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: Tuberculosis is North Korea’s biggest public health problem. With this American-made machine, his lab would be able to complete a TB test in just two hours, instead of two months. It took years, but Dr. O got the machines, only to discover that GeneXpert needs cartridges he can’t replace. It’s not entirely clear what about the cartridges would violate international sanctions. For a long time, the producer refused to disclose what agents were inside because that was patented information. But it doesn’t really matter. No one, it seems, is willing to help him procure them from abroad and run the risk of angering Washington. Despite a budding mood of detente on the Korean Peninsula since the summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last month in Singapore, ongoing sanctions championed by the U.S. and Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy continue to generate an atmosphere of hesitation and the fear of even unintentional violations. And that is keeping lifesaving medicines and supplies from thousands of North Korean tuberculosis patients. Dr. O’s laboratory, built with help from Stanford University and Christian Friends of Korea aid group, has essentially been running on empty since April. But the idle GeneXperts may soon be the least of his troubles. ___ Tuberculosis kills more than 1.6 million people a year. When left untreated it will be fatal in half of those it infects. It’s the world’s most deadly infectious disease and is so contagious that each case can be expected to lead to 10 to 20 more. In developed countries, it has largely been brought under control. There’s a vaccine that prevents it and a cocktail of drugs that can be used to treat, and often cure, it in a matter of months. But it’s a major scourge in less affluent places, including North Korea and sub-Saharan Africa. To help North Korea control its tuberculosis problem, a Geneva-based international aid organization called the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has dispersed more than $100 million in grants since 2010. Last year it supported the treatment of about 190,000 North Korean TB patients. But, two weeks ago, Global Fund ended all of its North Korea-related grants, saying it could no longer accept the North’s “unique operating conditions.” Spokesman Seth Faison said the fund informed Pyongyang in February so it would have time to look for alternative funding sources. He said Global Fund is providing buffer stocks of medicines and health products to help support the treatment of tuberculosis patients through June next year. Faison said Global Fund welcomes the “positive diplomatic efforts underway” between Pyongyang and its neighbors. But the fund’s position stands. The decision shocked the doctors at the Pyongyang tuberculosis lab, who praised Global Fund for the work it had done but accused it of bowing to political pressure from the United States and Trump’s vow to keep the pressure on and not ease sanctions until the North makes major steps toward denuclearization. The United States government, which has pledged $1.4 billion this year, is one of Global Fund’s biggest donors. The fund’s retreat sparked outrage outside of North Korea as well. In an open letter published in the medical journal Lancet, Harvard physician Kee Park, director of North Korea programs for the Korean American Association, warned the fund’s withdrawal could create a “humanitarian and public health crisis” and called the move “a cataclysmic betrayal of the people of the DPRK.” Whatever the reason, its departure is valid cause for concern. When tuberculosis patients reduce or go off their medications prematurely, or begin taking lower quality ones, the bacteria that causes their disease can develop a resistance to the two most powerful anti-TB drugs, making the condition harder and much more expensive to treat. This kind of multi-drug resistant TB is most often found in China, India and Russia. And it’s a big problem in North Korea. ___ North Korea’s health system is fragile and strapped for resources. But in keeping with Kim’s directives to lift the nation’s standard of living, officials are looking for ways to improve. “We have been waging a vigorous struggle with a highly ambitious plan to increase the average life expectancy of the population and bring other health indices in line with those of the world’s most advanced countries,” explained Ri Jong Chang, who is the director of the Central Tuberculosis Prevention Institute and has worked with TB patients for the past 25 years. Ri explained that at the most basic level, the country maintains a network of about 7,000 clinics and a system initiated decades ago that focuses on “household doctors.” Each doctor is responsible for the care of 150 households within their administrative area. Along with primary care, they keep their patients informed and educated about health issues and conduct activities to prevent diseases. If a suspected case of tuberculosis is found, the patient is sent to a county-level hospital for testing. Aware of its needs and vulnerabilities, North Korea, which is generally secretive and deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of foreign “meddling,” has demonstrated a surprising willingness to accept help, allow access and share information with United Nations’ agencies and foreign aid organizations. Along with Global Fund, the most established group treating TB patients in the North is the Eugene Bell Foundation, which supports the treatment of more than 1,000 patients at 12 centers across the country. Unlike Global Fund, since 2008 the Eugene Bell Foundation has been solely focused on fighting multi drug-resistant tuberculosis, which typically takes about 18 months to treat and costs nearly $5,000 per patient. Stephen Linton, who founded the group in 1995, has a grim assessment of the situation. “We are probably only covering about one-tenth of the MDR-TB patients in the country right now,” he told The Associated Press. He said about half of his patients are in Pyongyang, a city of 3 million and the place where most of the North’s elites reside. The reason is straightforward — MDR-TB develops after exposure to medications that failed. In rural areas, fewer people have access to those medicines to begin with. “If you are living in the countryside in North Korea, you are much less likely to get MDR-TB than if you live in Pyongyang. It’s horrendous,” he said. “We can’t get to the bottom of it, even though we focus a lot of resources there.” What really worries him, and the North Korean government, is what will happen if the patients who relied on Global Fund support run out of medications, stop getting help or turn to cheaper, less effective treatments. Many will die. But not before infecting many others. “This is an airborne infection,” he said. “Every time you are in a closed space with a TB patient, you are at risk. So for all the people that travel to North Korea, all the tourists, all the diplomats — they are a risk to everyone who comes near them.” ___ This was supposed to be the year Eugene Bell began to really up its game in North Korea, tripling to 3,000 the number of patients it treats. Many of the sanatoria where TB patients are treated in the North were built 30 or 40 years ago. They have poor insulation, are overcrowded and are often fire hazards. To address those problems and the sort of transparency issues Global Fund was concerned about, Eugene Bell has developed pre-fabricated wards tailor-made to meet the North’s conditions. They are simple, single-story duplexes. Each can be put up quickly by three or four people, meaning the entire process can be monitored while Linton and other Eugene Bell people are in the country on their bi-annual medical team visits. The wards are already paid for when they are shipped from China, so the money isn’t going into the pockets of government officials or funding Kim Jong Un’s missile programs. The idea was to begin putting up 80-100 wards to create large centers in each of North Korea’s nine provinces. A pilot project with 10 wards is now operating on the outskirts of Pyongyang, not far from the airport. Linton said everything was going well until last December. “Then we ran into this sanctions problem,” he said. “It’s officially approved. The design is approved. And it’s not that we can’t send anything in. But these buildings have a metal roof — a panel that has metal in it, aluminum — and that’s the issue.” Linton said Eugene Bell has a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of them “rotting in monsoon weather” in a dockyard outside of Seoul. He believes that until Washington makes it clear it is not against humanitarian aid, other countries and aid organizations will be reluctant to act — or even approve the shipment of items like Dr. O’s GeneXpert cartridges or Eugene Bell’s patient wards that are clearly intended for humanitarian use. As an American, Linton says, he is concerned the U.S. will be held responsible for whatever bad happens with TB in North Korea since no country is as seen as “owning” the sanctions as much as America. “Unless something is done and done soon, this medical emergency will become known in Korea as the ‘Sanctions TB Epidemic,’” he said. “And it will haunt the peninsula for generations.” ___ Talmadge is the AP’s Pyongyang bureau chief. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter: @EricTalmadge

Answer: Despite detente, sanctions on North Korea fan TB epidemic.


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.


Question: In 1990, Congress passed and President George H. W. Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which extended federal civil rights protections to people with mental or physical impairments: The ADA is one of America’s most comprehensive pieces of civil rights legislation that prohibits discrimination and guarantees that people with disabilities have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in the mainstream of American life — to enjoy employment opportunities, to purchase goods and services, and to participate in State and local government programs and services. Modeled after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin – and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — the ADA is an “equal opportunity” law for people with disabilities. More than a quarter-century on, and despite further work to be done, the ADA has so positively affected how people with disabilities are treated and perceived in America that the notion that laws once existed to keep physically and cognitively challenged people indoors and out of sight seems scarcely believable. But it was the case — and not so long ago. Beginning in the late 1800s, statutes known as “unsightly beggar ordinances,” aka “ugly laws,” were enacted in some American cities to rid public spaces of what Chicago Alderman James Peevey euphemistically referred to as “street obstructions”: By street obstructions, Peevey didn’t mean food carts, construction materials, roadblocks or potholes. He meant beggars, such as the ones described in the Tribune as “the one-legged individual who, with drooping eye and painfully lugubrious countenance, holds forth his hat for pennies” or “the fellows who yell ‘ba-na-naas'” and “the woman with two sick children who was drawn through the carding-machine in a woolen mill, and who grinds ‘Mollie Darling’ incessantly on a hurdy-gurdy on a street corner.” Following the example of San Francisco, which had pioneered the legislation in 1867, Peevey helped pass a law in 1881 imposing fines (or stints in the poorhouse) on all who were “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object,” yet dared beg, panhandle, or otherwise make nuisances of themselves in public. Among other cities, Omaha, Columbus, Cleveland, and Portland, Oregon followed suit, all passing ugly laws using virtually identical language. In a discussion of Susan M. Schweik’s The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (2009), reviewer Shannon Sommer encapsulates the social and economic developments leading up to these measures: Schweik discusses in detail several factors which combined to create the perfect storm for the emergence of ugly law in America at this time. These include: the formation of Charity Organization Societies, the rise or eugenics and state institutions, an increasing focus on using urban planning to create beautiful cities, increasing immigration at a time when there were few restrictions placed on immigration, the large number of soldiers injured in the Civil War which had ended just a few years earlier, temperance and prohibition, and the increasing industrialization of society with resulting industrial-related injuries. Schweik notes that though the passage of new ugly laws ceased by the beginning of World War I and enforcement of existing statutes dwindled thereafter, they remained on the books until well into the latter half of the 20th century: Schweik found that the last known arrest under an ugly law occurred in Omaha, NE in 1974 when a policeman wanted to arrest a homeless man but had no basis for arrest. After searching the city code and finding that Omaha’s Ugly Law was still on the books he was able to take the man into custody on the basis that the man had “marks and scars on his body.” Prosecutors refused to press charges in this case. Schweik recounts one prosecutor pointing out that “criminal prosecution under this law would require the impossible: courtroom proof “that someone is ugly.”

Answer:
"During the 19th and 20th centuries, some U.S. cities enacted so-called ""ugly laws"" banning people deemed ""diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person"" from public spaces."