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Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.
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Paragraph: Bryant’s action came despite a federal judge’s ruling last year that struck down a less-restrictive law limiting abortions in the state. The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights called the new measure “cruel and clearly unconstitutional” and said it would sue Mississippi to try to block the law from taking effect on July 1. After a bill signing ceremony at the state Capitol, Bryant told reporters that he’s not worried about lawsuits. “They don’t have to sue us. It’s up to them,” Bryant said. “If they do not believe in the sanctity of life, these that are in organizations like Planned Parenthood, we will have to fight that fight. But it is worth it.” Mississippi is one of several states that have considered bills this year to ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is found. Abortion opponents are emboldened by new conservatives on the Supreme Court and are seeking cases to challenge Roe v. Wade, the court’s 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. A federal judge in 2018 struck down a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, saying it is unconstitutional. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi. “Lawmakers didn’t get the message,” Hillary Schneller, staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement Thursday. “They are determined to rob Mississippians of the right to abortion, and they are doing it at the expense of women’s health and taxpayer money. This ban — just like the 15-week ban the governor signed a year ago — is cruel and clearly unconstitutional.”  The law that Bryant signed Thursday says a physician who performs an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected could face revocation of his or her Mississippi medical license. It also says abortions could be allowed after a fetal heartbeat is found if a pregnancy endangers a woman’s life or one of her major bodily functions. The House and Senate both rejected efforts to allow exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest. Georgia and Tennessee are among the states considering similar bills. Kentucky’s law banning abortion after the detection of a heartbeat was immediately challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union when Republican Gov. Matt Bevin signed it on March 14, and a federal judge temporarily blocked it. A federal judge on Wednesday also blocked another Kentucky law that would ban abortion for women seeking to end their pregnancies because of the gender, race or disability of the fetus. Dr. Leana Wen, a physician who is president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement Thursday that the new Mississippi law “is a dangerous policy that criminalizes a safe, standard medical procedure and will endanger women’s lives.” “Patients must be empowered to make their own health care decisions, in consultation with their doctor and their family, and doctors must be able to provide health care to our patients without the threat of prison time,” Wen said. “We cannot accept a world where the right to abortion care depends on where you live or how much money you make.” Jameson Taylor, vice president for policy at the conservative Mississippi Center for Public Policy, praised Bryant for signing the bill. “The heartbeat bill is popular because everyone knows a heartbeat is a sign of life,” Taylor said in a statement. “Intellectual and scientific honesty demands a reconsideration of Roe, a 50-year-old decision based on old science. 3-D and 4-D ultrasounds are showing women that their unborn child is alive.” ____ Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter at http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus . Claim: Mississippi governor signs ‘heartbeat’ abortion law.
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Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant on Thursday signed one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation — a measure that bans most abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, about six weeks into pregnancy.


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Paragraph: Voters in both Western states approved ballot initiatives in 2012 allowing personal possession and use of marijuana by anyone aged 21 and or older for purposes of just getting high, though public consumption of pot remains illegal. In January the world’s first state-licensed retail marijuana outlets opened for business in Colorado, and stores in Washington are set to follow suit later this year. Both states are among 20 that have already removed criminal sanctions for medical use of marijuana. The federal government still classifies marijuana as an illegal narcotic, but the Obama administration has given states new leeway to experiment with legalized cannabis. In Denver’s Civic Center Park near the state capitol, revelers on Sunday gathered to hear music and listened to speakers during a weekend event that organizers billed as the “world’s largest 4/20 rally.”  The date of April 20, or 4/20, corresponds to the numerical code widely recognized within the cannabis subculture as a symbol for all things marijuana. Police officers standing by on the fringes of the Denver festival issued 63 citations on Sunday, most for smoking pot in public - a ticket that carries a fine of $150. About half as many were cited on Saturday, police said. At least eight individuals were taken to a detoxification facility for treatment during the two days, police said. Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson said officers have refrained from wading into the crowd to arrest violators, but instead were citing people who openly defied the public consumption ban. “Those ticketed were blatantly in violation of state law and city ordinances,” Jackson said. Organizers of the rally and city officials beefed up security at the event after three people were wounded by gunfire at last year’s rally. Separately, the Cannabis Cup, a trade show sponsored by High Times magazine, drew sold-out crowds over the weekend at a Denver convention venue. The two-day event featured marijuana sampling and workshops, such as how to open a pot shop, cultivation tips, and how to talk to children about weed, according to the event’s website. Rachel O’Bryan, spokeswoman for Smart Colorado, an organization that advocates for stricter enforcement of marijuana laws, said the cannabis industry needs to do more to police its own. “People are flouting the law by openly consuming,” she said. “We’re concerned about the message that sends to our kids.”  In Seattle, several hundred people who paid $15 a head crowded the cavernous interior of a former brewery where Rainier Beer was made for decades to attend a 4/20 gathering organized by sponsors of the city’s annual Hempfest rally. Reggae music played over loudspeakers and the air inside was thick with the sweet, skunky odor of cannabis. But no police were visible at the event, which organizers deliberately held on private space leased from the brewery owners in an industrial section of the city south of downtown. The gathering featured a workshop on how to roll a joint with an entire ounce (28 grams) of marijuana - the legal limit for personal possession in the state - as well as vendors selling pipes and other paraphernalia, and a blind-toke test in which participants tried to distinguish between different strains of pot by sampling them. Attendees ranged from middle-aged baby boomers to a younger crowd from the so-called millennial generation. A cheer from the crowd went up at precisely 4:20 p.m. local time, as many attendees milling about outside lit joints and pipes simultaneously, sending puffs of smoke into the air followed by raucous fits of coughing. One woman in the crowd accepted a joint handed her from a bearded bystander. “You look just like Jesus,” she exclaimed in an apparent reference to the event coinciding with Easter Sunday. “How does it feel to be risen?”  Doug Medina, 54, said he traveled hundreds of miles with his wife and daughter from Billings, Montana, to Seattle for the 4/20 weekend celebrations there. “It feels a little more open than it did five or 10 years ago,” he said while smoking a joint outside the brewery. Claim: Marijuana fans pack 4/20 events in Colorado, Washington state.
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Thousands of marijuana enthusiasts gathered in Colorado and Washington state over the weekend for an annual celebration of cannabis culture with rallies, concerts and trade shows in the first two U.S. states to legalize recreational marijuana.


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Paragraph: Outbreak response experts at the World Health Organization (WHO) and at the vaccines alliance GAVI are already talking to the leading Ebola vaccine manufacturer, Merck, to reassess just how much larger global stocks need to be. “We’re actively engaged with the World Health Organization and with groups like GAVI, the U.S. government and others to try to understand what will be an appropriate sized stockpile in the future,” Merck’s head of vaccines clinical research, Beth-Ann Coller, said in a telephone interview. Supply of the Merck shot, which is currently being used to fight a large and spreading outbreak of Ebola in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, is not a problem right now, according to the WHO’s deputy director-general of emergency preparedness and response, Peter Salama. But the nature of Ebola outbreaks is changing, he told Reuters. As the virus finds its way out of rural villages into populous urban settings, plans for how to contain it in future must change too. “What I’m concerned about is the medium- to long-term stockpile. The figure of 300,000 was very much based on previous Ebola outbreaks where you never really had huge numbers of cases because they were in isolated, rural, populations. But now, we increasingly see Ebola in mega-cities and towns.”   “We need to view it now as an urban disease as well as a rural one - and therefore one requiring a different order of magnitude of preparations, including vaccines,” he said. Merck’s experimental Ebola vaccine, known as rVSV-ZEBOV, is the furthest ahead in development. Another potential vaccine being developed by Johnson & Johnson could also eventually become part of the stockpile, global health officials say. Congo’s two Ebola outbreaks this year illustrate the shifting nature of the threat. The first was relatively contained, infecting up to 54 people and killing 33 of them in an area of DRC’s Equateur Province that is remote and sparsely populated. Several of the eight outbreaks before this one in Congo - including one in 2014 and another in 2017 both also in Equateur - were also quickly contained and limited in size. But this year’s second outbreak in Congo - and the country’s tenth since the virus was first identified there in 1976 - is concentrated not in rural villages but in urban areas of the North Kivu and Ituri provinces. It has already infected more than 450 people, killed more than 270, and last month spread to Butembo, a densely populated city of about one million. This kind of prospect means global health emergency responders must “review our assumptions around Ebola”, Salama said. “If it were to take off in Butembo, or Goma, or, even worse, Kinshasa, we’d be talking about a totally different issue in terms of ... vaccine supplies required.”  Seth Berkley, chief executive of the GAVI vaccines alliance which has an agreement with Merck to ensure a current stockpile of 300,000 rVSV-ZEBOV doses, told Reuters that around 40,000 doses had been used so far in the Congo outbreak. The emergency response is based on “ring vaccination” which aims to control an outbreak by identifying and offering the vaccine to contacts of anyone likely to be infected. This method uses relatively small numbers of vaccine doses and forms a human buffer of immunity to try to prevent spread of the disease. For now in Congo, Berkley said, there is no immediate need to boost the stockpile. But looking towards future inevitable outbreaks, the numbers would likely need to change. “The challenge we would have - and this has been under discussion - is if we started to do community-based vaccination in urban and semi-urban areas. That’s when the numbers would start to get quite big quite quickly,” he told Reuters. Merck’s shot has proven safe and effective in trials in West Africa but has yet to be approved for a license by U.S. and European regulators, so is being used in the Congo outbreak under special emergency rules for experimental products. When it gets approval, which Coller hopes would be in 2019, it will be made at a newly built manufacturing plant in Germany. Coller said Merck is not yet clear how many doses a year, or a month, the German facility could churn out once it is in production, but she stressed the company would “work collaboratively with the public health agencies to do our best to support their needs”. Claim: As Ebola threatens mega-cities, vaccine stockpile needs grow.
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Doubts are growing about whether the world’s emergency stockpile of 300,000 Ebola vaccine doses is enough to control future epidemics as the deadly disease moves out of rural forest areas and into urban mega-cities.