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 rise of Donald Trump is striking not merely because it has come so quickly, but because there’s much in his resumé that clashes with Republican orthodoxy. Conservative columnist Erick Erickson ran down the list in a recent post on RedState.com. Trump has given money to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. He has supported abortion rights. And ""he has supported a Canadian-style universal health care system,"" Erickson wrote. We decided to look into Trump’s track record on health care. The billionaire’s 2000 book The America We Deserve makes a strong pitch for universal health care. ""I’m a conservative on most issues but a liberal on this one,"" Trump wrote. ""We should not hear so many stories of families ruined by health care expenses. We must not allow citizens with medical problems to go untreated because of financial problems or red tape."" When he turned to how the country might achieve universal coverage, Trump focused like a laser beam on a Canadian-style, single-payer plan. He said it would eliminate many billions of dollars of overhead. ""The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than America,"" he wrote. ""We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing."" Ever the pragmatist, Trump noted change would not happen overnight. ""While we work out details of a new single-payer plan, there are a number of ways to make the health care system now in place work more efficiently,"" Trump wrote. So, it’s fair to say that in 2000, Trump supported a Canadian-style health care plan. By 2011, his views had changed. As he contemplated a presidential bid, he told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., that ""I will fight to end Obamacare and replace it with something that makes sense for people in business and not bankrupt the country."" In an interview with the New York Times, Trump backed away from a single-payer plan, as well as another of his proposals from a decade earlier, a surtax on the wealthiest Americans. ''We had a much different country when I proposed those two things,'' he said, according to the New York Times reporter. We searched the Nexis database of news reports for any other views Trump might have voiced on universal health care between 2000 and 2011 and found none. In a recent radio interview, Trump did not so much reject his previous support for a Canadian-style plan as describe, in a roundabout fashion, a totally different approach. He gave few details but said, ""we're going to have great (private) plans,"" and that government should help people ""at the lower levels."" ""You can’t have a guy that has no money, that’s sick, and he can’t go see a doctor, he can’t go see a hospital,"" Trump said. ""I mean, because I’m actually a conservative with a heart."" Our ruling Erickson said that Trump has supported a Canadian-style universal health care system. Trump’s own book from 2000 affirms that. By about 10 years later, he had changed his position. Erickson got it right."

SOLUTION: "Erick Erickson Says Donald Trump ""has supported a Canadian-style universal health care system."

PROBLEM: Scientists on Monday described evidence of this bitter chapter of South American history preserved deep in an ice cap in the Peruvian Andes in the form of residue from the relentless clouds of metallic dust spewed from the mines starting in the 16th century. The mountaintop mines of Potosí in Bolivia were the world’s richest silver source. While the Incas had long extracted silver, a new processing method introduced by the Spanish in 1572 greatly increased production even as it belched lead dust and other pollutants into the atmosphere. The pollution blew over the entire region, including the Quelccaya Ice Cap some 500 miles (800 km) northwest in southern Peru. The Spanish refining process involved pulverizing silver ore, containing both lead and silver, into powder, which sent metallic dust into the atmosphere. The powder was mixed with mercury. The silver was separated by heating the mixture to allow the mercury to evaporate. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists said they drilled into the glacier at an altitude of about 18,000 feet (5,600 meters) to learn about past air pollution. The age of the ice was determined with precision because it was laid down in discernible layers caused by the annual alternation between wet and dusty dry seasons. The pollutants spawned by the Spanish colonial-era silver operations from the 16th century through the 18th century consisted mostly of lead but also arsenic and others. The researchers called it the earliest evidence of large-scale, human-produced air pollution in South America, beginning more than two centuries before the industrial revolution. The pollutants were reminders of “the sad conditions and fate of tens of thousands locals exploited in the silver mining operations during the colonial period,” Ohio State University environmental scientist Paolo Gabrielli said. “Their work conditions must have been truly terrible. Many died because of the strenuous physical efforts but it was also not infrequent that underground mine galleries collapsed, burying and killing hundreds of people,” Gabrielli said. Ohio State earth sciences professor Lonnie Thompson called the Quelccaya ice a “Rosetta Stone” for studying climate history, saying the samples also can reveal past temperatures, aridity and perhaps even the evolution of bacteria and viruses.

SOLUTION: Peruvian ice cap harbors evidence of conquistadors' avarice.

PROBLEM: Karen Sage of Austin, facing a Tuesday runoff with Mindy Montford of Austin for the Democratic nod for a judgeship, touts her experience as a prosecutor overseeing a new unit focused on defendants with mental illness. With no Republican opponent in November, the winner of the runoff will likely be a shoo-in for Travis County’s 299th state District Court judgeship. In a mailer sent to voters April 3, Sage celebrates the new program, saying that jail “time for non-violent, mentally ill offenders has been reduced by 50 percent.”We wondered if Sage’s statement—echoed in a TV ad she debuted Wednesday—reflects reality. Sage’s campaign initially referred us to Rosemary Lehmberg, the Travis County district attorney. Lehmberg confirmed that she asked Sage, an assistant district attorney, to helm the felony mental health unit, which was started in January 2009. Claire Dawson-Brown, the DA’s director of strategic prosecutions, said a magistrate started handling a special docket comprised of “mental health” defendants in late April 2009. To be in the program, Dawson-Brown said, defendants must usually be charged with a non-violent crime. They also must be diagnosed with major depression or considered bipolar, schizo-affective or schizophrenic, and seen as unstable in the jail. “It would be someone in a crisis situation,” she said, “or their mental illness is impairing their behavior.” Experts team to address the needs of the mental health inmates, Dawson-Brown said. She said participants get services they need in custody and when they return to the community. Besides Sage, who has a paralegal and a secretary, each defendant has an attorney familiar with mental health issues; she said the magistrate, a jail counselor and officials serving the local mental health and adult probation systems also play roles, with social workers sometimes getting involved. And how has the program affected jail stays? Sage said she reached her 50-percent reduction statement by comparing a baseline estimate that “mental health” inmates facing felony charges were averaging 106 days in jail before the program began to the 42-day average for participants in the program at the time she left the office in mid-December to run for judge. The decrease amounts to 60 percent. Dawson-Brown agreed that as of late 2008 and early 2009, the average Travis County jail stay for all its “mental health” defendants, including violent offenders, was 106 days. We pointed out that the baseline figure sweeps in the longer jail stays of individuals charged with violent crimes who aren’t automatically put in the new program, driving up the pre-program average and potentially skewing before and after comparisons. Dawson-Brown then gave us more detailed jail-stay information enabling an improved review of the change in average jail stays. Based on the new figures, we estimate that defendants who have been through the new program would have averaged 77 days in jail before the program began. The nitty gritty: We multiplied the number of affected defendants categorized by the level of felony they faced--ranging from first-degree felony charges to second- and third-degree felonies to state-jail felony charges--by the days that similarly charged defendants averaged in jail before the program began. Next, we totaled those defendant-days-in-jail and divided the total (19,432) by the number of defendants (253) to reach the pre-program estimate of an average of 77 days in jail. Through February, the magistrate had processed 253 defendants since the program’s start, according to Dawson-Brown, and they averaged 36 days in jail. Best we can tell, the average jail stay for defendants dropped by 41 days, or 53 percent.

SOLUTION:
"Karen Sage Says that under a new program jail ""time for non-violent, mentally ill offenders has been reduced by 50 percent."