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 Associated Press has learned that the attorneys general in Illinois and the District of Columbia are examining how Juul’s blockbuster vaping device became so popular with underage teens. The company’s rapid rise to the top of the multi-billion dollar U.S. e-cigarette market has been accompanied by accusations from parents, politicians and public health advocates that Juul fueled a vaping craze among high schoolers. In addition to the ongoing inquiries in Illinois and the district, which had not been publicly disclosed before, four other state attorneys general are probing or suing Juul. Juul’s top executives have disputed allegations that they’ve marketed their products to teens, declaring that they’ve taken unprecedented steps to combat underage use of its e-cigarettes. The company has shut down its Facebook and Instagram pages and pulled several of its flavored products out of retail stores. Juul also backs federal legislation to raise the minimum age to purchase all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, to 21 nationwide. Juul spokesman Ted Kwong declined to answer specific questions about the investigations in an emailed statement but reiterated past company steps to prevent youth use. Juul announced Thursday that 50 retail chains have pledged to adopt the company’s age-verification system, which requires sellers to scan a customer’s ID before selling Juul products. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement Friday the Trump administration “will continue using every regulatory and enforcement power we have to stop the epidemic of youth e-cigarette use.” A senior Illinois law enforcement official described to AP a wide-ranging inquiry being conducted by the office of Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul that is centered on whether Juul violated state consumer fraud laws and other statutes by designing and marketing its products to appeal to underage teens. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity. Marrisa Geller, a spokeswoman for District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine, confirmed in an emailed statement an investigation of Juul is underway. She said Racine is concerned about “the dramatic increase in the use of vaping products by district youth” as well as the policies and practices employed by e-cigarette manufacturers to prevent minors from using their products. The attorneys general in Colorado, Connecticut and Massachusetts have announced investigations of Juul related to concerns over underage use of its products. North Carolina’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against Juul in May, asking a court to limit the company’s sales and marketing in the state. All six attorneys general are Democrats. The Food and Drug Administration said last October it seized thousands of documents from Juul’s San Francisco headquarters relating to the company’s marketing. The agency has been investigating whether the company targeted youth with the flavors, design and ingredients of its products. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Juul’s early marketing campaign and use of social media to promote its products. The FTC declined to comment. Juul has repeatedly stated that it understands the concerns about youth vaping and has taken “the most aggressive actions” of any company in the industry to combat the problem. It has spent millions of dollars on newspaper, radio and online advertisements pledging to keep its products out of the hands of young people. The company also has denied it ever marketed to anyone underage. Kwong said Juul’s earliest marketing campaign, in 2015, was aimed at adults between 25 and 34. Based on the sales and revenue, he said, “there is no evidence that it drove use, youth or otherwise.” Kwong said the company’s paid social media “influencer” program was as a small, short-lived program that ended in 2018. Electronic cigarettes, which have been available in the U.S. since about 2007 and have grown into a more than $6 billion-a-year industry, are battery-powered devices that typically heat a flavored nicotine solution into an inhalable aerosol. Juul, which launched in 2015, now controls roughly three-quarters of the U.S. retail market for e-cigarettes. Last year, one in five U.S. high school students reported vaping in the previous month, according to government survey figures. Most experts agree the aerosol is less harmful than cigarette smoke since it doesn’t contain most of the cancer-causing byproducts of burning tobacco. But there is virtually no research on the long-term effects of the vaping chemicals, some of which are toxic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that 215 teens and adults in 25 states including Illinois have contracted severe respiratory illnesses after vaping. However, the agency said a clear-cut common cause of the illnesses hasn’t been identified and they are being called “potential cases” that are still under investigation. The CDC said in many of the cases patients had acknowledged they’d recently vaped a substance containing THC, the high-inducing ingredient in marijuana. The agency did not say how many of the patients were teens. Kevin Burns, Juul’s chief executive officer, told “CBS This Morning” on Wednesday the illnesses are “worrisome” for the industry and for Juul “if we contributed to it.” He said the company is in close contact with the CDC to get as much information as it can “so if there’s any issue that was ... associated with us, that we can get to the root cause and understand that.” In Illinois, the state’s Department of Public Health has called e-cigarette use among teens an “epidemic” and said there is an alarming lack of understanding about the risk for nicotine addiction. Other areas being investigated by Raoul’s office include: how Juul verifies the ages of people who make online purchases from the company’s website; the amount of nicotine in the flavored solution and how safe those levels are; and whether Juul has improperly advertised its e-cigarette as a smoking-cessation tool. Kwong said the Juul system is designed to help adult smokers switch from combustible cigarettes and is not intended to be used as a cessation product. Neither Juul nor any other e-cigarette has yet been approved by the FDA to help people who smoke traditional paper-and-tobacco cigarettes quit. The Illinois probe began in the spring. Raoul’s office is not coordinating its investigation with other attorneys general, the official said. Geller, the spokeswoman for Racine, declined to discuss the scope of the district’s inquiry. However, a senior official in Racine’s office wrote to a Juul representative in early February and asked for a trove of information about how district residents purchase the company’s products. Among the data sought by Benjamin Wiseman, director of consumer protection, was a list of authorized retail stores and third-party online retailers that failed to comply with Juul’s rules for preventing minors from buying and using its products. Wiseman also asked that the company “describe in detail the nature of the retailer’s failure to comply” and what action Juul took in response. Racine’s office, Wiseman wrote, learned from news reports and conversations with community members and other government officials that use of Juul’s products by young teenagers in the district has increased dramatically in recent years. “Remarkably, one district high school principal estimates that half of the juniors and seniors at her school are using e-cigarettes, many of which we believe are Juul’s products,” Wiseman told Patrick Lynch, a former attorney general of Rhode Island who runs a lobbying and consulting firm that represents Juul. Lynch’s firm arranged for a meeting in the attorney general’s office last November that included himself, Juul chief administrative officer Ashley Gould, Wiseman and Assistant DC Attorney General Brian Caldwell, according to emails obtained through an open records request. Lynch is not registered as a lobbyist in the District of Columbia. The agenda for the meeting isn’t described in the records, although one email from Lynch said they discussed Juul’s efforts “to dramatically diminish youth access to their product.”

Ex Output:
Juul Labs facing scrutiny from federal and state officials.


Ex Input:
The lawmakers demanded that the executive explain why blackouts intended to prevent downed power lines from sparking deadly wildfires caused so much trouble of their own. The explanation CEO Bill Johnson offered the Capitol hearing room: Several smaller outages that PG&E triggered in the year before its debacle began in mid-October went well, giving his company misplaced confidence. “I think we got a little complacent that we had figured it out,” Johnson testified last month. PG&E had not figured it out. An Associated Press review shows widespread problems with the four “public safety power shutoffs” the utility started rolling out in 2018, a year before massive blackouts paralyzed much of California in recent months. Interviews and documents obtained under public records requests reveal persistent failures and broken promises that in some cases compromised public safety. Even as PG&E assured regulators it was fixing the problems, the utility kept making many of the same mistakes, further undermining trust after its outdated equipment and negligence has been blamed for fires that killed nearly 130 people during 2017 and 2018. Communication, a foundation of emergency management, was poor. PG&E’s notifications of impending outages were haphazard at times, with some sent after the power was already out. Telecommunications companies, water providers and emergency managers did not always receive the early word they needed. “We were surprised that PG&E provided no advanced warning to us,” an official with the city of Oroville’s drinking water provider wrote state regulators about a June outage. PG&E made important information hard to get. It was slow to distribute electronic maps showing who would lose power, making it harder for emergency responders to know exactly where to send resources. The utility also balked at providing the addresses of medically needy customers to local officials who planned to check on them in person. Breakdowns afflicted even basic technology. In a region that’s home to Silicon Valley and its thousands of computer programmers and engineers, PG&E had not prepared the website where it posted outage updates for a crush of customers, so it crashed. Tech experts from the state had to intervene. The sound quality of some calls PG&E hosted during shutoffs was so poor that emergency responders and legislators had a hard time understanding updates. Even then, not everyone was invited. “In the future, AT&T requests that it and other communications providers be included on any conference calls providing real time information,” the telecommunications giant protested to regulators after the June shutoff. These and other early failures weren’t widely recognized as harbingers of the issues that would overwhelm PG&E come mid-October, partly because the outages affected rural areas with less political and economic clout. While the headline-making shutoffs affected more than 2 million people across much of PG&E’s 70,000-square-mile service territory, the four initial blackouts affected tens of thousands in Northern California’s Sierra Nevada foothills and famed wine valleys. They hit in October 2018 and then in June, September and early October of this year. Among those who saw trouble building were regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission. The first shutoff was chaotic and the next three were not going according to the guidelines regulators had passed. Commission staff met more frequently with PG&E starting in the spring, using advice and persuasion rather than mandating changes. “We, as the state, never got to the point where we had complete confidence in PG&E’s ability to execute,” said Elizaveta Malashenko, the top California regulator overseeing blackouts. Malashenko, deputy executive director of safety and enforcement policy, told the AP that the commission didn’t act more aggressively because it has to balance punitive intervention with giving utilities a chance to self-correct. “There needs to be some basic operational assumption that you can set up a conference call,” Malashenko said. Some critics faulted regulators for not doing enough. The utilities commission, a sprawling bureaucracy with a complex rule-making process, was “not aggressive enough early in setting clear requirements and standards,” said Melissa Kasnitz, legal director for the Center for Accessible Technology, which advocates for people with disabilities. PG&E promised to fix a range of problems promptly, and an executive said it worked hard to deliver. In many ways, that didn’t happen. Not only did the problems continue throughout the smaller shutoffs, but they were replicated on a huge scale starting with the mid-October shutoffs. The problems galled local officials, who vented deep frustration that a utility they often work closely with kept failing them. After all, they are the ones dealing with a shutoff’s consequences. They must dispatch ambulances, run jails and water plants, direct traffic through darkened intersections, set up community shelters and much more. “It’s almost as if it’s intentional disregard of all the warnings we gave them,” said Napa County Supervisor Diane Dillon, whose district north of San Francisco has experienced nearly every shutoff. ___ Sixteen million people — more than the population of nearly any U.S. state — depend on PG&E for power. The shutoffs were an inconvenience for some and extremely costly for others. For society’s most frail, they brought questions of life and death. Those who rely on medical devices in their homes were particularly vulnerable. “PG&E did nothing to help us who depend on electricity to run our life support,” recounted Grace Lin, a polio survivor who needs a ventilator to breathe and uses an electric wheelchair. “It’s not like we could simply grind our teeth and tough it out by holding our breath.”   Lin said she was confused by the notifications PG&E sent ahead of the first shutoff that affected her San Francisco Bay Area home on Oct. 9. The company website they referred to for updates was frozen. Lin considered herself lucky that she had the means to evacuate 20 miles away, to a quadriplegic friend’s house that had electricity. PG&E could identify “medical baseline” customers such as Lin based on billing records. Local officials working to identify everyone who might need help repeatedly asked PG&E to share its list, so no one was overlooked. Regulators said PG&E promised it would release medical baseline addresses during a shutoff. Yet when each of the first four hit, PG&E insisted that locals sign a legal agreement not to disclose the addresses, causing delay and uncertainty that regulators said could risk lives. On the eve of the first massive power outage, Malashenko of the utilities commission was urgently emailing company officials in frustration. “This issue has been discussed many times over the last several months” yet “has once again become an issue with PG&E,” she wrote on Oct. 8. Malashenko said state officials also pushed PG&E to improve in other areas. Starting in April, they met at least weekly with PG&E, pointing out needed improvements and stressing that aspects of the utility’s preparation was inadequate. PG&E argued that the commission’s own privacy rules meant it couldn’t share the addresses without a non-disclosure agreement, spokesman Jeff Smith explained. Resolving the problem took an order that the commission’s executive director sent three hours before the first massive blackouts began. Other groups of vulnerable Californians endured shutoffs without the help they needed. “A lot of them don’t have support, a lot of them don’t have family,” Betty Briggs, 84, said of her elderly neighbors in the well-touristed Napa Valley town of Calistoga. “It makes it very difficult, and it puts them in danger.”   Briggs can get around without help, but her husband requires 24-hour care due to dementia. He lives nearby at Cedars Care Home, where seven residents in their 80s and 90s experienced three shutoffs before mid-October. The outages created anxiety for people reliant on routine, as well as practical problems. Beds and wheelchair lifts require electricity. So does the heat and air conditioning. When the freezer got too warm, staff tossed 30 days of backup food. Owner Irais Lopez still hasn’t restocked fully. “Now, we only buy small quantities,” Lopez said, “because we don’t know what will happen.”  ___   At PG&E’s high-rise headquarters in downtown San Francisco, the emergency operations center springs to life with each shutoff. Employees in different colored vests that distinguish their expertise cluster around banks of computer monitors showing real-time updates. Maps track wind speed and direction, as well as which circuits are down. Conversation hums in the background. This is where decisions are made and answers can be found — and local officials said they felt they had little access to either. Fed up with communication gaps, one hard-hit county requested a presence at PG&E headquarters during the September shutoff. Regulators required that the utility hold seats in its emergency operations center for local representatives, but a lawyer for Sonoma County instead spent her day in a conference room several locked doors away. “There was just a lack of understanding on behalf of PG&E of why local government needs timely information,” said Petra Bruggisser, a deputy county counsel. PG&E already had a shaky reputation in its Northern and central California territory. The company spent three years in bankruptcy starting in 2001, after California’s attempt to deregulate its power market went awry. Maintenance failures led to a natural gas pipeline blast near San Francisco in 2010 that killed eight people. PG&E was found criminally liable and paid a $1.6 billion fine. In late 2017, its equipment was suspected of starting the Tubbs Fire that killed 22 people and destroyed more than 5,600 buildings. The utility revealed in spring 2018 that it would start using power shutoffs when fire danger was high and extreme winds blew. PG&E then began to explain what to expect, sending millions of emails to update its customer contact files, running advertising in multiple languages and holding hundreds of meetings with community leaders, public safety agencies and residents. The California Public Utilities Commission started writing guidelines for how utilities should roll out “de-energization.” The guidelines were published as a 176-page document in June. By that point, PG&E had again filed for bankruptcy protection, crushed by liabilities for fires in 2017 and 2018, including the Camp Fire that nearly wiped out the town of Paradise and killed 85 people. The utility now has a market value of about $6 billion — a drop of $30 billion in just over two years — and is working with the state and a federal judge to emerge from bankruptcy by June 30. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he expects PG&E’s entire 14-member board of directors, including Johnson, its CEO, to step down before the state will approve the utility’s plan to regain its financial footing. “PG&E’s recent management of the public safety power shutoffs did not restore public confidence,” the Democratic governor warned the company in a Dec. 13 letter. “Instead, PG&E caused extreme uncertainty and harm for Californians who rely on power for their health care and their livelihood.” PG&E said Johnson was not available for an interview. The utility’s point man on the shutoffs told AP that he believes Johnson, while testifying before lawmakers last month, was referring to its ability to kill and safely restore power to an extremely complex electrical grid. Sumeet Singh, a vice president who oversees PG&E’s community wildfire safety program, listed a litany of ways the utility is investing in fixes that he said will lessen the need for future shutoffs. Those include trimming more vegetation near power lines and burying some lines in areas most at risk of igniting. Singh also acknowledged that the utility had some struggles during the early shutoffs but that it strove to improve and disputed any characterization that it did not succeed in some ways. He cited how quickly the utility restored power as one improvement, along with the timeliness and accuracy of customer notifications. “Did we hit the mark on every single improvement? No. Do we have more work to do? Yes,” Singh said. Power shutoffs are likely to be a feature of life in California for years to come. PG&E must invest billions in infrastructure upgrades, and communities are spreading into lands once populated by trees and brush. Regulators promise to be watching closely. “If we have an outcome that doesn’t meet the public expectation and what we need to run as a state,” said Malashenko of the utilities commission, “that means that we need to rethink our approach and try something different and drive to a better outcome.” In November, the commission launched an investigation into whether it should sanction PG&E for violating shutoff protocols. PG&E said it will need to improve how it reacts after it shuts off the power. “I think we thought the big event was turning off the power,” Johnson told lawmakers. “And I think we focused on that as the main event instead of the impact of that, right, on the people it affected.” ___ Pritchard reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press journalists Terence Chea and Eric Risberg in Calistoga and Adam Beam in Sacramento contributed to this report. ___ Contact Pritchard at https://twitter.com/lalanewsman.

Ex Output:
AP Exclusive: PG&E’s history with blackouts signaled trouble.


Ex Input:
Peter Magombeyi, president of the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association (ZHDA) and one organizer of an ongoing strike to demand higher wages for state doctors because of soaring living costs, disappeared on Saturday night. ZHDA represents junior and middle level doctors at public hospitals. “As health professionals we are being threatened by security elements. Both nurses and doctors are regularly being told that resisting what the government offers them will result in their death,” according to a doctors petition to parliament. “Evidence of the threats is available in audio and text messages,” the petition said without giving more details. Police said they could not immediately comment. Edric Nhema, secretary general for the country’s nurses union who was part of the salary negotiating team with Magombeyi, told doctors at Parirenyatwa Hospital before the march that he had received death threats from unknown people. State security minister Owen Ncube said in a statement that the government was treating Magombeyi’s case as a disappearance and not an abduction as alleged by the doctor’s colleagues. He said the timing of Magombeyi’s disappearance, ahead of the United Nations annual meeting next week and at a time a U.N. special rapporteur on human rights was in Zimbabwe, pointed to work by a “third force” meant to tarnish the country’s image. Dozens of riot police blocked more than 200 doctors on Wednesday as they marched to parliament to present their petition chanting “no Peter, no work”. Two years after President Emmerson Mnangagwa and the army conspired to oust longtime ruler Robert Mugabe, people are suffering from triple-digit inflation that has eroded salaries and shortages of basic goods like fuel and electricity. Human rights groups say they have recorded more than 20 cases of abductions of activists by state security agents since January. The government denies any involvement. Churches under the Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations (ZHOCD) groups said they were worried that after many reported cases of abduction, no one had been arrested. “This has put the security of citizens at the highest level of vulnerability,” ZHOCD said in a statement, adding that Mnangagwa should publicly condemn abductions and torture of civilians.

Ex Output:

Zimbabwe doctors say receiving death threats over strike.