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: "Ohio Sen. Rob Portman has been busy in Washington touting the Comprehensive Addiction Recovery Act in response to a shocking number of heroin overdoses in Ohio. The bill just passed in the Senate, 94-1. (Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse was the sole ""nay,"" saying he believes that fighting addiction is a local issue.) Ohio ranks high on the list of states reeling from the national epidemic. In Montgomery County, which encompasses Dayton, Ohio, heroin-related deaths increased 225 percent between 2011 and 2015. Back in the 1970s, the heroin on U.S. streets was the ""black tar"" variety, and much of it came from southeast Asia. In 2010, 80 percent of the heroin in the world came from poppy fields in Afghanistan, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. So when Portman said that most of the heroin in America comes from Mexico’s border, we were skeptical. Portman, it turns out, has done his homework. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s National Drug Threat Assessment of 2015 says that Mexico is the primary supplier of heroin to the United States. ""Southeast Asia was once the dominant supplier of heroin in the United States, but Southeast Asian heroin is now rarely detected in U.S. markets,"" the report state. ""Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Colombia dominate the U.S. heroin market, because of their proximity, established transportation and distribution infrastructure, and ability to satisfy U.S. heroin demand."" The report also says that Mexican ""transnational criminal organizations,"" (the DEA’s term for drug-dealing gangs) ""pose the greatest criminal drug threat to the United States; no other group is currently positioned to challenge them."" The National Drug Threat report notes that Colombian gangs were traditionally the suppliers of wholesale cocaine and heroin to Mexican and Dominican groups. But cartels in Mexico are ramping up their roles on the supply side -- opium production in Mexico increased by 50 percent in 2014. Mexican labs also produce fentanyl, a synthetic painkiller that is 80 to 100 times stronger than morphine. Fentanyl is sometimes mixed with heroin or substituted for heroin, and the DEA reports more than 700 overdoses attributed to fentanyl between late 2013 and early 2015. Drugs get past the U.S. borders mostly ""by land, not by sea,"" said Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, in the same March 8 hearing with Portman. And a 2015 Washington Post series on the surge of heroin puts the border detection rate at a scant 1.5 percent. Smugglers’ creativity defies gravity: One successful bust came when agents caught two men flying a drone carrying 28 pounds of heroin from Mexico to California. Our ruling Portman said that heroin is coming to the United States primarily from Mexico. He hasn’t been studying drug facts for nothing."

SOLUTION: We understand that this heroin is primarily coming from Mexico, over the border.

PROBLEM: “She kept screaming, ‘These African bitches brought Ebola into our country and are making everybody sick!’” said Pewu, 29, who emigrated from Liberia in 2005. “Then she told her son, ‘You know the country that’s called Liberia that they show on the TV? That’s where these bitches are from.’”  Pewu’s experience points to an alarming trend. While many Americans have reached out to help, African communities in the United States are reporting an increasing number of incidents of ostracism. Thursday’s news that a physician who had treated Ebola patients in West Africa has tested positive for the disease in New York heightened anxieties even further. Some Liberians, whose home country has been hardest hit by the worst outbreak of the virus on record, say they are being shunned by friends and co-workers and fear losing their jobs. In California, doctors refused to examine a child believed to have been in contact with someone who traveled to West Africa but turned out to have no risk of Ebola, a nurses’ association said. In Rhode Island, two women said they were disinvited to a baby shower for a co-worker. And in South Carolina, a high school student was sent home for 14 days because the student’s parent had visited Senegal, a country that has had one non-fatal case of Ebola and was declared Ebola-free last week, according to a school spokesman. At least two speeches by Liberians have been canceled by U.S. universities, and a college in Texas refused admission to  Nigerian students over worries about the virus even though that country has had few cases. Oretha Bestman-Yates, a healthcare worker in New York, said she was barred from returning to her job after a trip to Liberia - despite 21 days of quarantine and no signs of illness. “People are looking at Liberians as if we have Ebola in our DNA,” said Ezekiel Solee, 55, a pastor in Rhode Island at a meeting in Providence on Tuesday to discuss the stigma. “Even when you hang your jacket, no one else wants to hang his jacket near you because they are afraid.”  This week, President Barack Obama’s administration issued new guidelines for hospitals treating suspected Ebola cases and ordered all travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea - the West African countries most affected by the disease - to be funneled for screening through five selected airports. Four people in the United States have been diagnosed with Ebola, which as of Wednesday had infected 9,911 people in Africa and killed 4,868 since the outbreak began earlier this year, the World Health Organization said. Many Republicans, joined by some Democrats, have called for a travel ban to the region. Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh linked the case of Thomas Duncan, a Liberian who died of Ebola in Dallas, to illegal immigration, saying there was a “huge Liberian community of illegal immigrants in Dallas.”  Sociologist Barry Glassner, author of the book “The Culture of Fear,” said the combination of Ebola fear and racial prejudice makes xenophobic reactions to dark-skinned people from West Africa even more likely. “One has to wonder: If these were Swedes, would we be seeing the same response?” he asked. Alexander Kollie, 43, president of the Liberian Ministerial Fellowship of Rhode Island, said he feels increasingly ostracized. “Because we are from Africa and our skin color identifies us as being from Africa, we are being treated differently,” he said. “People avoid us, and they are afraid of us.”  But fear of Ebola also runs deep among West Africans. Several Liberian community associations in the United States have asked members to voluntarily quarantine themselves if they have traveled to the affected countries. In Staten Island’s Little Liberia, where Pewu lives, streets bustle with men and women in bright traditional attire, loudly greeting each other in their native languages. But some here have begun limiting their greetings to verbal salutes. Tamba Aghailas, 42, a human resources specialist who recently traveled to Liberia, said so many people in the community were uncomfortable touching him when he returned that he stopped greeting acquaintances with a handshake. Experts like Dr. Mark Rupp, an infectious disease specialist at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which treated Ebola-infected cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, urged the public to resist irrational fear of Ebola, which is spread through contact with body fluids of someone who is showing symptoms. “We even have some examples here in our own community – children of parents who are working in our biocontainment unit being shunned,” he said. “That level of paranoia is just not helpful, and it’s just not appropriate.”

SOLUTION: With U.S. Ebola fear running high, African immigrants face ostracism.

PROBLEM: In May 2020, The New York Times reported that Asian giant hornets, often referred to as “murder hornets,” had been spotted for the first time in the United States. This was not welcome news, and social media sites quickly filled up with alarming images of these large insects. One such photograph supposedly showed four “murder hornets” in the palm of a person’s hand:  This is a genuine photograph of Asian giant hornets. A 2010 article from National Geographic described these hornets as “small but highly efficient killing [machines]” that were approximately 2 inches long with a 3-inch wingspan. Although people have died from this hornet’s painful sting, the insects are only “highly efficient killing machines” when it comes to bees. National Geographic wrote: Bees, other hornet species, and larger insects such as praying mantises are no match for the giant hornets, which often stalk their prey in relentless armies. Just one of these hornets can kill 40 European honeybees a minute; a handful of the creatures can slaughter 30,000 European honeybees within hours, leaving a trail of severed insect heads and limbs. People are not the Japanese giant hornet’s usual prey, but those who have felt its sting describe the pain as excruciating. Masato Ono, an entomologist at Tamagawa University, near Tokyo, said it’s “like a hot nail through my leg.” Someone who is stung by the hornet and doesn’t receive proper treatment soon thereafter can die from the venom, which is powerful enough to disintegrate human flesh. About 40 people die each year after being stung by giant hornets, mainly as a result of an allergic reaction to the venom. The above-displayed photograph was taken in 2011 by Devon Henderson and shows four dead Asian giant hornet queens in the palm of the photographer’s hand. This image was originally posted to Henderson’s Flickr account dedicated to Hymenoptera, a large order of insects which includes wasps, bees, and ants.

SOLUTION:
A photograph shows four Asian giant hornets barely fitting on the palm of someone's hand.