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.

Ex Input:
Central to the plan to protect the city, some or all of the 78 barriers will one day be raised when the sea rises more than 110 centimeters (43 inches), to prevent damaging high tides from pushing into the lagoon city, a world heritage site built picturesquely — but somewhat precariously — upon more than 120 islands. Concerns that high tides are becoming more frequent because of climate change have increased the urgency. While the concept is simple, its realization has been anything but. The system of movable underwater barriers, dubbed Moses, has been beset by corruption, cost overruns and delays. Projected at 1.8 billion euros ($2 billion) and meant to be completed by 2011, the project has so far cost 5.5 billion euros and is running a decade behind schedule. In the wake of last month’s flooding of Venice, the worst in 53 years, the consortium that oversees construction of Moses is eager to demonstrate that the project — after years of bad news — is on track and will be fully operational by the end of 2021. Venetians say they cannot afford to be wrong. Skeptics and critics say they may be. A recent test of the deepest expanse of barriers — at the Malamocco entrance to the lagoon — was declared a success by the New Venice Consortium. It was the last of the four sections of barriers to be completely raised — but so far only in calm seas. The real test will come when all four are raised at once, and not only in serene waters, but under flood conditions. That isn’t scheduled to take place until the end of next year. It took six years to test each of the four movable sea walls covering the three openings to the lagoon, partly because work was slowed by a 2014 corruption scandal that implicated the three main contractors and sent 35 people to jail. Work is continuing largely with the original subcontractors now contracting directly with the consortium, which itself has been placed under government control as a result of the scandal. The fact that the barriers have not yet been physically tested in rough seas is a concern to critics. Paolo Vielmo, an offshore marine engineer who has long criticized the project, said that tests carried out in a laboratory in the Netherlands in the 1990s indicated that the barriers, under certain conditions, would oscillate out of control — possibly even breaking apart. “Its behavior is not predictable,’’ Vielmo said. He said that the trials so far declared successful have been under only modest sea conditions that fail to represent anywhere near the threat of the phenomenon of extreme oscillation called subharmonic resonance. Vielmo and two other offshore engineers have compiled a report for the Codacons consumer and environment protection advocacy group, which is asking officials to run additional calculations to see if the project is indeed viable. And if it is not, Codacons says Moses should be stopped. “We don’t want to delay by one minute the possibility to make Moses operational. But we say we cannot make it operational until we are sure it will work,’’ said Franco Conte, president of Codacons in Venice. “Naturally, the Venetian community is exasperated and they say, ‘If we did 95%, let’s do 100% and see if that works.’ But that is unconscionable. If we don’t know if it works, we cannot experiment.”  The barrier system is made up of giant flood gates, each 20 meters (66 feet) long. The gates are attached by hinges to giant cement blocks placed on the seabed along the three openings from the sea into the lagoon, Malamocco, Chioggia and the Lido. The gates can be lifted to create a temporary barrier in high tides. Once the water has receded, they can be lowered again — allowing shipping traffic to continue and for the tidal system to flush out the lagoon. The idea behind the project was to create a mobile system that would not impede views of the unique and protected landscape. But Moses has suffered criticism from the start that there were simpler, cheaper systems that could have been deployed. Venetians have been waiting since the record 1.94-meter (6.36-foot) flood of 1966 for a system to protect them from regular inundations. The flooding in November, the second-worst recorded, proved the urgency. In the 150 years that they have been recording the tide levels in Venice, two high tides above 1.5 meters have never been recorded in a year. In November, there were three in one week. Climate scientists note that exceptional tides — those over 1.4 meters — have become much more frequent in the past two decades, with more than half of all recorded occurring since 2000. “One has to realize the kind of existential question that that serious flooding has given rise to,” said Jane Da Mosto, an environmental scientist and executive director of the non-profit group We Are Here Venice, which is working to defend the city against myriad issues, including depopulation, cruise traffic through St. Mark’s basin and overtourism. “People are asking: will Venice be defendable against these kinds of episodes?’’  It’s not just the still-uncalculated damage to landmarks like St. Mark’s Basilica, where corrosive salt water creeps through porous brick and tile. It’s also the boxes of ruined belongings and piles of soaked mattresses discarded in alleyways and loaded onto motorboats and trash barges for disposal. The relentlessness of the Venetian fall and winter tides make one-third of ground floors uninhabitable in the historic canal city. “I am very old, I cannot say that I want to die, but I certainly do not want to be witness to the fact that it does not work,” 84-year-old resident Paola Scarpa said of the Moses barriers, as she walked to check on a family property in the Canareggio neighborhood on a recent December morning. “It would be a pain too great.”  ___  Associated Press journalist Trisha Thomas contributed to this report.

Ex Output:
Venice tide barriers pass another test but skeptics remain.


Ex Input:
Continental AG announced this week that it has given $5 million to Wildlife Mississippi to finance that organization’s purchase of 1,000 acres along Bayou Pierre west of Hazlehurst in Copiah County. One parcel was purchased from a timber company and one was bought from an individual, said James Cummins, executive director of Wildlife Mississippi The waterway, which empties into the Mississippi River in Claiborne County, is the only home of a fish listed as federally threatened, the bayou darter. Cummins said his group plans to improve habitat by planting native hardwood trees on part of the land which is now planted in pines, and by removing invasive species from areas where there are now hardwoods. The initial restoration work is expected to take place over the winter and spring. Wildlife Mississippi already owns an adjoining 320 acres. “What we’re trying to do is build a larger conservation area around Bayou Pierre,” Cummins said. The stream is plagued by erosion because the channel of the Mississippi is deepening, and Bayou Pierre is carving out a deeper channel of its own to get down to the lower level of the river it feeds into. That’s causing erosion of Bayou Pierre’s banks, harming the stream’s water quality and further stressing the bayou darter. The problem has been going on for years, exacerbated by agriculture and gravel mining in the Bayou Pierre watershed. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been trying to organize landowners to improve the situation, and Wildlife Mississippi’s entry is one response. Cummins said Wildlife Mississippi was approached by Continental even before the company announced its $1.45 billion tire plant near Clinton in February, and Continental said the transaction was completed in April. “It’s important for Continental to work with local environmental groups to conserve the areas where we’re investing,” Continental Project Manager Grant Bovim said in a statement. Continental ultimately plans 2,500 jobs at the Hinds County site. Wildlife Mississippi will retain the land and is considering public access to the tract in the future. Cummins said the group would like to encourage canoeing and kayaking in Bayou Pierre. ___ Follow Jeff Amy at: http://twitter.com/jeffamy . Read his work at http://bigstory.ap.org/author/jeff-amy .

Ex Output:
Tire company gives $5M to protect land around Bayou Pierre.


Ex Input:
In late May 2020, Snopes readers asked whether a “brutal” open letter written by British media personality Piers Morgan to U.S. President Donald Trump, ending their years-long friendship, was authentic. Morgan’s letter is real and was published on April 27, 2020, by the British tabloid Daily Mail. The letter is scathing, however it appears Morgan and Trump’s friendship was already on the outs when Morgan wrote it. Morgan’s letter was largely a critique of Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, and read in part: You are the most powerful person in America and your words carry enormous weight and consequence. Within hours of you suggesting it might be a good idea to use bleach, one public health hotline in one state – Maryland – received 100 phone calls asking about whether they should use household detergent to combat the virus, and was forced to issue an alert warning people not to try it. New York City’s Poison Control Center took 30 similar calls from the moment your briefing last Thursday night ended to 3pm the next day – and was also forced to release an alert saying that using bleach ‘can put people at great risk.’ This latest debacle came after you previously and repeatedly hyped up an anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, as another ‘cure’ – until it turned out to cause more deaths in COVID patients than those who weren’t treated with it.

Ex Output:

British media personality Piers Morgan penned a scathing open letter to U.S. President Donald Trump, marking the end of their years-long friendship.