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.
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Question: “This pandemic is not only a public health crisis, it is also fueling an economic crisis the likes of which we have not seen since the Great Depression,” Hancock said at a news conference. Denver has seen steep declines in sales, lodging and other taxes since the pandemic hit Colorado two months ago, and the state is still under a safer-at-home order that has placed restrictions on businesses. City leaders say the drop in tax revenue is affecting the fund that pays for police and fire services, as well as street maintenance. American cities, from Puyallup, Washington, to Miramar, Florida, have also furloughed employees to save money in the face of dire economic forecasts. In April, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti released a spending plan he called “a document of our pain” that includes service cuts and furloughs for nearly 16,000 workers. Under the proposal, city employees would take 26 furlough days, the equivalent of a 10% pay cut, in the coming year. The spending reductions in Los Angeles are likely to be a sign of what’s to come at city halls across the nation, as jobless lines grow and local treasuries see steep drops in tax revenue. Denver’s planned furloughs, which do not apply to uniformed employees like firefighters, police officers and sheriff’s deputies, will save the city about $16 million. The city also is reducing travel, hiring and purchases, and it is asking departments to cut 7.5% from their budgets. About 3,000 of Denver’s 12,000 employees are uniformed workers. “I want everyone to know that we have worked to exhaust every other tool we had before taking this step,” said Hancock, who repeated his call for lawmakers to include cities in the next federal stimulus package. “The reality is this: If cities can’t recover, there will be no national recovery,” he said. Brendan Hanlon, the city’s chief financial officer, said he thought the fallout from the 2008-2009 Great Recession was astonishing, but the current crisis will be harder to address. “I could have never imagined seeing the numbers that we’re seeing right now and the gravity that it means to the services that we provide to the public every day here in Denver,” he said. The city last instituted furloughs in 2011. A survey by the National League of Cities found nearly universal agreement that cities would be hit hard by revenue shortfalls caused by the coronavirus outbreak, and in many cases furloughs and layoffs would be used to close budget gaps.

Answer: Denver to furlough thousands of workers amid coronavirus.


Question: The justices did not comment in refusing to review an appeals court ruling that upheld the law. Enforcement of the law had been on hold pending the legal challenge but will begin shortly, said Steve Pitt, general counsel to Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin. The American Civil Liberties Union had challenged the law on behalf of Kentucky’s lone remaining abortion clinic. The ACLU argued that “display and describe” ultrasound laws violate physicians’ speech rights under the First Amendment. The federal appeals court in Cincinnati upheld the Kentucky law, but its sister court in Richmond, Virginia, struck down a similar measure in North Carolina. The Supreme Court had previously upheld “informed consent” laws for women seeking abortions. The court will hear an abortion case in March, over Louisiana’s attempt to require doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Doctors’ speech also has been an issue in non-abortion cases. The federal appeals court in Atlanta struck down parts of a 2011 Florida law that sought to prohibit doctors from talking about gun safety with their patients. Under the law, doctors faced fines and the possible loss of their medical licenses for discussing guns with patients. In Kentucky, doctors must describe the ultrasound in detail while the pregnant woman listens to the fetal heartbeat. Women can avert their eyes and cover their ears to avoid hearing the description or the fetal heartbeat. Doctors failing to comply face fines and can be referred to the state’s medical licensing board. The ACLU called the law unconstitutional and unethical. ACLU lawyer Alexa Kolbi-Molinas said that the Supreme Court “has rubber-stamped extreme political interference in the doctor-patient relationship.” Pitt painted a different picture of the law. “It’s a five-minute procedure that takes place before the abortion is performed to give women who might have a lack of understanding of what’s actually in the womb, that this is a real living human being there, they might change their mind,” he said. The high court’s decision not to review the ultrasound case came on Bevin’s final day in office. Bevin, a Republican, is an outspoken abortion opponent. During his term, he signed a series of measures passed by the GOP-led legislature that put limits and conditions on abortion, including the 2017 ultrasound law. Those laws have triggered several legal challenges. Bevin was defeated in last month’s election by Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, but Republicans remain in control of the state legislature. ___ Associated Press writer Bruce Schreiner contributed to this report from Frankfort, Ky.

Answer: Supreme Court leaves Kentucky’s ultrasound law in place.


Question: "For most couples, the ideal honeymoon getaway might entail a week of unwinding at a beach resort or a stay in a secluded mountainside cabin. Not Bernie Sanders. He chose a colder route. Sanders and his wife, Jane Sanders, spent their first days as newlyweds in the Soviet Union, claims George Will in a recent Washington Post column. Will’s Aug. 7 column focused mostly on the legacy of Robert Conquest, who died Aug. 3 at age 98, and whose writings on Soviet prisons documented the atrocities of the Stalin regime. A reader asked us to look into the accuracy of the final paragraph of Will’s column, which invoked Sanders’ ""honeymoon."" It reads: ""Conquest lived to see a current U.S. presidential candidate, a senator, who had chosen, surely as an ideological gesture, to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988. Gulags still functioned, probably including some of the ‘cold Auschwitzes’ in Siberia, described in Conquest’s ‘Kolyma.’ The honeymooner did not mind that in 1988 political prisoners were — as may still be the case — being tortured in psychiatric ‘hospitals.’ Thanks to the unblinking honesty of people like Conquest, the Soviet Union now is such a receding memory that Bernie Sanders’s moral obtuseness — the obverse of Conquest’s character — is considered an amusing eccentricity."" We wanted to see if Sanders actually honeymooned on the turf of the United States’ former adversary during the final years of the Cold War. Sister cities The trip took place while Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vt., from 1981 to 1989. Toward the end of his mayoral tenure, the small city on Lake Champlain launched a sister-city program with Yaroslavl, located 160 miles northeast of Moscow. The program, which is still operating today, has facilitated exchanges between the two cities involving ""mayors, business people, firefighters, jazz musicians, youth orchestras, mural painters, high school students, medical students, nurses, librarians and the (Yaroslavl) ice-hockey team,"" according to its website. Along with sister-city relationships with Bethlehem in the West Bank and Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, the Yaroslavl program was part of Sanders’ unorthodox attempt to take on international issues from a small city in New England. Sanders also actively pursued his agenda outside of the country, writing letters to world leaders and even traveling to Cuba to meet with the mayor of Havana. ""Burlington had a foreign policy,"" he wrote in his 1997 book Outsider in the House, ""because, as progressives, we understood that we all live in one world."" The bond between Burlington and Yaroslavl solidified when Sanders and his wife, as members of a 12-person delegation from Burlington, paid their Soviet counterparts a visit in 1988. The timing of the trip was unusual. Bernie and Jane were married May 28, 1988. The delegation left Burlington the next day. ""Trust me,"" Sanders writes in the book. ""It was a very strange honeymoon."" When reached for comment, Sanders’ campaign said that the dates for the trip had already been set, and the couple ""set their wedding date to coincide with that trip because they didn't want to take more time off."" In a 2007 interview, Jane Sanders also recalled the peculiar timing: ""The day after we got married, we marched in a Memorial Day parade, and then we took off in a plane to start the sister city project with Yaroslavl with 10 other people on my honeymoon."" Bernie Sanders also refers to the trip sarcastically as ""quiet and romantic"" in his book. The ""honeymoon"" was dotted with meetings, interviews and diplomatic functions. A June 2015 profile in The Guardian described the former mayor’s meeting with Yaroslavl city officials: ""After receiving a rundown of central planning, Soviet-style, from Yaroslavl’s mayor, Alexander Riabkov, Sanders notes how the quality of both housing and health care in America appeared to be ‘significantly better’ than in the communist state. ‘However,’ he added, ‘the cost of both services is much, much, higher in the United States.’ "" An education in central planning probably wasn’t the only item on Sanders’ itinerary. Yaroslavl is home to historic churches and buildings, and the Sanderses would have been in for some good sightseeing, said Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Will made it sound as if Sanders was visiting to condone Soviet torture practices, but the Burlington trip was more of a dialogue-building exchange program. The Vermont weekly newspaper Seven Days reported in 2009 that the sister-city relationship ""helped local residents who sought to ease tensions between the United States and Soviet Union by initiating citizen-to-citizen exchanges with a Russian city."" Also, the Soviet Union was barely intact at the time of the trip. Negotiations had opened up between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a few years earlier. ""It was at the beginning of perestroika,"" said Michael Briggs, a spokesman for the Sanders campaign, referring to the restructuring policy Gorbachev instituted in the mid 1980s. Gulags still existed and political prisoners were still held in 1988, said Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. But a watershed moment came when Gorbachev allowed physicist Andrei Sakharov to return from internal exile two years earlier. ""The power of the Communist Party was being questioned and the confrontation with the West was winding down through negotiations,"" Cohen said. In 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and in 1988, Reagan himself spoke in Moscow’s Red Square. One year later brought the fall of the Berlin Wall. Three years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Participation in the Burlington-Yaroslavl program has waned over the years, though it was viewed as a ""glamorous endeavor"" by many in Burlington at the time, program leader Howard Seaver said in 2009. Will could not be reached for comment through his researcher. Our ruling Will wrote that Sanders chose ""to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988."" Sanders and his wife did travel to Yaroslavl, a city in the Soviet Union, after their wedding in 1988. In the sense that the trip came after the couple were married, the trip was a honeymoon. The two have also referred to the trip that way, albeit sarcastically at times. But it was an unusual honeymoon, to say the least. The trip’s primary purpose was diplomacy, not leisure, and included about 10 extra guests. Will’s claim is accurate but is missing context about the trip’s underlying purpose."

Answer:
"George Will Says Bernie Sanders chose ""to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988."