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Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.
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Paragraph: There were nearly 1,000 drug-related deaths in Scotland last year. Correct, there were 934 registered in 2017. The UK has the highest death rate in the EU from drugs. Estonia had the highest rate of drug-related deaths per million people aged 15 to 64 in the EU, based on research using data from 2015 and 2016. The UK placed joint-third alongside Ireland. Scotland’s drug-related death rate is the highest in the EU. Correct if you compare Scotland to a league table of EU sovereign countries. This is based on a comparison of the drug-related death rate per million people aged 15 to 64 in 2015 and 2016. Claim 1 of 4 Claim: Scotland’s drug-related death rate is the highest in the EU.
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Correct if you compare Scotland to a league table of EU sovereign countries. This is based on a comparison of the drug-related death rate per million people aged 15 to 64 in 2015 and 2016.


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Paragraph: While likely to be welcomed by green groups, some do not think it goes far enough to protect remaining forests in the tropical archipelago. The moratorium, which covers around 66 million hectares (254,827 square miles) of primary forest and peatland, was first introduced in 2011 and has been renewed regularly as part of the efforts to reduce emissions from fires caused by deforestation. “The president signed an instruction on stopping new permits and improving primary forest and peatland governance,” Forestry and Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said in a statement. Bakar said the Aug. 5 presidential instruction mandated that ministers, governors and other officials could not issue new permits within the moratorium area. Indonesia has had one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, with more than 74 million hectares (285,700 square miles) of rainforest - an area nearly twice the size of Japan - logged, burned or degraded in the last half century, according to Greenpeace. The moratorium decision comes after authorities declared an emergency in six provinces on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo where smoke from outbreaks of forest fires have started causing acute respiratory infections. The air pollution in Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan on the island of Borneo was getting worse and had forced authorities to restrict school hours, said Arie Rompas, a Greenpeace Indonesia forest campaigner. Rompas said the permanent moratorium still did not provide adequate protection for primary forest and peatland in the long run, blaming a lack of punishment and loopholes in regulations. “The policy should not be via a presidential instruction because it is the weakest among legal instruments,” he said. According to the ministry’s data, the area mapped out for the moratorium had been changed from 69.1 million hectares initially to 66.1 million hectares recently. “If it’s a permanent one, changing the map should not be allowed anymore,” he said, adding that Greenpeace had found that  permits for palm-oil, pulp wood, logging and mining had been granted on 1.6 million hectares from the original moratorium. Claim: Indonesia president makes moratorium on forest clearance permanent.
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Indonesian President Joko Widodo has issued a permanent moratorium on new forest clearance for activities such as palm plantations or logging, the environment minister said on Thursday.


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Paragraph: Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis issued statements saying they will vote against Dourson to serve as head of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Environmentalists and Senate Democrats have vehemently opposed Dourson, a toxicologist with close ties to the chemical industry. That means only one more Republican “no” vote would likely be needed to torpedo his nomination. Moderate GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told reporters Thursday she is also leaning against supporting Dourson, but has not yet made a final decision. The White House and EPA did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday or Thursday. Despite the fact he hasn’t yet been confirmed by the Senate, Dourson has already been working at the agency as a senior adviser to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. The agency’s press office did not respond to emails seeking how much he is being paid. The Associated Press reported in September that Dourson has for years accepted payments for criticizing studies that raised concerns about the safety of his clients’ products, according to a review of financial records and his published work. Past corporate clients of Dourson and of a research group he ran include Dow Chemical Co., Koch Industries Inc. and Chevron Corp. His research has also been underwritten by industry trade and lobbying groups representing the makers of plastics, pesticides, processed foods and cigarettes. Burr and Tillis, both of whom are considered reliably pro-business conservatives, cited Dourson’s past work and worries among their home-state constituents about tainted drinking water in opposing his nomination. “Over the last several weeks, Senator Tillis has done his due diligence in reviewing Mr. Dourson’s body of work,” said a statement from Tillis’ office. “Senator Tillis still has serious concerns about his record and cannot support his nomination.” Marine veterans and their families blame decades-old contamination of wells at a North Carolina base with solvents and dry-cleaning chemicals for infant deaths and serious health problems that include cancer. More recently, concerns have been raised about undisclosed discharges of chemicals used to manufacture Teflon and GoreTex into the Cape Fear River, a source of municipal drinking water for Wilmington and other southeastern North Carolina communities. Dourson worked at the EPA for more than a decade, leaving in 1994 as the manager at a lab that assessed the health risks of exposure to chemicals. The following year, he founded Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, a private toxicity evaluation nonprofit organization that tests chemicals and produces reports on which chemicals are hazardous in what quantities. Dourson’s views toward industry are consistent with others Trump has selected as top federal regulators. Among them is Pruitt, who in March overruled the findings of his agency’s own scientists to reverse an effort to ban chlorpyrifos, one of the nation’s most widely used pesticides. Court records show Dourson and his work have often been called on when his corporate clients are seeking to fend off lawsuits. DuPont was accused of polluting a West Virginia town with Perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a chemical that the company’s internal tests had long ago concluded was toxic. Corporate officials discussed hiring Dourson as part of a strategy to defend themselves. Dourson led a team that found in 2002 that PFOA levels up to 150 parts per billion were safe, a level higher than was found in testing of 188 private wells and springs. That was also well above the 1 part per billion that Dupont’s own scientists had concluded could be considered safe years before. The EPA now says that only 70 parts per trillion of PFOA are acceptable — or only 0.05 percent of what Dourson’s team said was safe. DuPont and a former subsidiary, Chemours Co., later paid $761 million to settle 3,550 lawsuits stemming from its use of the chemical. Chemours is the company whose spills of a chemical called GenX, a replacement for PFOA, are now at issue in North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. “I will not be supporting the nomination of Michael Dourson,” said Burr, the state’s senior senator. “With his record and our state’s history of contamination at Camp Lejeune as well as the current GenX water issues in Wilmington, I am not confident he is the best choice for our country.” The stand was quickly praised by environmental advocacy groups that rarely find common ground with the two Tarheel Republicans. “No one who has spent decades arguing on behalf of the chemical industry for weaker safety standards should be charged with reviewing chemicals for the EPA,” said Scott Faber, a senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “It would be like putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department.” ___ Follow Associated Press environmental reporter Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck Claim: Trump EPA nominee opposed by GOP senators from NC.
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North Carolina’s two Republican senators say they oppose President Donald Trump’s pick to oversee chemical safety at the Environmental Protection Agency, putting Michael L. Dourson’s nomination at serious risk.