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: The 6.6 magnitude quake hit early on Tuesday, damaging buildings, toppling power lines and triggering landslides in the central area of the Philippines’ southern island. A seven-year-old child and his 44-year old father were among those who were killed in the North Cotabato province after they were struck by a boulder, disaster officials said. Authorities said the death toll could rise further because many injured were not immediately brought to hospitals. “It was depressing to see the damage left by the earthquake,” Abril Espadera, a disaster official in North Cotabato, told Reuters, as he recalled seeing collapsed homes and demolished buildings in the province, including schools. Smaller tremors rattled nervous residents throughout the day and those who were afraid to return to their homes set up tents to shelter near school yards, Espadera said. In Magsaysay town in Davao del Sur province, rescuers were trying to recover three bodies after landslides in two separate towns swallowed parts of agricultural areas, police said. The quake, whose magnitude was initially put at 6.7 by the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, was the second powerful quake to strike Mindanao in two weeks. Authorities had flagged the risk of landslides after the 6.3 quake on Oct. 16 in central Mindanao that killed seven and injured more than 200. Earthquakes are common in the Philippines, which is on the geologically active Pacific Ring of Fire. Power cables swayed in Davao city, the home town of President Rodrigo Duterte, where people rushed to open spaces, and some fainted out of fear. The quake also triggered power cuts in nearby General Santos city, media said. Some schools in the area have suspended classes. Duterte’s office has called for calm as it mobilized all government agencies to undertake damage assessment and to coordinate rescue and relief operations.

Answer: Death toll in southern Philippines earthquake rises to seven.


Question: His two attempts to craft legislation replacing Obama’s law have collapsed for lack of GOP support. Republican opposition seems likely to doom a vote next week on his Plan C, a bill simply repealing much of Obama’s statute. Along the way, conservative Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., accused McConnell of a “serious breach of trust” by telling moderates that proposed Medicaid cuts would not occur. His fellow Kentucky Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, was a constant thorn and the most vociferous opponent of McConnell’s effort. And Utah Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, gave party leaders little advance word when he and Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, deserted the bill late Monday, effectively killing it in the dark of night. “This has been a very, very challenging experience for all of us,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday. McConnell faced a difficult environment. Polls have consistently shown Obama’s statute was far more popular than the GOP effort to repeal it, making his bill a tough sell to colleagues. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings and zigzagging engagement haven’t helped. And facing unbroken Democratic opposition, McConnell needed to win over at least 50 of the 52 GOP senators, a .962 batting average he’s been unable to achieve. “Mitch has a tough, tough job and frankly I cut him a lot of slack on this. He can only do so much,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. Democrats, who often grudgingly marvel at McConnell’s moves, kept waiting for him to pull a rabbit from what turned out to be an empty hat. They said he overreached by turning a bill reshaping Obama’s law into one that also cut nearly $1 trillion in taxes over a decade and sliced almost $800 billion from Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, disabled and nursing home patients. They say he boxed himself in by rushing to deliver on his party’s seven-year-old overpromise to repeal Obama’s law. That proved an arduous task that angered tens of millions who’ve benefited from the statute, especially with much of McConnell’s work performed behind closed office doors. “I don’t have any sympathy for him,” said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., his party’s No. 2 Senate leader. “I assume he felt duty-bound as the Republican leader” to pursue repeal of Obama’s law. But he said McConnell should have known that “rewriting the health care system of America on the fly and in secret was not going to work.” McConnell seemed to be trying to turn lemons into lemonade with next week’s likely rejection of a simple repeal of much of Obama’s law. By losing, GOP leaders would send a message to conservative voters that they tried to obliterate the law, while signaling to Republican senators that the votes aren’t there and it is time to move on. A senator for 33 years, the 75-year-old McConnell has a reputation for weaving compromises that avert onrushing political disasters. He cut several such deals during Obama’s years in the White House, including major budget pacts in 2011 and 2013. But once Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans took House and Senate control this year, it became McConnell’s job to play offense. In particular, he is quarterback of the Senate GOP drive to repeal Obama’s law. But dismantling the law is not going to happen, at least in the immediate future. Assessing Democrats as unwilling to help them scrap Obama’s law — which they were — McConnell ignored them from the start. That tactic ignored his own advice from his 2016 memoir, “The Long Game,” in which he criticized Democrats for passing Obama’s 2010 statute “without regard for the views of the other side.” “Once you only have 52 votes and you try to do a bill just with Republicans, you set yourself up for a nearly impossible task,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. McConnell’s latest bill would cut Medicaid, letting insurers sell policies with negligible coverage and rolling back Obama taxes on the health care industry. Getting GOP votes for it is a Rubik’s cube-like problem because conservatives and moderates have mutually exclusive demands, like whether to slash Medicaid or erase Obama regulations protecting consumers. “You have first- and second-term twerps that think they know the solution to everything,” said former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., who retired in 2007. “This was always going to be a difficult process and I’m not sure how we would have handled it differently,” said No. 2 Senate GOP leader John Cornyn of Texas. Movement conservatives who have often accused McConnell of not being an aggressive enough champion of their causes do fault him. “Mitchcare collapses,” read a statement by Ken Cuccinelli, who heads the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has clashed with McConnell. Cuccinelli called the bill’s demise “an embarrassing defeat for someone who portrays himself as a strategic genius.”

Answer: Crumbling health bill dents McConnell image as top tactician.


Question: Chinese health authorities did not immediately confirm the report from state broadcaster CCTV. Coronaviruses are spread through coughing or sneezing or by touching an infected person. Some cause the common cold and others can lead to more severe respiratory diseases, such as SARS and MERS. Such viruses are common in people but more exotic versions from bats, camels and other animals have caused severe illness. The novel coronavirus is different from those that have previously been identified, CCTV said. Health authorities ruled out SARS and MERS as possible causes over the weekend. As of Sunday, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission said 59 people in the central Chinese city were being treated for the respiratory illness. Seven were in critical condition, while the rest were stable. Eight patients were discharged Wednesday, Xinhua state news agency reported. They had not exhibited any pneumonia symptoms for several days. Chinese researchers used a sample from one patient to conduct gene sequencing of the virus, said Gauden Galea, a World Health Organization representative to China. “Preliminary identification of a novel virus in a short period of time is a notable achievement,” Galea said in a statement, adding that it “demonstrates China’s increased capacity to manage new outbreaks.” Possible cases of the same illness have been reported in Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan involving recent travelers to Wuhan. Since the end of 2019, Hong Kong public hospitals have reported 38 patients who presented with fever, respiratory infection or pneumonia symptoms after recent visits to Wuhan. Twenty-one of those patients have since been discharged, Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority said Wednesday. No serious cases have been found to be related to those in Wuhan, said Hong Kong health chief Sophia Chan. None of the Hong Kong patients had visited the seafood market in Wuhan where some of the mainland Chinese patients worked. The South China Seafood City food market will be suspended and investigated, Wuhan’s health commission said. A Chinese woman who works for a South Korean company was diagnosed Tuesday with pneumonia, according to the Korea Centers of Disease Control and Prevention said. Meanwhile, Taiwan authorities said Wednesday that they were quarantining a patient who fell ill with flu symptoms on Jan. 6, more than two weeks after the individual returned from a trip to Wuhan. The new illnesses had raised fears of a recurrence of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. The disease first infected people in southern China in late 2002, and spread to more than two dozen countries. More than 8,000 people were sickened and nearly 800 died, but no cases have been reported since 2004. Another coronavirus causes MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome, which started in Jordan and Saudi Arabia in 2012 and spread into about two dozen other countries. About 2,500 lab-confirmed cases have been reported, including more than 800 deaths, with cases continuing to be seen in recent years. On Wednesday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out a health alert advising physicians who treat patients with pneumonia-like illness to consider a possible link to the Chinese outbreak and to wear masks and take other precautions in treating patients who recently traveled to Wuhan. The CDC this week also advised U.S. travelers going to Wuhan to avoid animals and sick people and wash their hands often. ___ Stobbe reported from New York.

Answer:
Chinese report says illnesses may be from new coronavirus.