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:
The two on Thursday toured a Lowndes County neighborhood where residents say the sewage system regularly overflows into their yards and homes. They then held a town hall in Hayneville. Charlie Mae Holcombe, 70, of Hayneville, said heavy rains are always a sign of trouble. Holcombe described the problems she faced as Gore and Barber spoke with her in her driveway. She said the toilets in her house will begin to bubble as a sign the sewage system is about to backup, sometimes filling her yard — including the area around a child’s swing set — and her house with raw sewage. “They have had to come and pump it out of my yard with the pump truck,” Holcombe said. “It’s backing up, even in my bathtub. The sewage has run over all in the house.” Her home in Lowndes County is in an area that has been plagued by sewage problems and concerns about potential illness. “I have heard about it and seen pictures of it for a long time, but it was shocking to see it in person,” Gore said of the conditions he saw. Alabama’s Black Belt region gets its name for the dark rich soil that once gave rise to cotton plantations. But the type of soil makes it difficult for traditional septic tanks, in which wastewater filters through the ground, to function properly, said Alabama State Health Officer Scott Harris in an interview with The Associated Press. The region’s intense poverty and inadequate municipal infrastructure contribute to the problem. “Sewage is typically handled at a local level... These counties haven’t always been able to do that,” Harris said. Catherine Coleman Flowers, an activist who has worked on rural environmental issues in the county for years, said wastewater sanitation problems are not limited to Alabama’s Black Belt. “It’s all over the country,” Flowers said, adding that climate change, with heavy rains and rising water tables, will make it worse. Holcombe said she’s not sure what it means, but when a red light flashes at a sewage treatment lagoon across the street, it is a reliable sign that her yard will flood. In addition to overwhelmed septic and sewage systems, some homes in the rural county are on “straight pipe” systems where sewage runs untreated from home to yard. Harris said a May survey of almost 200 Lowndes County households found that two to three percent of the households were on straight pipe systems. Holcombe’s home sits not far from the state highway where voting rights marchers walked from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Barber noted the proximity to the key sites of the civil rights movement and said the environmental issues are about the continued fight for justice. The town hall, held at a community center in Hayneville, focused on a number of environmental issues. Birmingham resident Jimmy Smith described living near a Superfund site in Birmingham. Others described concerns about landfills, straight pipe sewage systems and coal ash disposal in the Black Belt. At the town hall, Gore criticized what he described as the continued resistance from power companies and politicians to switching to renewable forms of energy such as solar energy. “It’s really a disgrace that this far Southern state with abundant sunshine is deprived of the advantages of the solar revolution being enjoyed all over the world,” Gore said.

Ex Output:
Environmental justice issues focus of town hall.


Ex Input:
The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, the privately held drug company that has made billions from OxyContin, and Sacklers hold most of the seats on the board. Members of the family have been accused in a case brought by the state of Massachusetts of deceiving patients and doctors about the drug’s risks as deaths mounted. And documents recently released in the case shine new light on former Purdue Pharma President Richard Sackler’s role in the aggressive marketing of the powerful opioid. As the allegations mount, family members who made their fortunes well before OxyContin even went on the market have sought to distance themselves from their relatives. At the same time, activists have called on institutions to cut ties with the Sacklers, staging protests at museums that have received millions in donations. “The Sackler name is becoming synonymous with the opioid epidemic, and it is damning for these institutions to have their name up,” said Nan Goldin, a photographer whose works have been displayed at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum and at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a Sackler Wing. Lost in the outrage: One of the most generous and best known of the Sacklers died in 1987, nearly a decade before OxyContin was released. Arthur M. Sackler made his money from medical research, medical advertising and trade publications. His younger brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, bought out his stake after he died. Arthur Sackler’s name is on a gallery at the Smithsonian, a wing of galleries at London’s Royal Academy of Arts and a museum at Beijing’s Peking University. The Sackler Wing at the Met, which houses the celebrated Temple of Dendur from ancient Egypt, was funded by all three brothers. Richard has likewise donated heavily to various institutions. After a federal investigation, Purdue Pharma and three executives — none of them Sacklers — pleaded guilty in 2007 and agreed to pay more than $600 million for misleading the public about the risks of OxyContin. The Stamford, Connecticut, company has also been hit with a multitude of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis that killed more than 47,000 people in 2017 alone. Arthur’s nephew, Richard Sackler, who became president of Purdue Pharma in 1999 and remains on the board, is at the center of the litigation. He and other current and former executives have been accused of hiding the dangers of the drug from doctors and patients, encouraging physicians to prescribe more of the highest doses and minimizing the abuse crisis as it was unfolding. “This is not too bad. It could have been far worse,” he wrote to Purdue Pharma executives in 2001 after a federal prosecutor reported that 59 people in one state had died from OxyContin, according to documents released this week in the Massachusetts case. At the launch party for OxyContin in 1996, Richard Sackler boasted the drug would bring a “blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,” the documents say. Years later, they say, he sought to shift blame onto drug users themselves, recommending the company “hammer on the abusers in every way possible.” “Richard followed that strategy for the rest of his career: collect millions from selling addictive drugs, and blame the terrible consequences on the people who became addicted,” attorneys in Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s office wrote. “By their misconduct, the Sacklers have hammered Massachusetts families in every way possible. And the stigma they used as a weapon made the crisis worse.” A spokesman for Richard Sackler’s family referred questions about the lawsuit to the company. Purdue Pharma said in a statement that Massachusetts’ case — the first one brought by a state to personally name members of the Sackler family — is “littered with biased and inaccurate characterizations.” The company said it will “aggressively defend against these misleading allegations.” Arthur Sackler’s widow and children insist that they never financially benefited from the sale of OxyContin. “It is a gross injustice to connect Arthur to the opioid crisis some 30 years after his death when he had nothing to do with it,” Dame Jillian Sackler said in a statement. “It denies the many important contributions he made working to improve world health and to build cultural bridges between peoples.” But activists have made no distinction between Arthur and his relatives. In July, dozens of activists led by Goldin held a protest inside the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard, scattering pill bottles and holding banners that read “SHAME ON SACKLER.” Similar demonstrations have been held at the Met and the Smithsonian. Goldin, who was addicted OxyContin for years, said that getting the institutions to act will be difficult. “Who is going to turn down the money? They offer millions to these institutions, and the board members are not necessarily committed to action, so it’s going to take a lot,” she said. A Met spokesman said that the Sackler family’s support began decades before the opioid crisis, but that the museum will be examining its gift acceptance policies. The Guggenheim, home to the Sackler Center for Arts Education, had no comment. A Harvard spokesman said in an email that Arthur Sackler’s donation in 1982 paid for the construction of the building that originally housed the museum but that his foundation does not fund the museum. ___ Associated Press reporter Verena Dobnik contributed to this report from New York. ___ Follow Alanna Durkin Richer at http://www.twitter.com/aedurkinricher

Ex Output:
Opioid crisis brings unwanted attention to wealthy family.


Ex Input:
Thailand and neighbouring Cambodia were among Southeast Asian countries accused by New York-based Human Rights Watch of using the pandemic to crack down on criticism. Both countries reject the accusations and say their measures are needed to keep order and combat disinformation. Thailand has the region’s second highest number of virus cases after Malaysia, with a total of 827 after 106 new infections were reported on Tuesday. Four people have died. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who first seized power in a 2014 coup, said he would invoke powers to help suppress the virus that has swept the world since January, killing some 16,500 people and infecting more than 375,000. The emergency decree is due to take effect on Thursday and Prayuth said details of the specific powers to be used would be set out later. Among the powers in the decree is that “to censor or shut down media if deemed necessary.”  Prayuth ruled by decree until an election early last year which opponents say was engineered to keep him in office, an allegation he denies  Other regional leaders have also taken on additional powers and ordered emergency security measures. The Philippines congress granted President Rodrigo Duterte extra powers overnight as infections also soared there and across the region - rising more than 20-fold across Southeast Asia to more than 4,500. With growing concern in Thailand over the spread of the virus, the government said a man had been arrested after posting false statements about a lack of coronavirus screening at Bangkok’s main international airport. “The post created panic for the public and eroded their confidence in Suvarnabhumi Airport,” the ministry of digital affairs said. Artist Danai Ussama, 42, posted that he had gone through no health screenings and been given no instructions by officials when he arrived on a flight from Barcelona. He was charged under the Computer Crime Act, punishable by up to five years in prison. The Thai Lawyers for Human Rights said Ussama was granted bail later on Tuesday and would appear in court on May 12. U.S.-based Human Rights Watch accused Southeast Asian countries of using the virus as an excuse to crackdown on dissent, saying that 17 people had been arrested in Cambodia over social media posts. “What these government ministers forget is in the era of COVID-19, they need the cooperation of the people to share information and act responsibly, and slamming people into prison will achieve the exact opposite,” said the group’s deputy Asia director, Phil Robertson.

Ex Output:

Thai leader to invoke emergency powers as virus infections climb.