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.

Input: Consider Input: Helicopters whirred above the turbid, red-brown flood waters searching for people to ferry back to the port city of Beira, headquarters of the huge rescue operation in Mozambique. The death toll in that country was now 242, Land and Environment Minister Celso Correia said, adding that the number of dead was rising as rescue workers found bodies that had been hidden by Cyclone Idai’s now-receding floodwaters. Correia told a news conference that around 15,000 people, many of them very ill, still needed to be rescued. “Our biggest fight is against the clock,” he said, adding that 3,000 had been rescued so far. In neighbouring Zimbabwe, the confirmed death toll jumped to 139. President Emmerson Mnangagwa, declaring two days of national mourning from Saturday, described scenes of “unmitigated despair” in Rusitu, near the border with Mozambique. In Malawi, 56 people were confirmed dead. “This is a human catastrophe of the highest order,” businessman Graham Taylor told Reuters, saying he had seen “hundreds of bodies that had been washed up by the floodwater” while trying to return home after visiting his son in Beira. “What struck me first was the number of people on the rooftops and in trees. You could hear communities shouting for help - for hours, for days,” said Taylor, who also described meeting people on the badly damaged highways heading towards the devastated areas in search of family members. “It was a humbling experience,” he said. “I saw no sign of government assistance.”  Even when people are safely out of the floods, the situation is dire. Some 30 percent of the 88 centres set up by the Mozambican government for displaced people still have no food, Environment Minister Correia said. Idai lashed Beira with winds of up to 170 km per hour (105 miles per hour) a week ago, then moved inland to Zimbabwe and Malawi, flattening buildings. The storm’s torrential rains caused the Buzi and Pungue rivers, whose mouths are in the Beira area, to burst their banks. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which is coordinating food drops, said as many as 1.7 million people in Mozambique would need food aid in the next three months. The scale of the flooding is huge - the U.N. satellite agency says floodwaters covered 2,165 sq km (835 sq miles) on March 20. Some 90 percent of the city of Beira was damaged, the WFP said, while aerial assessments over the Buzi valley showed “entire villages wiped out”. Mozambique’s National Disasters Management Institute (INGC) said some 358,000 hectares (885,000 acres) of crops had been destroyed. Thirty-nine hospitals had been damaged, it said. With more rain forecast for Beira on Thursday, Christian worshippers sang hymns on an empty patch of land where a pulpit was all that remained of their Pentecostal church. “Here in Beira, all the churches have collapsed from this cyclone ... Oh my dear brothers, please pray for us,” said Pastor Luis Semente. “Only God can restore this.”   A priority for Thursday was pushing into flooded areas that had not yet been surveyed, said Connor Hartnady, leader of a South African rescue task force. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said it was sending two emergency units to Beira that would provide drinking water for up to 15,000 people and sanitation facilities for 20,000, as well as shelter kits. “More help is needed, and we are continuing to do all we can to bring in more resources and to reach more people,” said Jamie LeSueur, the IFRC’s operations head in Mozambique. The WFP stepped up airdrops of high-energy biscuits and water purification tablets to isolated pockets of people stranded by the floodwaters. Mnangagwa said in a televised address that in Rusitu he had seen big boulders strewn over what had been a settlement, a banana market and a police post. Floods had washed away police officers and prisoners, he said. The Christian charity Tearfund said the timing of the floods was disastrous, with harvesting due to start in coming weeks. Even before the floods, 5.3 million people had been experiencing food shortages, said its Zimbabwe director, Earnest Maswera. Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi has said the eventual death toll from the cyclone and ensuing floods could be more than 1,000. Mozambique’s tiny $13 billion (£9.9 billion) economy is still recovering from a currency collapse and debt default. The cyclone knocked out Mozambican electricity exports to South Africa, exacerbating power cuts that were already straining businesses in Africa’s most industrialised economy.

Output: Aid workers rush to rescue African cyclone victims amid mounting death toll.


Input: Consider Input: Exploring online was easy, with hashtags like #scars, #hurt and #brokeninside. Nothing made sense back then, but Theo absorbed what he saw on websites like a religion. All he could focus on was how the exterior he was born with — that of a girl — didn’t look or feel right. That was six years ago, when he had another name and a different gender. Back then, Theo felt that his body was rebelling in disturbing ways. He developed breasts and got his period. He felt like a boy, but every month, the cramps reminded him of reality. He became a child at war with his body. He wasn’t aware of words like gender dysphoria or transgender; those would come later. So would the national debates, the furor over bathrooms, and discussions of how to help children who didn’t feel right in their own skin. “When you’re 10 years old, you really shouldn’t be worried about who you are,” Theo would say years later, in a moment of reflection. “You shouldn’t be having that existential question when you’re in fifth grade. You should be worried about homework and the fifth-grade dance coming up.” He knew he was different from other kids in class. One day in the girls’ bathroom at his South Florida elementary school, Theo made the first of many gouges in his arm, using a paperclip. Pricks of blood bloomed on his fair skin. A teacher and a school nurse whisked Theo to safety. Theo’s mother, Lori Ramos, got the call from the principal. Her child was in the hospital. Ramos burst into the ER: Was it a fall, a fight, a shooting? “What’s going on here?” Ramos demanded of doctors and school staff. The answers were confusing: Her child had asked a teacher to call her by a different name, use different pronouns. Her child didn’t feel normal and wanted to be a boy. Ramos was bewildered — she saw no prior clues her child felt this way. And she was no stranger to transgender, gay, lesbian and bisexual issues — she worked in a clinic for HIV patients. When she’d given birth in 2001, in a hot tub on the family’s back porch in a Florida suburb an hour south of glitzy Miami Beach, she was thrilled. “I had my older son, and I had my girl, and my family was complete,” Ramos said. Her baby. Her “sunshine girl.” One who was no longer filled with light. Theo was involuntarily committed for 72 hours so doctors could determine whether he was a danger to himself or others. Soon, therapists and doctors had a diagnosis: gender dysphoria, a conflict between a person’s physical or assigned gender and the gender with which they identify. But a diagnosis didn’t solve Theo’s problems or make him feel better. When he tried to look like a boy, everyone at school noticed. His mother was accepting; his father wasn’t. He threatened to disown Theo. Theo again turned to the internet. He started cutting around his thighs and hips — his “problem areas.” When Theo saw thin kids online, he looked at his own baby fat and, once again, didn’t fit in. He wouldn’t eat for days, or he’d force himself to throw up. Cutting and vomiting weren’t painful, not exactly. They were more of a stress release, a way to match physical pain to what he felt inside: “I just know that it isn’t right, that the body I have isn’t supposed to be this way.” Small aggressions at school led to outright bullying. Other kids asked what was in Theo’s pants, if he had a penis, if he could show them. Theo started missing school. A therapist diagnosed depression and anxiety disorder. If only Theo could become a boy through hormone therapy — that, he thought, would solve his problems. “It’s just like every time I’m misgendered it feels like a wrench clamping around my heart and it slowly grows tighter and tighter,” he explained. “Being addressed as female or identifying as female never felt right to me; it always gave me this acute sense of discomfort and pain.” Hormone therapy for transgender children is a recent, controversial practice. It hasn’t been studied much. The concept that children can be transgender has been discussed in the open only recently; previously, it was something to be hidden, squashed and ignored. About 150,000 teenagers in the U.S. identify as transgender, according to a 2017 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law. About 1.4 million U.S. adults identify as transgender. Medical professionals have come up with protocols for children and teens. They recommend that some kids with gender dysphoria essentially pause puberty with hormone blockers until they’re certain they want to live as a different gender. But the child must be prepubescent. It was too late when Theo and his parents learned about the option. Theo could take testosterone, but rigorous counseling sessions were recommended first. This annoyed Theo: Why not become a boy right away? Experts say impatience is common: Transgender children want to transition, and waiting is frustrating. Even under regular circumstances, teens and patience aren’t usually mentioned in the same sentence. Doctors say going slow when treating trans teens is essential for physical and emotional well-being, and note that if a teen’s feelings last until age 16, the desires are probably permanent. Theo insisted testosterone could bring peace with his body: “If I could just start T therapy, I would know I was on the way to being who I’m supposed to be.” His parents, though, worried about the effects on their growing child. Theo wanted testosterone, but his anxiety sometimes made him question his desires. It became a regular topic of conversation between mother and son. “I’m nervous,” Theo said in the spring of 2016. He was 14. “What if I do change my mind?” “Well, what if you do?” asked his mother. “I can always stop,” Theo said. Ramos shook her head. “The changes are permanent.” ____ EDITOR’S NOTE: The Associated Press followed Theo Ramos for more than a year as he grappled with his gender dysphoria. This is the first installment of a three-part story. PART ONE: As a child grappling with gender dysphoria, Theo Ramos found himself at war with his body. PART TWO, coming Tuesday: Living with a transitioning transgender child “is anything but a straight line,” as his mom says. PART THREE, coming Wednesday: Visibility of transgender issues is at a high, but all the talk in the world doesn’t make life any easier as a gender-fluid or transitioning kid. ____ Follow Tamara Lush on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tamaralush .

Output: Trans teen’s war with his body started when he was just 10.


Input: Consider Input: The new estimate of nearly 3,000 dead in the six months after Maria devastated the island in September 2017 and knocked out the entire electrical grid was made by researchers with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. “We never anticipated a scenario of zero communication, zero energy, zero highway access,” Gov. Ricardo Rossello told reporters. “I think the lesson is to anticipate the worst. ... Yes, I made mistakes. Yes, in hindsight, things could’ve been handled differently.” He said he is creating a commission to study the hurricane response, and a registry of people vulnerable to the next hurricane, such as the elderly, the bedridden and kidney dialysis patients. Rossello acknowledged Puerto Rico remains vulnerable to another major storm. He said the government has improved its communication systems and established a network to distribute food and medicine, but he noted that there are still 60,000 homes without a proper roof and that the power grid is still unstable. “A lesson from this is that efforts for assistance and recovery need to focus as much as possible on lower-income areas, on people who are older, who are more vulnerable,” said Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken institute. Tuesday’s finding is almost twice the government’s previous estimate, included in a recent report to Congress, that there were 1,427 more deaths than normal in the three months after the storm. The George Washington researchers said the official count from the Sept. 20 hurricane was low in part because doctors were not trained in how to classify deaths after a disaster. The number of deaths from September 2017 to February 2018 was 22 percent higher than during the same period in previous years, Goldman said. Donald Berry, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center who was not involved in the study, told The Associated Press in an email that he believes the report is more accurate than the one released by Harvard investigators in May that estimated up to 4,600 more deaths than usual occurred. He said the data sources used by George Washington also are better, “but its accuracy is not as great as they advertise.” “If the true number of deaths attributable to Maria turns out to be 2,000 then I would not be surprised,” he said. The number of dead has political implications for the Trump administration, which was accused of responding half-heartedly to the disaster. Shortly after the storm, when the official death toll stood at 16, President Donald Trump marveled over the small loss of life compared to that of “a real catastrophe like Katrina.” Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005, was directly responsible for about 1,200 deaths, according to the National Hurricane Center. That does not include indirect deaths of the sort the George Washington researchers counted in Puerto Rico. The White House issued a statement on Tuesday noting that it sent 12,000 personnel to Puerto Rico for response and recovery efforts, and said it would continue to support the island’s government and its communities in their recovery for years to come. “The American people, including those grieving the loss of a loved one, deserve no less. The president remains proud of all of the work the federal family undertook to help our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico,” it said. Yet many remain outraged at both the local and federal governments. Rep. Nydia Velazquez, a New York Democrat, said the report shows the U.S. government failed the people of Puerto Rico. “These numbers are only the latest to underscore that the federal response to the hurricanes was disastrously inadequate and, as a result, thousands of our fellow American citizens lost their lives,” she said in a statement. There is no national standard for how to count disaster-related deaths. While the National Hurricane Center reports only direct deaths, such as those caused by flying debris or drowning, some local governments may include indirect deaths from such things as heart attacks and house fires. Researchers with George Washington said they counted deaths over the span of six months — a much longer period than usual — because so many people were without power during that time. “That caused a number of issues,” Goldman said, explaining that people were forced to exert themselves physically or were exposed to intense heat without fans or air conditioning. “It’s fairly striking that you have so many households without electricity for so long. That’s unusual in the U.S. after a disaster.” Power has not yet been fully restored to Puerto Rico nearly a year after the hurricane, and outages remain common. Puerto Rico’s government released data in June showing increases in several illnesses in 2017 that could have been linked to the storm: Cases of sepsis, a serious bloodstream infection usually caused by bacteria, rose from 708 in 2016 to 835 last year. Deaths from diabetes went from 3,151 to 3,250, and deaths from heart illnesses increased from 5,417 to 5,586. Bethzaida Rosado said government and health care officials were not prepared for the storm, and she is still angry her 76-year-old mother died because oxygen tanks were not available on the island after the hurricane. “Do you know what it’s like to see your mother run out of oxygen?” she said. “I don’t wish that on anyone.” Months ago, the Rossello administration stopped updating its official death toll at 64 and ordered the independent investigation amid suspicions the dead were substantially undercounted. The first phase of the study cost $305,000. In the second phase, the researchers plan to focus on the causes of death. The researchers found that the risk of death was 45 percent higher for those living in impoverished communities, and that men over 65 saw a continuous elevated risk of death. They also reported that physicians and others told them that Puerto Rico’s government did not notify them about federal guidelines on how to document deaths related to a major disaster. “Others expressed reluctance to relate deaths to hurricanes due to concern about the subjectivity of this determination and about liability,” the report said. For the study, the researchers reviewed mortality data from July 2010 to February 2018. They also took into account an 8 percent drop in Puerto Rico’s population in the six months after the storm, when tens of thousands fled because of the damage. However, they did not share details of their methodology, saying those will be released if the study is published in a scientific journal. “We did not cherry-pick, I can promise you,” Goldman said. “We used very rigorous methodology.” The study also found that government emergency plans in place when Maria hit were not designed for hurricanes greater than a Category 1. Maria was a Category 4 with 154 mph winds. Damage was estimated at more than $100 billion. The researchers made several recommendations, including more emergency planning and government training for doctors on filling out death certificates. They also said the public health system needs to be strengthened, though Goldman said they don’t know yet whether those weaknesses contributed to storm-related deaths. Rossello pledged to carry out the recommendations, though there are questions about Puerto Rico’s ability to do so. The island is trying to restructure a portion of its more than $70 billion public debt amid a 12-year recession.


Output: Hurricane’s death toll in Puerto Rico put at nearly 3,000.