TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: Britain’s step, which follows France, amounts to a victory for electric cars that if copied globally could hit the wealth of oil producers, as well as transform car industry jobs and one of the icons of 20th Century capitalism: the automobile itself. The mayors of Paris, Madrid, Mexico City and Athens have said they plan to ban diesel vehicles from city centers by 2025, while the French government also aims to end the sale of new gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2040. The British government has been under pressure to take steps to reduce air pollution after losing legal cases brought by campaign groups. Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives had pledged to make “almost every car and van” zero-emission by 2050. “There should be no new diesel or petrol vehicles by 2040,” environment minister Michael Gove told BBC Radio. The ban would only apply to conventional rather than hybrid vehicles that have both an electric and combustion engine, Gove’s ministry said. There is a mountain to climb, however. Electric cars currently account for less than 5 percent of new car registrations in Britain, with drivers concerned about the cost and limited availability of charging points and manufacturers worried about making expensive investments before the demand is there. “We could undermine the UK’s successful automotive sector if we don’t allow enough time for the industry to adjust,” warned    Mike Hawes, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. Hawes said there were only 12,000 public charging points in Britain and new power infrastructure would be needed, as well as steps to ensure the power network could cope with large numbers of people seeking to charge vehicles at the same time. While many automakers may find it hard to countenance the end of the combustion engine, some have embraced a future where electric vehicles, or perhaps even driverless ones, prevail. This month, Volvo became the first major traditional automaker to set a date for phasing out vehicles powered solely by the internal combustion engine by saying all its car models launched after 2019 would be electric or hybrids. Renault-Nissan in 2009 announced plans to spend 4 billion euros on electric car development. But until Volkswagen (VW) admitted in 2015 to cheating on U.S. diesel emissions tests, most mainstream auto manufacturers had been slow to sink serious investment into battery cars. The backlash against diesel, without which carmakers would struggle to meet CO2 targets, has since refocused minds and produced a flurry of new commitments. VW itself unveiled ambitious plans last year to roll out 30 new battery-powered models that it expects to account for 2-3 million annual sales by 2025 - or as much as 25 percent of its vehicle production. “Even though modern combustion engines will be relevant for at least another 20 years, it is clear that the future will be ruled by electric drives,” VW chief executive Matthias Mueller said earlier this year. PSA Group boss Carlos Tavares, in the past a vocal defender of diesel technologies, said on Wednesday the French company was ready to embrace mass electrification, provided the required consumer demand and government support were there. “The rise of the electric vehicle is very much dependent on the subsidies and the support governments will be able to give to this technology,” Tavares told analysts during the company’s first-half results presentation. PSA is planning to roll out new pure-electric and plug-in hybrid models from 2019. Toyota, which pioneered hybrids but long resisted battery-only cars, changed tack last year and has since unveiled plans for a new range of pure-electric models. In Europe, so called ‘green cars’ benefit from subsidies, tax breaks and other perks, while combustion engines face mounting penalties including driving and parking restrictions. China, struggling with catastrophic pollution levels in major cities, is pushing plug-in vehicles, though in the United States there is much less appetite so far. Germany, the home of major carmakers such as VW, Daimler and BMW, should soon start phasing out petrol and diesel too, said Oliver Wittke, a transport expert in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. But there is likely to be resistance in Europe’s biggest car market. More than 600,000 jobs could be at risk in Germany from a potential ban on combustion engine cars by 2030, the Ifo economic institute said this month in a study commissioned by Germany’s VDA car industry lobby. Germany’s major carmakers have invested heavily in diesel technology, which offers more efficient fuel burn and lower carbon dioxide emissions than gasoline-powered cars. In response to the British decision, a German government spokeswoman said on Wednesday Merkel had repeatedly warned against “demonizing” diesel vehicles. A spokesman for VW’s Audi brand, two thirds of whose European sales are diesel cars, said it could make diesel “fit for a future with even more stringent emission standards”. Yet Britain’s move will accelerate the decline of diesel cars, whose nitrogen oxide emissions have been blamed for causing respiratory diseases, in Europe’s second biggest market. The government will provide more than 250 million pounds to local authorities for schemes to restrict diesel vehicles’ access to polluted roads but said other options should be exhausted before charging users of polluting vehicles. Any restrictions or charges for polluting vehicles to use affected roads should be time-limited and lifted as soon as air pollution is within legal limits, it added. Gove said he favored road-by-road restrictions for diesel vehicles rather than outright bans from town centers or costly vehicle scrappage schemes, but did not rule them out entirely if they were local authorities’ preferred options. The government also said it would consult later this year on other possible measures including a targeted scrappage scheme. London mayor Sadiq Khan, of the opposition Labour Party, said the government’s commitment was half-hearted and steps needed to be taken before 2040 to tackle air pollution. “We need a fully-funded diesel scrappage fund now to get polluting vehicles off our streets immediately, as well as new powers so that cities across the UK can take the action needed to clean up our air,” Khan said in a statement. Turning away from oil will add to discussions about whether the world is reaching peak oil demand and how additional electric power can be generated. Some companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, expect demand to peak as early as by the end of the next decade. Demand for diesel cars fell 10 percent in the first half of the year in Britain while sales of petrol vehicles rose 5 percent, according to industry data. Sales of electric and hybrid models rose by nearly 30 percent, the fastest growing section of the market albeit from a low base.

SOLUTION: Electric cars win? Britain to ban new petrol and diesel cars from 2040.

PROBLEM: The Kate Spade New York Foundation said in a statement Wednesday it is donating $200,000 to The Jed Foundation, which partners with schools to strengthen mental health programs. The fashion brand will match public donations to JED from Wednesday through June 12, up to $100,000, at jedfoundation.org/katespade. The donations follow money already given to other organizations, including the Crisis Text Line. Anna Bakst, brand president and CEO of Kate Spade New York, said the company hopes to encourage more conversation, education and research around mental health. Spade killed herself June 5, 2018, at 55, after years of battling depression and anxiety.

SOLUTION: Kate Spade New York fulfills $1 million mental health pledge.

PROBLEM: The story of Jean Hilliard, a woman who made a full recovery after she was found frozen stiff in the snow in Minnesota, has been shared in various forms since it was first published in 1980. And with each reiteration the story has grown more astonishing. One of the first reports of the incident, which was published by the Montreal Gazette on 30 December 1980, explained how Hilliard had collapsed on a 22-below-zero night as she tried to seek shelter after a minor car accident. The young woman was found “frozen solid” approximately six hours later and brought to a hospital:   She breathed shallowly two or three times a minute and her heart beat faintly eight times a minute. Dr. George Sather said that “I thought she was dead, but then we picked up an extremely faint whimper. We knew there was a person existing then.”  Jean’s chances of surviving were rated slim — her body temperature didn’t even register on the thermometer, and that meant it was less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit. “There was no evidence of a pulse or blood pressure,” said Sather’s brother, Dr. Edgar Sather. “Her body was too frozen to find a vein to get a pulse.”  Most of the stories published about Jean Hilliard immediately after the incident credited electric heating pads and oxygen tanks for her recovery, but with each retelling the story became more miraculous. When Weekly World News (the same publication has brought audiences fantastically fictional stories about the half-bat, half-human “Bat Boy” and Hitler’s UFO escape) published their version of the story in January 1981, quotes from Hilliard’s parents were added that credited her recovery to the power of prayer. Guide Post Magazine took this theme a step further, claiming that a prayer chain had saved Jean Hilliard’s life:  Mrs. Erickson hurried to her office and made a phone call to the prayer chain chairman at the Baptist church where her husband is pastor. The prayer chain was set in motion. The prayer chain was lengthening. Mrs. Erickson called the pastors of the Lutheran, Catholic, Methodist and Bethel Assembly churches in Fosston. They, in turn, called the chairmen of their prayer chain groups, who passed the word along. During the first hours that the prayer chain was underway, my legs and feet, instead of getting darker as Dr. Sather expected, started to lighten and regain their natural color. One after another, the doctors and nurses filed in to marvel at the pinkish tinge appearing at the line of demarcation where the darkness started on my upper thighs — the place where Dr. Sather said he thought they might have to amputate. The prayer chain spread to the nearby towns of Crookston and Bemidji, and into Grand Forks, North Dakota. Soon hundreds, then thousands of people were aware that a young woman had been brought in to the Fosston hospital frozen solid and was in desperate need of God’s miraculous healing. While some may consider Hilliard’s recovery a “miracle” (the New York Times even quoted Dr. Sather’s deeming the young woman’s survival as such), her experience was not a rare one. In an article published by the Spartanburg Herald in January 1981, Dr. Richard Iseke said that it was not unusual for freezing victims to make full recoveries:  The recovery of a Minnesota woman frozen stiff after a nightling ordeal in sub-zero weather was described as a miracle by her doctor. But other physicians say such “miracles” are not all that rare: freezing victims have recovered fully even after prolonged periods without heartbeats. “There’s a term we have that says no one is dead until he’s warm and dead,” said Dr. Richard Iseke, associated director of the Boston Emergency Medical Center, which every winter treats victims of freezing or, more accurately, hypothermia. Although Hilliard is undeniably lucky to survive, Iseke said “there are numerous case reports in the medical literature of people who have survived (with interior body temperatures) as low as 68 or 69 degrees. The human body reacts to extreme cold much like a hibernating animal: internal activity is slowed, which dramatically reduces the cells’ demand for oxygen from the blood. Jean Hilliard’s recovery was incredible — some may even say miraculous — but it is not an “unsolved medical mystery”:

SOLUTION:
Jean Hilliard made a full recovery after she was found frozen in sub-zero temperatures.