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.

"Don't mess with Charlie Crist when it comes to open government. It was Crist, as Florida governor, who created something called the Office for Open Government. And we've heard stories of the governor himself ordering agency heads to hand over public records requested by nosy reporters. Now Crist is taking up the cause of the nation's people in a debate over transparency when it comes to the health care reform bill. ""It seems that a bill that was crafted in a closed-door, backroom meeting in the White House will end the same way,"" Crist, who is running for U.S. Senate, said in a statement released Jan. 5, 2010. ""President Obama has broken his pledge to the American people to be transparent throughout this process, and (Senate Majority Leader) Harry Reid and (House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi have only aided in the secrecy with sweetheart deals and dead of the night votes."" Crist is claiming that Obama broke a promise when it comes to transparency and health care reform. Lucky for us, we have this thing at PolitiFact called the  Obameter  , where we are tracking Obama's more than 500 campaign promises. If you'll now turn to  Promise No. 517  . To achieve health care reform, Obama said in August 2008, ""I'm going to have all the negotiations around a big table. We'll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies -- they'll get a seat at the table, they just won't be able to buy every chair. But what we will do is, we'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies. And so, that approach, I think is what is going to allow people to stay involved in this process."" If it only happened ... While the Senate and House floor debates have been televised on C-SPAN, negotiations have almost always been away from television cameras. ABC's Jake Tapper put the discrepancy in front of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs this week, to see if the final negotiations between the House, the Senate and the president would be televised. ""There have been a countless number of public hearings,"" Gibbs said. ""The Senate did a lot of their voting at 1 and 2 in the morning on C-SPAN ... I think what the president promised and pledged was so that you could see who was fighting for their constituents and who was fighting for drug and insurance companies."" But, Tapper pressed, the president was talking about negotiations, not votes -- which would hardly be a campaign promise since they would have been televised regardless. ""Well, but the bill gets put together on the floor of the Senate,"" Gibbs said. ""That's where the bill got augmented. And I think if you watched that debate ... you'd have seen quite a bit of public hearing and public airing."" Despite the action on the House and Senate floors, most of the serious negotiations on the health care bill have been done in the same fashion as other major initiatives in the past -- behind closed doors. From negotiations with the drug companies and health care interests to final assembly of the delicate compromise on abortion, the bulk of the big deliberations and discussions have occurred out of the public eye. The debate over the resulting bill may have been on C-SPAN as Gibbs claims, but the real sausagemaking took place in a private kitchen. 517 a Promise Broken. On top of that, C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb  wrote  to House and Senate leaders last week inviting negotiations on the channel. ""President Obama, Senate and House leaders, many of your rank-and-file members, and the nation’s editorial pages have all talked about the value of transparent discussions on reforming the nation’s health care system,"" Lamb wrote. ""Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between the Chambers, we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American."" Obama promised an end to closed-door negotiations and complete openness for the health care talks. But he has failed to deliver. When Crist says ""President Obama has broken his pledge to the American people to be transparent throughout this process,"" he's right."
President Obama has broken his pledge to the American people to be transparent throughout (health care reform negotiations).

Attractions such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum and the Ferrari World theme park will be closed from March 15-31, the Abu Dhabi Government Media Office said, while the country’s civil aviation authority indefinitely suspended flights to and from Lebanon, Turkey, Syria and Iraq from March 17. The UAE, which has reported 85 coronavirus infections but no deaths, and other Gulf Arab states are intensifying measures to halt the virus as the number of cases rises. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have taken the most drastic steps, cancelling all international flights. Dubai, the UAE’s regional business and transit hub, said it was cancelling all events planned in March and asked hotels to stop hosting wedding celebrations. Some shops have voluntarily closed to boost containment efforts. In the capital, Abu Dhabi, cinemas, arcades and entertainment venues have been shuttered, state news agency WAM reported. Seeking to soften the impact of the shutdowns on key sectors such as tourism and transportation, the central bank said its program would help banks and companies weather the crisis. Saudi Arabia also announced $13 billion to support small and medium enterprises. Saudi Arabia, which reported 17 new cases on Saturday bringing its total to 103, said two-week flight suspensions would start on Sunday, while Kuwait did not specify a length for its grounding which began on Saturday. Saudi Arabia has already suspended the Umrah pilgrimage and locked down its eastern Qatif region where many infections are located. On Saturday, it also closed popular family entertainment zones located inside many shopping malls. Health ministry spokesman Mohammed Abdelali urged the population of 30 million to avoid gathering in public, minimize movements and stay at home as much as possible. “(Such) measures slow the growth of cases so that we can control it, while the countries that take delayed measures experience fast growth which the health systems cannot deal with,” he told reporters. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a group of six oil-rich Arab monarchies which also includes Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, has reported nearly 900 coronavirus cases, mostly in people who had traveled to Iran or who been infected by visitors to Iran. No deaths have been reported in the GCC, unlike Iran where the toll rose by nearly 100 on Saturday to 611, out of 12,729 total infections. Oman, with the lowest number of infections in the region at 20, said on Saturday all schools and educational institutions would close for a month, a precaution also taken by other GCC states and Yemen. Saudi Arabia and Oman canceled all sporting events until further notice, state media said. The UAE will stop issuing visas, except for foreign diplomats, from March 17, WAM reported, citing immigration authorities. Qatar will halt the issuance of visas upon arrival to a number of European nationalities from Sunday, the government communication office said, while the Qatar Olympic Committee suspended all local sports activities until March 29. Qatar confirmed 17 new infections on Saturday, bringing the total number of cases to 337, the highest in the GCC, followed by Bahrain with 211 and Kuwait with 104. Gulf health authorities have stepped up pleas to avoid gatherings and are sanitizing public places. Police in Kuwait used drones fitted with loudspeakers to urge people on the streets to avoid gathering. Health Minister Basel Al-Sabah said on state television: “I urge you by God to stay at home.”  The competing sides in Yemen’s civil war announced airport closures including in the capital Sana’a, a measure that will affect flights operated by United Nations organizations taking part in humanitarian relief efforts.
UAE cancels events, flights as central bank announces coronavirus fiscal plan.

But he and his colleagues are cooking up something else altogether: yeast that works with chunks of man-made DNA. Scientists have long been able to make specific changes in the DNA code. Now, they’re taking the more radical step of starting over, and building redesigned life forms from scratch. Boeke, a researcher at New York University, directs an international team of 11 labs on four continents working to “rewrite” the yeast genome, following a detailed plan they published in March. Their work is part of a bold and controversial pursuit aimed at creating custom-made DNA codes to be inserted into living cells to change how they function, or even provide a treatment for diseases. It could also someday help give scientists the profound and unsettling ability to create entirely new organisms. The genome is the entire genetic code of a living thing. Learning how to make one from scratch, Boeke said, means “you really can construct something that’s completely new.” The research may reveal basic, hidden rules that govern the structure and functioning of genomes. But it also opens the door to life with new and useful characteristics, like microbes or mammal cells that are better than current ones at pumping out medications in pharmaceutical factories, or new vaccines. The right modifications might make yeast efficiently produce new biofuels, Boeke says. Some scientists look further into the future and see things like trees that purify water supplies and plants that detect explosives at airports and shopping malls. Also on the horizon is redesigning human DNA. That’s not to make genetically altered people, scientists stress. Instead, the synthetic DNA would be put into cells, to make them better at pumping out pharmaceutical proteins, for example, or perhaps to engineer stem cells as a safer source of lab-grown tissue and organs for transplanting into patients. Some have found the idea of remaking human DNA disconcerting, and scientists plan to get guidance from ethicists and the public before they try it. Still, redesigning DNA is alarming to some. Laurie Zoloth of Northwestern University, a bioethicist who’s been following the effort, is concerned about making organisms with “properties we cannot fully know.” And the work would disturb people who believe creating life from scratch would give humans unwarranted power, she said. “It is not only a science project,” Zoloth said in an email. “It is an ethical and moral and theological proposal of significant proportions.” Rewritten DNA has already been put to work in viruses and bacteria. Australian scientists recently announced that they’d built the genome of the Zika virus in a lab, for example, to better understand it and get clues for new treatments. At Harvard University, Jeffrey Way and Pamela Silver are working toward developing a harmless strain of salmonella to use as a vaccine against food poisoning from salmonella and E. coli, as well as the diarrhea-causing disease called shigella. A key goal is to prevent the strain from turning harmful as a result of picking up DNA from other bacteria. That requires changing its genome in 30,000 places. “The only practical way to do that,” Way says, “is to synthesize it from scratch.” The cutting edge for redesigning a genome, though, is yeast. Its genome is bigger and more complex than the viral and bacterial codes altered so far. But it’s well-understood and yeast will readily swap man-made DNA for its own. Still, rewriting the yeast genome is a huge job. It’s like a chain with 12 million chemical links, known by the letters, A, C, G and T. That’s less than one-hundredth the size of the human genome, which has 3.2 billion links. But it’s still such a big job that Boeke’s lab and scientists in the United States, Australia, China, Singapore, and the United Kingdom are splitting up the work. By the time the new yeast genome is completed, researchers will have added, deleted or altered about a million DNA letters. Boeke compares a genome to a book with many chapters, and researchers are coming out with a new edition, with chapters that allow the book to do something it couldn’t do before. To redesign a particular stretch of yeast DNA, scientists begin with its sequence of code letters — nature’s own recipe. They load that sequence into a computer, then tell the computer to make specific kinds of changes. For example one change might let them rearrange the order of genes, which might reveal strategies to make yeast grow better, says NYU researcher Leslie Mitchell. Once the changes are made, the new sequence used as a blueprint. It is sent to a company that builds chunks of DNA containing the new sequence. Then these short chunks are joined together in the lab to build ever longer strands. The project has so far reported building about one-third of the yeast genome. Boeke hopes the rest of the construction will be done by the end of the year. But he says it will take longer to test the new DNA and fix problems, and to finally combine the various chunks into a complete synthetic genome. Last year, Boeke and others announced a separate effort, what is now called Genome Project-write or GP-write . It is chiefly focused on cutting the cost of building and testing large genomes, including human ones, by more than 1,000-fold within 10 years. The project is still seeking funding. In the meantime, leaders of GP-write have started discussions of ethical, legal and social issues. And they realize the idea of making a human genome is a sensitive one. “The notion that we could actually write a human genome is simultaneously thrilling to some and not so thrilling to others,” Boeke said. “So we recognize this is going to take a lot of discussion.” ___ Follow Malcolm Ritter at @MalcolmRitter. His recent work can be found here. ___ This Associated Press series was produced in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Scientists build DNA from scratch to alter life’s blueprint.