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: Actual occurrences can sometimes take on folkloric lives of their own, making the shift from news stories to cautionary tales through emotional responses to elements of those events. That was the case with the 4 June 1999 death of 12-year-old Catherine “Casey” Fish, who did indeed die while playing the marshmallow-stuffing game known as “Chubby Bunny” — descriptions of her death have become part of the cautionary lore spread among parents. The rules of “Chubby Bunny” require competitors to enunciate that phrase with marshmallows stuffed in their mouths. No swallowing or chewing is allowed, and any participant who gags, coughs, or spits is “out” of the game. The winner is whichever child manages to utter the expression through the largest number of marshmallows. Casey Fish choked on four marshmallows and collapsed during the annual Care Fair held at Hoffman Elementary School, a grade school in Chicago’s North Shore area, and died at the Glenbrook Hospital a few hours later. The “Chubby Bunny” competition was to have been part of the day’s activities and would have been supervised by a teacher. However, Casey began playing the game with some of her friends when her teacher momentarily left the area ten minutes before the scheduled start of the “Chubby Bunny” competition to have a word with a janitor. As Casey choked, the teacher was summoned back to the room, but he arrived too late to head off the youngster’s death. Casey’s death was reported by the media at the time of the incident. But, unlike many news stories about the death of a child, the deceased sixth-grader’s story was told and retold in ensuing months, primarily via The Oprah Winfrey Show, which talked about the case (including airing interviews with the distraught parents) in January, March, and June 2000. The tale of how Casey’s life ended continued to surface in the news as her parents pursued a civil suit against the school district, asserting that a failure to properly supervise the children led to the death of their daughter. (In 2005, her parents settled their lawsuit for $2 million.) All of this additional attention served to keep the story in circulation. The folkloric shift this real-life tragedy has taken involves the mode of death. While a very real youngster did indeed lose her life through playing “Chubby Bunny,” she did so through choking on the intact confections in her mouth, not (as developing lore would have it) via the marshmallows’ somehow breaking down to form a windpipe-clogging glue. In the example quoted above, the bonbons were said to have “emulsified” — that is, turned into a liquid mass. Another Internet-spread description of the death says “The marshmallows were heated in the mouth and throat and effectively turned into a sticky enough substance that it could not be removed by conventional attempts at first aid.” Yet another version claims that “The marshmallows, warming-up to body temperature, took on the form of her air passage, and choked her to death.” We know the marshmallows did not eventually turn into a sticky, fatal mass after Casey held them in her mouth for a while because, during the lawsuit brought by Casey’s parents, Casey’s best friend testified seeing her pal’s lips turn purple just a few seconds after she had put the marshmallows into her mouth. While marshmallows can be quickly melted into a thick liquid, goopy substance in a pot on the stove (as anyone who has made Rice Krispies squares will attest), the temperature inside the human mouth is not sufficient to reduce them to that state. Absent chewing or licking, a marshmallow can be held in one’s mouth approximately 15 minutes before it entirely disappears, its bulk gradually dissolving and being swallowed across the span of that quarter hour. At no point in that process does the resultant fluid become thick or gluey — it is thin, watery, and easily swallowed. The danger presented by the game comes not from the marshmallows being rendered into a suffocating goo in the human mouth by the heat of that environment, but from their bulk. In the zeal to best others, a child may stuff more of the confections into his mouth than he can cope with, potentially lodging one in his throat where it will block his windpipe the way a cork would. It is not any special “melting” property inherent to marshmallows that makes the game hazardous, but rather that the marshmallows take up so much space, and their consistency makes them difficult to remove either via the Heimlich maneuver or with medical instruments. On 13 September 2006, another “Chubby Bunny” death occurred when a 32-year-old Janet Rudd choked on a marshmallow and collapsed while participating in the game at a fair in London, Ontario. Emergency crews were unable to remove the blockage from her throat at the scene; she was taken to a hospital where she was revived, but she died later that evening.

SOLUTION: "A child suffocated while playing a ""Chubby Bunny"" marshmallow-stuffing game.  "

PROBLEM: The outbreak comes ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday in late January, when many of China’s 1.4 billion people will be travelling to their home towns or abroad. The World Health Organization and Chinese authorities are taking steps to ensure the disease does not spread further. Thai health authorities said on Wednesday they were stepping up monitoring of passengers arriving at airports with infrared thermal scanners ahead of the holiday, when 800,000 Chinese tourists are expected to visit the country. Memories remain fresh in Asia of a 2002-2003 outbreak of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in China and killed nearly 800 people worldwide. WHO has said there may have been limited human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus in China within families. And authorities in Wuhan confirmed on Wednesday that a married couple were among 41 people diagnosed with pneumonia believed to be caused by the new virus. There were no new cases or deaths at the end of Tuesday, the city’s health authority said. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission did not say in the statement whether the couple represented an instance of human-to-human transmission. But it said the husband, who worked at a seafood market suspected of being at the epicentre of the outbreak, was the first to fall ill and that his wife did not have any exposure to the market. Some of the other people diagnosed also denied visiting the market, the commission said. The authorities in Wuhan also confirmed that a Chinese woman quarantined in Thailand, the first case of the mystery strain of coronavirus to be detected outside of China, had come from Wuhan. The State Department’s notice referred to an alert by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urging citizens in China travelling to Wuhan to avoid contact with animals, animal markets or animal products, among other precautions. It also asked citizens those who had visited Wuhan and feel sick to seek medical care. The Wuhan health commission said in another statement issued late Wednesday that 7 of the 41 pneumonia patients have been released. The statement also said that 450 of the 763 people put under observation due to their close contact with known patients have been released.

SOLUTION: U.S. warns citizens in China about pneumonia outbreak.

PROBLEM: Dr. Denis Mukwege, founder of a hospital in eastern Congo that has treated tens of thousands of victims of the country’s conflicts for two decades, and Iraqi activist Nadia Murad received the prize at a ceremony in the Norwegian capital, Oslo. They split the 9-million-kronor ($1 million) amount. In an address interrupted by frequent applause, Mukwege criticized the international community for allowing Congolese to be “humiliated, abused and massacred for more than two decades in plain sight.” “I insist on reparations, measures that give survivors compensation and satisfaction and enable them to start a new life,” he said. “I call on states to support the initiative to create a global fund for reparations for victims of sexual violence in armed conflicts.” He said countries should take a stand against “leaders who have tolerated, or worse, used sexual violence to take power. ... This red line would consist of imposing economic and political sanctions on these leaders and taking them to court.” Dozens of armed groups in Congo profit from mining the country’s trillions of dollars’ worth of mineral resources, many of which are crucial to popular electronic products such as smartphones. “As consumers, let us at least insist that these products are manufactured with respect for human dignity. Turning a blind eye to this tragedy is being complicit,” Mukwege said. An outspoken critic of Congo’s government, he added: “My country is being systematically looted with the complicity of people claiming to be our leaders.” Murad, a member of Iraq’s Yazidi minority, was kidnapped and sexually abused by Islamic State militants in 2014. She became an activist after escaping and finding refuge in Germany. She told the ceremony that she wants world leaders to translate sympathy for victims into action against the abusers. “The fact remains that the only prize in the world that can restore our dignity is justice and the prosecution of criminals,” Murad said. “Young girls at the prime of life are sold, bought, held captive and raped every day. It is inconceivable that the conscience of the leaders of 195 countries around the world is not mobilized to liberate these girls,” she said. “What if they were a commercial deal, an oil field or a shipment of weapons? Most certainly, no efforts would be spared to liberate them,” she said. Berit Reiss-Andersen, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that chooses the peace laureates, also said action was necessary. “This award obligates Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad to continue their vital work. But the award obligates us to stand side by side with them in the struggle to end wartime sexual violence,” she said. Back in Iraq, Murad’s sister and brother who live in a camp for displaced Yazidi people in Dohuk in northern Iraq expressed their happiness for their sibling’s Nobel Prize. “We are very happy, because on this date, Daesh was defeated in Iraq, on the same day Nadia is receiving her award ... This is like a tumor in the chest of Daesh. We are very glad, and very proud,” her sister Khayriya Murad told The Associated Press at the family’s caravan where a photo of Nadia hung on the wall. She was busy receiving congratulations from friends and camp management staff. Daesh is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. The winners of the medicine, physics, chemistry and economics Nobels received their awards Monday in Stockholm; no winner of the literature prize was named this year. In comments at the awards banquet, William Nordhaus, an American who shared the economics prize for his work studying the consequences of climate change and proposing carbon taxes, took a swipe at those who are unwilling to address global warming. “Some obstacles are unnecessary and manmade, such as those posed by the financial interests of polluters or the ludicrous arguments of some of our politicians,” he said. He shared the prize with Paul Romer, also of the United States, who was honored for studying how economies can encourage innovation. The chemistry prize went to Americans Frances Arnold and George Smith and Britain’s Gregory Winter for work that speeds up the evolution of proteins and enzymes. James Allison of the United States and Japan’s Tasuku Honjo shared the medicine prize for discoveries in activating the body’s immune system to fight cancer. The physics prize was awarded to Donna Strickland of Canada, Gerard Mourou of France and Arthur Ashkin of the U.S. for developments in laser technology. ___ Associated Press writer David Keyton reported in Stockholm and AP writer Jim Heintz reported from Moscow. AP writer Rashid Yahya in Dohuk, Iraq, contributed to this report.

SOLUTION:
Nobel Peace winners urge global action vs. sexual violence.