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: "Bounciest Democrat on November's statewide ballot? It might be Hank Gilbert, making his second hard charge for state agriculture commissioner versus Todd Staples, the Republican who topped him four years ago. Gilbert, ever prowling for issues, recently trumpeted that the Texas Department of Agriculture is looking at buying thousands of stress balls -- squeezable toys. He said in a Sept. 24 press release: ""Make no mistake, Texans love their balls: footballs, baseballs, basketballs, and soccer balls. But 300,000 stress balls? It seems a little extreme, but that's the quantity of grape, barbell, and book-shaped polyurethane stress balls the Texas Department of Agriculture could be spending taxpayer dollars on...""  Really? To our inquiry, Gilbert's campaign provided Web links to the agriculture agency's June request for bids as well as a September post on a state website indicating that a $99,000 contract to provide promotional materials was awarded to a Massachusetts company, Oceans Promotions. We downloaded the June 29 bid-request package from a site for state requisitions overseen by the state comptroller's office. The package shows the department was seeking bids to provide up to 300,000 stress ""relievers,"" which we're guessing are not balls because they're not round. Precisely, the package says, the agency sought bids to make ""promotional items with logo imprints to follow through on (the) TDA Food and Nutrition Texans Bring It Campaign,"" with the items to include grape-shaped stress relievers with ""Texans Bring It"" written on them or ""Eating Right,"" which would be made of polyurethane and be two inches high by three inches wide. The package says a second set of stress relievers, each one called ""Dumbbell,"" would be imprinted ""Texans Bring It"" and ""Exercise"" and be five inches high by 1.8 inches in diameter. A third stress reliever would be imprinted ""Book"" and ""Texans Bring It,"" according to the bid package, while other promotional items would include pencils, buttons and bumperstickers. The package says the bids were sought for various quantities, starting from 2,500 and topping out at 100,000 each. It electronically links to a Branders.com site showing what the agency wanted the stress relievers to look like (our interpretation: bunches of purple grapes). Is all this a real deal? To our inquiry, Bryan Black, Staples' spokesman, replied via e-mail: ""An invitation for bid was issued for these federally funded educational items to reduce the $5.8 billion avoidable health care expenditures, paid by taxpayers, associated with overweight and obesity health problems."" We followed up with Black, asking if it's accurate to conclude that up to 300,000 of the stress relievers are being purchased. We also wondered why the purchase was being made. Black said he'd limit his comment to his e-mailed statement. Surely the agency would pipe up if Gilbert got its purchase plans wrong."

SOLUTION: Hank Gilbert Says the Texas Department of Agriculture seeks to purchase up to 300,000 promotional stress balls.

PROBLEM: The new rules, which have been opened to the public for consultation, will involve the establishment of a comprehensive “management system” covering the production, sale, utilization and recycling of thin plastic film in the countryside. Chinese farmers, mostly in the arid north and west, cover fields with vast amounts of “plastic mulch” to help maintain soil moisture and protect against pests. The technique has played an important role in boosting yields and raising the quality of crops, the agriculture ministry said in a notice. “But because of excessive use and inadequate recycling, agricultural-use plastic film pollution in some regions has been getting worse and worse, and it has already become a major environmental problem holding back the green development of agriculture,” the ministry said. In areas of northwest China that made use of plastic mulch, contamination rates stood at an average of 36 kilograms per hectare, with the figure as high as 138 kilograms in some regions, it said. The new rules would force farmers to use only film that meets quality standards, and they must also collect plastic waste from fields before its expiry date and deliver to approved recycling outlets. They will also be encouraged to reuse old film. China is said to use about 2 million tonnes of plastic film every year to cover around 200,000 square kilometers of farmland, an area the size of Belarus. But government researchers say the recycling rate stands at just 180,000 tonnes. If uncollected, the plastic waste eventually degrades the soil and could also infiltrate crops, with one parliamentary delegate from Shandong warning in March that some of the province’s exports of ginger and spinach had been contaminated. Beijing is aiming to make around 90% of its total farmland safe for agriculture by the end of next year, part of its efforts to guarantee food security.

SOLUTION: China drafts new rules to control rural plastic pollution.

PROBLEM: In late June and early July 2020, Snopes readers asked whether Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s foremost immunologist, had stated that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was told to cancel funding for research into how coronavirus infections emerge in humans. Fauci, who leads the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made the statement when responding to a question while testifying, along with other coronavirus task force leaders, on June 23, 2020, before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The testimony came as the U.S. experienced a spike in reported COVID-19 cases. Although scientists believe that the novel coronavirus, the virus causing the COVID-19 disease pandemic, had animal origins before it infected humans, the Trump administration has promoted an unfounded conspiracy theory that the disease originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, where it was originally detected in the winter of 2019. U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey asked Fauci about the grant, stating it didn’t make any sense to him that funding for research on the coronavirus had been canceled “while we are in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic,” asking Fauci if he knew why the decision had been made. “Why was it canceled? It was canceled because the NIH was told to cancel it,” Fauci replied. “I don’t know the reason, but we were told to cancel it.”

SOLUTION:
Dr. Anthony Fauci said the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was told to cancel a grant funding research for a study investigating how coronaviruses jump from bats to humans.