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: Kentaro Iwata, a professor of infectious disease at Kobe University, said on his blog on Thursday that it’s not clear that the outbreak in Japan will have subsided by the planned start of the Games in July. Also, the flood of foreign visitors could exacerbate the spread of the disease, known as COVID-19. Japanese government officials have said the Olympics will go ahead as scheduled and will not be held behind closed doors. “The Olympics are not just a mass gathering, but a mass gathering from all over the world, while COVID is a global pandemic,” Iwata wrote. “These two things don’t go together.”  Iwata boarded the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in February and his YouTube videos decrying the conditions there garnered more than a million views. Iwata said that bureaucrats, and not infectious disease professionals, were running the quarantine, and that basic protocols on zoning and the use of protective gear were not followed. Japan has recorded more than 1,600 cases of the virus, including about 700 from the Diamond Princess. Thirty nine people have died, including seven from the liner. The virus has spread around the world, with more than 218,000 confirmed cases and 8,900 deaths.

SOLUTION: Diamond Princess critic says Tokyo Olympics should be halted.

PROBLEM: Diana Nyad cries as she speaks to reporters and fans after arriving back in Key West, Florida August 9, 2011. An asthma attack, a painful shoulder and battering wind and waves forced 61-year-old swimmer Diana Nyad to abandon early on Tuesday her bid to become the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. REUTERS/Rob O'Neal/Florida Keys News Bureau/Handout The American, who tried and failed the 103-mile swim more than three decades ago when she was 28, gave up after enduring nearly 30 hours of a crossing expected to last 60, exhausted by her body’s limits and the force of the elements. “I thought this was my time. We set out, thinking the conditions were favorable. They were not. The winds were stronger and the waves were bigger than what I’d expected,” she told Reuters after her escort boat Bellisimo brought her to the Key West Yacht Club on Stock Island. Nyad, a veteran long-distance swimmer, had started out strongly, stroking rhythmically through calm seas after she dived off from the Marina Hemingway on the western outskirts of Cuba’s capital Havana at 7:45 p.m. EDT on Sunday. But, she said in an interview with CNN, she suffered an unexpected bout of asthma that left her gasping for oxygen. An “excruciating pain” also developed in her right shoulder and these physical handicaps combined with contrary winds and seas that pushed her floundering off course. “Last night at midnight, I was trembling, the 11 hours of asthma had taken so much from my body ... I just knew that it wasn’t mind over matter any more, I was absolutely spent,” Nyad, wearing a white bathrobe, told CNN at Stock Island. She said that toward the end she was “limping” and “slapping around” in the water and even resorted to breast stroke instead of her usual crawl. Her doctor joined her in the water at one point to try to give her relief with an inhaler. CNN, which had a producer on one of the boats accompanying Nyad, said she was vomiting when she was brought aboard an escort boat at 12:45 a.m. EDT (0445 GMT) on Tuesday. Nyad, who later recovered to breakfast on scrambled eggs on her way to Key West, was disappointed but had no regrets about her motives for attempting the swim. She turns 62 this month. She had said her main aim in attempting the Cuba to Florida swim again, without a shark cage, was to help people her age and older realize they can still achieve many things. “I was the best person I could be ... that’s the message. I dug down, I dug deep ... Whatever you’re doing, do your job well,” Nyad, who has the muscled body and the steely resolve of a marathon swimmer, told CNN. Raised in southern Florida, she first tried the crossing from Cuba in 1978, but failed in the face of winds and heavy waves. The same swim was completed successfully in May 1997 by Australian Susan Maroney, who was 22 at the time. But Maroney used a shark cage. Nyad’s flotilla of escort vessels included specially equipped kayaks transmitting an anti-shark shield in the form of an electronic signal that is annoying to the sleek ocean predators that stalk the waters of the Florida Straits. When she was years younger, Nyad put herself into the record books by swimming around Manhattan in 1975 in less than eight hours and by completing a 102.5 mile swim from Bimini in the Bahamas to Florida in 1979. Despite her having to abandon her bid, her fans tweeted their admiration on Tuesday. “That was Diana’s whole point. Rethink old. Sorry she (had) to abandon but my admiration doesn’t waiver. Go Diana,” said one. Asked whether she would attempt the swim again, Nyad told CNN: “You don’t beat Mother Nature ... I think I’m going to have to go to my grave without swimming from Cuba to Florida.”

SOLUTION: Sea defeats body, not spirit, of swimmer, 61.

PROBLEM: The latest work, which appears in the journal PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, also suggests that different policy steps might be needed in that case. “My study essentially shows that the methods used and analyses presented in the original research are insufficient to rule out other explanations (for lower IQ),” said Ole Rogeberg, an economist at the Frisch Centre for Economics Research in Oslo, to Reuters. The Dunedin Multi-disciplinary Health and Development Study is an ongoing report produced by New Zealand’s University of Otago, monitoring 1,037 New Zealand children born between April 1972 and March 1973. The study followed them for 40 years. The participants were periodically tested for IQ and other indices including drug taking, and in 2012 clinical psychologist Madeline Meier produced a study saying there was a link between teenage cannabis use and a lower IQ. Researchers in the Meier study compared the IQ trends of people who never smoked cannabis with four groups of those who did: people who smoked, people who scored as dependent in a follow-up survey, those who scored as dependent twice and those who scored as dependent three times. The study found IQ declines increasing “linearly” with cannabis use, Rogeberg wrote in PNAS. The crucial assumption in the Meier study is that cannabis use is the only relevant difference between the groups tested, he said. His use of a simulation model showed that it may be premature to draw a causal inference between marijuana use and falling IQ scores. For one thing, other writing about the Dunedin group on which Meier’s study is based suggest that early cannabis use is more common for people with poor self-control, previous conduct problems, and high scores on risk factors linked to low family socioeconomic status, he wrote. Given these factors, young people from lower status families tended to end up in less intellectually demanding environments, whether by choice or by circumstance, which would increase the difference in IQ levels as they aged. “We know that the researchers have measured the IQ of the participants at various ages in childhood - but we don’t know if the IQ changes were similar for the different cannabis-using groups before their cannabis use,” he told Reuters. “We don’t know how much of the change in IQ we can explain by differences in education, jail time, occupational status, etc and whether this affects the estimates in the paper.”

SOLUTION:
Study casts doubt on link between cannabis, teen IQ drop.