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: Knox County’s proposed ordinance hasn’t been drafted yet, but County Attorney Yvette Kirchoff said the ordinance wouldn’t be retroactive so homeowners won’t have to remove existing plants. If the measure is approved, Knox County would be the first in Indiana to move forward with such an ordinance, Kirchoff told the Vincennes Sun-Commercial . Invasive species can take over and alter environments, said Will Drews, a natural resource specialist with the Knox County Soil and Water Conservation District. They can also disrupt pasture lands and agriculture. “We’ve introduced most of them, unfortunately, over time,” he said. “They’re mostly from other parts of the world, such as Europe or Asia, and the problem is that they have no natural predators, so they just kind of get out of control.” One major issue is that some invasive species — such as wintercreeper, Japanese honeysuckle and burning bush — can be found in local nurseries and are used by landscapers, Drews said. “These are plants that are literally destroying our forests,” Drews said. “That’s frustrating to a lot of the folks that I work with and those who are aware of the problem.” The state Department of Natural Resources and state lawmakers have been working on legislation that would attempt to regulate the spread of invasive species, but the process has been slow, Drews said. Drews and Kirchoff are drafting the ordinance and will present it to the county commissioners soon. ___ Information from: Vincennes Sun-Commercial, http://www.vincennes.com

Answer: Indiana county working on invasive plants ordinance.


Question: The story does not talk about costs, which was disappointing. The costs of intensive medical therapy can easily be identified. Using an online pharmacy we calculated the costs to be about $1,500 to $2,000 annually for medical therapy, using generic drugs. Using the Health Care Blue Book, we found the average cost of coronary artery bypass sugery and hospitalization to be about $62,000. We think that this is important information for readers that should have been included. The quantification here was presented in such a way to make it clear to readers that there was no significant benefit found to surgical intervention, which is a fair conclusion to draw from the study. The story says, “In the Stich study, 41% of patients assigned to treatment with drugs alone died during the follow-up period, which averaged five years. That compared with a mortality rate of 36% among patients who received bypass surgery plus medication. Although the relative reduction in risk of death was 14%, the result didn’t meet tests for statistical significance, meaning it could have resulted from chance alone.” That’s a great way to describe the lack of statistical significance. It would have been even more powerful to show readers the actual number of patients who died in each group. The story provides great information about the study itself and about the overall state of the evidence supporting heart surgery. “How best to treat these patients has been fraught with uncertainty,” is one of the more notable phrases from the story. It also says, “Many patients aren’t evaluated for heart surgery to treat diseased arteries because they don’t suffer classic chest pain or because doctors worry that hearts weakened by heart failure won’t benefit from the procedure. Other doctors recommend immediate bypass surgery despite a lack of vigorous studies to support that strategy.” The story does not engage in disease-mongering and takes a very careful approach to describing the types of patients who would be affected by this study’s results. We also like the way they provided snapshots of patients who were in both arms of the study — surgery and non-surgery — at the end of the story, making it clear, as the study did, that both routes can be equally successful. The story brings in some strong independent voices who help make sense of this complicated study: James Fang, a cardiologist at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, Raymond Gibbons, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, and Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Rarely do you see a story that spends as much time with independent experts as it does with the authors of the study. The story does a great job showing how the standard interventions for heart disease stacked up against each other in this study. We wish that some mention had been made of diet and exercise and that at least a sentence had been included about whether there might be differences in outcomes seen as a result of different medication patterns. The story doesn’t make it clear what exactly the patients were taking. The story makes it clear that the range of treatments studied by the authors are widely available. The story makes it clear that there is a great need for more evidence in this field and that this study will be surprising to many clinicians because of a long-held assumption that surgery is the superior option. tudies published in the early 1990s supported the view that bypass surgery provided a better long term outcome. The story does not rely on a news release.

Answer: More Options Before Bypass Surgery, Study Finds


Question: 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.

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