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.

Example Input: The Democrat announced that legislation he’ll propose in his 2020 State of the State agenda on Jan. 8 will also prohibit online, phone and mail-order sale of e-cigarettes to anyone but registered retailers. “Vaping is a public health crisis, claiming too many lives and making countless others sick in a short period of time,” Cuomo said in a statement. “The problem is made worse by unscrupulous vaping companies who are targeting young people with candy flavored products like cotton candy and bubble gum and other marketing ploys.”   The legislation would codify emergency regulations adopted by state health officials in September to ban flavored e-cigarette sales. That ban is on hold pending a court challenge by the vaping industry led by the Vapor Technology Association. Cuomo said nearly 40% of 12th graders and 27% of all high school students are using e-cigarettes, with flavored products driving the increase in use. Cuomo said his legislation will also empower the state Department of Health to ban the sale of vaping carrier oils that have been blamed for respiratory ailments. Action against e-cigarettes has gained urgency amid the rise of a vaping illness nationwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that as of Dec. 17, more than 2,500 people across the United States have reported respiratory issues related to vaping and 54 people are known to have died.
Example Output: Cuomo to propose ban on e-cig flavors and ads aimed at youth.

Example Input: This is a tricky one. The story does not explicitly address cost, except to call text messaging “a scalable and affordable approach.” For many (or most) patients, the cost of receiving four text messages a week would likely be negligible — covered by an individual’s phone plan or by nominal text rates. However, not everyone owns a mobile phone, a fact that makes access (and cost) a more significant issue. However, the story does deliver on this point. The story discusses both the number of U.S. adults who own mobile phones (90 percent) and the fact that text messages are more accessible than other forms of mobile health communication (such as apps, which require patients to own smartphones or other smart devices). So, while we’d prefer a more in-depth discussion here, we’ll award a Satisfactory rating for the story’s nod in this direction. The story addresses the range of benefits reported in the study, such as reduced cholesterol and blood pressure, but doesn’t quantify that information or offer readers any context. For example, while the story says “patients who had received the text messages had reduced their cholesterol,” the JAMA paper reports that patients who received the text messages had a “mean difference [of] −5 mg/dL” in “LDL-C.” In other words, the information in the paper, while quantified, probably isn’t very useful to many readers outside the health industry. Is “a mean difference of −5 mg/dL in LDL-C” good? Bad? Irrelevant? This is where reporters have an opportunity to shine. If a news story can take those numbers and translate them into language that is accessible to non-experts, it provides a very real service. It would have been great to see that here. As long as people aren’t driving and checking their cell phones, there don’t appear to be any harms associated with receiving well-meaning text messages four times a week, so we’ll mark this one “not applicable.” This is a strong suit. The story not only offers a concise, but good, summary of the study — but it also goes out of its way to address the study’s limitations. For example, the study notes that the study “can’t tell us whether text messaging could eventually lead to fewer subsequent heart attacks among the patients receiving those messages or whether the positive health outcomes would continue past the six-month study window.” Good points, and we’re glad the story includes them. No disease mongering here. The story includes input from an outside expert who was not involved with the research. The story clearly meets our bar here, although it would have been stronger if it had reached out to at least one more independent source — preferably one who hadn’t written an editorial that ran in conjunction with the paper in JAMA. Yes, the editorial was independent and provides some insightful commentary. But it also means we already knew where this source stood on the issue. Finding another reputable expert, who hadn’t already weighed in publicly on the work, would have been great. The focus of the story is not so much on how the text message intervention directly reduced heart disease risk, but on the extent to which it resulted in patients taking steps to reduce their own risk — such as by exercising more, smoking less, making dietary changes, or taking prescription drugs on a regular basis. The story does discuss other “mobile health interventions,” such as smartphone apps — but notes that there don’t appear to be many mobile health projects that rely simply on text messages. The story also looks at how the text messages helped patients pursue lifestyle changes — like exercising more and smoking less — that reduced their risk. It was fairly clear from the story that this was a clinical trial, and that this particular service doesn’t seem to be available to offer customized, encouraging text messages for heart disease patients. From the start, the story frames this research in the context of the much larger “mobile health” field. For example, the story notes that “While there are more than 100,000 health-related apps on the market, the evidence to date is lacking as to whether many of those apps are safe or effective.” Since the story includes quotes from an interview, we can be fairly certain it went beyond the related JAMA news release.
Example Output: Text Reminders Help People Lower Cholesterol, Blood Pressure

Example Input: The reported spills, which have not been publicly detailed, occurred at U.S. Oil Recovery, a former petroleum industry waste processing plant contaminated with a dangerous brew of cancer-causing chemicals. On Aug. 29, the day Harvey’s remnants cleared out, a county pollution control team sent photos to the Environmental Protection Agency of three large concrete tanks flooded with water. That led PRP Group, the company overseeing the ongoing cleanup, to call a federal emergency hotline to report a spill affecting nearby Vince Bayou. Over the next several days, the company reported two more spills of potentially contaminated storm water from U.S. Oil Recovery, according to reports and call logs obtained by the AP from the U.S. Coast Guard, which operates the National Response Center hotline. The EPA requires that spills of oil or hazardous substances in quantities that may be harmful to public health or the environment be immediately reported to the 24-hour hotline when public waterways are threatened. The EPA has not publicly acknowledged the three spills that PRP Group reported to the Coast Guard. The agency said an on-scene coordinator was at the site last Wednesday and found no evidence that material had washed off the site. The EPA says it is still assessing the scene. The AP reported in the days after Harvey that at least seven Superfund sites in and around Houston were underwater during the record-shattering storm. Journalists surveyed the sites by boat, vehicle and on foot. U.S. Oil Recovery was not one of the sites visited by AP. EPA said at the time that its personnel had been unable to reach the sites, though they surveyed the locations using aerial photos. Following AP’s report, EPA has been highlighting the federal agency’s response to the flooding at Superfund sites. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt reiterated that safeguarding the intensely polluted sites is among his top priorities, during a visit Friday to the San Jacinto River Waste Pits, one of the sites AP reported about two weeks ago. Pruitt then boarded a Coast Guard aircraft for an aerial tour of other nearby Superfund sites flooded by Harvey, including U.S. Oil Recovery. Photos taken Aug. 31 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show dark-colored water surrounding the site two days after the first spill was reported to the government hotline. While the photos do not prove contaminated materials leaked from U.S. Oil Recovery, they do show that as the murky floodwaters receded, they flowed through Vince Bayou and emptied into the ship channel leading to the San Jacinto River. The hotline caller identified Vince Bayou as the waterway affected by a spill of unknown material in unknown amounts. Thomas Voltaggio, a retired EPA official who oversaw Superfund cleanups and emergency responses for more than two decades, reviewed the aerial photos, hotline reports and other documents obtained by AP. “It is intuitively obvious that the rains and floods of the magnitude that occurred during Hurricane Harvey would have resulted in some level of contamination having been released to the environment,” said Voltaggio, who is now a private consultant. “Any contamination in those tanks would likely have entered Vince Bayou and potentially the Houston Ship Channel.” He said the amount of contaminants spread from the site during the storm will likely never be known, making the environmental impact difficult to measure. The Houston Ship Channel was already a polluted waterway, with Texas state health officials warning that women of childbearing age and children should not eat fish or crabs caught there because of contamination from dioxins and PCBs. PRP Group, the corporation formed to oversee the cleanup at U.S. Oil Recovery, said it reported the spills as legally required but said subsequent testing of storm water remaining in the affected tanks showed it met federal drinking water standards. The company declined to provide AP copies of those lab reports or a list of specific chemicals for which it tested, saying the EPA was expected to release that information soon. U.S. Oil Recovery was shut down in 2010 after regulators determined operations there posed an environmental threat to Vince Bayou, which flows through the property in Pasadena. Pollution at the former hazardous waste treatment plant is so bad that Texas prosecutors charged the company’s owner, Klaus Genssler, with five criminal felonies. The German native fled the United States and is considered a fugitive. Genssler did not respond to efforts to contact him last week through his social media accounts or an email account linked to his website address. More than 100 companies that sent hazardous materials and oily waste to U.S. Oil Recovery for processing are now paying for the multimillion-dollar cleanup there through a court-monitored settlement, including Baker Hughes Oilfield Operations Inc., U.S. Steel Corp. and Dow Chemical Co. Past sampling of materials at the site revealed high concentrations of hazardous chemicals linked to cancer, such as benzene, ethylbenzene and trichloroethylene. The site also potentially contains toxic heavy metals, including mercury and arsenic. A 2012 EPA study of the more than 500 Superfund sites across the United States located in flood zones specifically noted the risk that floodwaters might carry away and spread toxic materials over a wider area. Over the past six years, remediation efforts at U.S. Oil Recovery have focused on the northern half of the site, including demolishing contaminated structures, removing an estimated 500 tons of sludge and hauling away more than 1,000 abandoned containers of waste. PRP Group said the southern portion of the site, including the three waste tanks that flooded during Harvey, has not yet been fully cleaned. Over the years workers have removed more than 1.5 million gallons of liquid waste — enough to fill nearly three Olympic-sized swimming pools. AP began asking the EPA whether contaminated material might have again leaked from U.S. Oil Recovery last week, after reviewing the aerial photos taken Aug. 31. The EPA said it visited the site on Sept. 4, nearly a week after site operators reported an initial spill, and again the following week. The EPA said that its staff saw no evidence that toxins had washed away from the scene during either visit. “Yesterday, an EPA On-scene coordinator conducted an inspection of Vince Bayou to follow up on a rumor that material was offsite and did not find any evidence of a black oily discharge or material from the U.S. Oil Recovery site,” an EPA media release said on Thursday. PRP Group said the spills occurred at the toxic waste site on Aug. 29, Sept. 6 and Sept. 7. One of the EPA’s media releases on Sept. 9, more than 11 days after the first call was made to the hotline, made reference to overflowing water at the scene, but did not describe it as a spill. The company said it reported the first spill after Harvey’s floodwaters swamped the three tanks, filling them. The resulting pressure that built up in the tanks dislodged plugs blocking a series of interconnecting pipes, causing the second and third spills reported to the hotline the following week. The company does not know how much material leaked from the tanks, soaking into the soil or flowing into nearby Vince Bayou. As part of its post-storm cleanup workers have vacuumed 63 truckloads holding about 315,000 gallons from the tanks. The Superfund site is located just a few hundred yards from the Pollution Control Services offices for Harris County, which includes Houston. Its director, Bob Allen, says his team took pictures of the flooding on Aug. 29, when the area that includes the three big tanks was still underwater. The AP requested those photos as public records, but they have not yet been released. Allen said his staff did not note any black water or oily sheen on the surface at the time, and did not collect water samples for testing. He said the EPA later sampled the area to determine whether there was contamination. “We knew that the water probably got into the plant, probably washed out some of the stuff that was in the clarifier,” Allen said, referring to one of the old concrete tanks once used to store toxic waste. “Once they get done with the assessment of that site and the other Superfund Harris County sites, then they’ll probably let us know, let the public know, what’s been going on.” ___ Biesecker reported from Washington. Associated Press reporters Reese Dunklin in Dallas and Jeff Horwitz in Washington contributed to this reporting. ___ Follow Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck and Bajak at https://twitter.com/fbajak ___ Submit a confidential tip to The Associated Press at https://www.ap.org.tips
Example Output:
AP Exclusive: Evidence of spills at toxic site during floods.