 29 Celsius) in Chicago and wind chills flirting with minus 65 degrees (minus 54 Celsius) in parts of Minnesota, according to the National Weather Service. The unusual cold could stick around another eight weeks, Cohen said. “The impacts from this split, we have a ways to go. It’s not the end of the movie yet,” Cohen said. “I think at a minimum, we’re looking at mid-February, possibly through mid-March.” Americans were introduced to the polar vortex five years ago. It was in early January 2014 when temperatures dropped to minus 16 degrees (minus 27 Celsius) in Chicago and meteorologists, who used the term for decades, started talking about it on social media. This outbreak may snap some daily records for cold and is likely to be even more brutal than five years ago, especially with added wind chill, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private weather firm Weather Underground. When warm air invades the polar region, it can split the vortex or displace it, usually toward Siberia, Cohen said. Recently, there have been more splits, which increase the odds of other places getting ultra-cold, he said. Pieces of the polar vortex have chilled Europe, Siberia and North America this time. (It’s not right to call the frigid center of cold air the polar vortex because it is just a piece or a lobe, not the entire vortex, said University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Jason Furtado.) When the forces penning the polar vortex in the Arctic are weak, it wanders, more often to Siberia than Michigan. And it’s happening more frequently in the last couple decades, Furtado said. A study a year ago in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society looked at decades of the Arctic system and found the polar vortex has shifted “toward more frequent weak states.” When the polar vortex pieces wander, warmth invades the Arctic, Alaska, Greenland and Canada, Masters said. While the Midwest chills, Australia has been broiling to record-breaking heat. The world as a whole on Monday was 0.7 degrees (0.4 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1979-2000 average, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer. Some scientists — but by no means most — see a connection between human-caused climate change and difference in atmospheric pressure that causes slower moving waves in the air. “It’s a complicated story that involves a hefty dose of chaos and an interplay among multiple influences, so extracting a clear signal of the Arctic’s role is challenging,” said Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. Several recent papers have made the case for the connection, she noted. “This symptom of global warming is counterintuitive for those in the cross-hairs of these extreme cold spells,” Francis said in an email. “But these events provide an excellent opportunity to help the public understand some of the ‘interesting’ ways that climate change will unfold.” Others, like Furtado, aren’t sold yet on the climate change connection. Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini, who has already felt temperatures that seem like 25 degrees below zero, said there’s “a growing body of literature” to support the climate connection. But he says more evidence is needed. “Either way,” Gensini said, “it’s going to be interesting being in the bullseye of the Midwest cold.” ___ Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears . ___ This Associated Press series was produced in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

SOLUTION:
Science Says: Get used to polar vortex outbreaks.