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: Actual occurrences can sometimes take on folkloric lives of their own, making the shift from news stories to cautionary tales through emotional responses to elements of those events. That was the case with the 4 June 1999 death of 12-year-old Catherine “Casey” Fish, who did indeed die while playing the marshmallow-stuffing game known as “Chubby Bunny” — descriptions of her death have become part of the cautionary lore spread among parents. The rules of “Chubby Bunny” require competitors to enunciate that phrase with marshmallows stuffed in their mouths. No swallowing or chewing is allowed, and any participant who gags, coughs, or spits is “out” of the game. The winner is whichever child manages to utter the expression through the largest number of marshmallows. Casey Fish choked on four marshmallows and collapsed during the annual Care Fair held at Hoffman Elementary School, a grade school in Chicago’s North Shore area, and died at the Glenbrook Hospital a few hours later. The “Chubby Bunny” competition was to have been part of the day’s activities and would have been supervised by a teacher. However, Casey began playing the game with some of her friends when her teacher momentarily left the area ten minutes before the scheduled start of the “Chubby Bunny” competition to have a word with a janitor. As Casey choked, the teacher was summoned back to the room, but he arrived too late to head off the youngster’s death. Casey’s death was reported by the media at the time of the incident. But, unlike many news stories about the death of a child, the deceased sixth-grader’s story was told and retold in ensuing months, primarily via The Oprah Winfrey Show, which talked about the case (including airing interviews with the distraught parents) in January, March, and June 2000. The tale of how Casey’s life ended continued to surface in the news as her parents pursued a civil suit against the school district, asserting that a failure to properly supervise the children led to the death of their daughter. (In 2005, her parents settled their lawsuit for $2 million.) All of this additional attention served to keep the story in circulation. The folkloric shift this real-life tragedy has taken involves the mode of death. While a very real youngster did indeed lose her life through playing “Chubby Bunny,” she did so through choking on the intact confections in her mouth, not (as developing lore would have it) via the marshmallows’ somehow breaking down to form a windpipe-clogging glue. In the example quoted above, the bonbons were said to have “emulsified” — that is, turned into a liquid mass. Another Internet-spread description of the death says “The marshmallows were heated in the mouth and throat and effectively turned into a sticky enough substance that it could not be removed by conventional attempts at first aid.” Yet another version claims that “The marshmallows, warming-up to body temperature, took on the form of her air passage, and choked her to death.” We know the marshmallows did not eventually turn into a sticky, fatal mass after Casey held them in her mouth for a while because, during the lawsuit brought by Casey’s parents, Casey’s best friend testified seeing her pal’s lips turn purple just a few seconds after she had put the marshmallows into her mouth. While marshmallows can be quickly melted into a thick liquid, goopy substance in a pot on the stove (as anyone who has made Rice Krispies squares will attest), the temperature inside the human mouth is not sufficient to reduce them to that state. Absent chewing or licking, a marshmallow can be held in one’s mouth approximately 15 minutes before it entirely disappears, its bulk gradually dissolving and being swallowed across the span of that quarter hour. At no point in that process does the resultant fluid become thick or gluey — it is thin, watery, and easily swallowed. The danger presented by the game comes not from the marshmallows being rendered into a suffocating goo in the human mouth by the heat of that environment, but from their bulk. In the zeal to best others, a child may stuff more of the confections into his mouth than he can cope with, potentially lodging one in his throat where it will block his windpipe the way a cork would. It is not any special “melting” property inherent to marshmallows that makes the game hazardous, but rather that the marshmallows take up so much space, and their consistency makes them difficult to remove either via the Heimlich maneuver or with medical instruments. On 13 September 2006, another “Chubby Bunny” death occurred when a 32-year-old Janet Rudd choked on a marshmallow and collapsed while participating in the game at a fair in London, Ontario. Emergency crews were unable to remove the blockage from her throat at the scene; she was taken to a hospital where she was revived, but she died later that evening.

SOLUTION: "A child suffocated while playing a ""Chubby Bunny"" marshmallow-stuffing game.  "

PROBLEM: Dr. Nelson Teich, an oncologist and health care consultant, took the job April 17 faced with the task of aligning the ministry’s actions with the president’s view that Brazil’s economy must not be destroyed by restrictions to control spread of the virus. Teich’s predecessor, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, also had rejected the use of chloroquine, which also had been touted by U.S. President Donald Trump as a treatment. Four government ministers who spoke after Teich’s resignation defended the idea of patients being allowed to use the drug if they want to, including Economy Minister Paulo Guedes and the Cabinet chief of staff, Gen. Walter Braga Netto. Officials say almost 15,000 people have died in Brazil from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, though some experts say the figure is significantly higher due to insufficient testing. The peak of the crisis has yet to hit Latin America’s largest nation, experts say. Gen. Eduardo Pazuello, who had no health experience until he became the Health Ministry’s No. 2 official in April, will be the interim minister until Bolsonaro chooses a replacement. Brazilian media have said that Teich’s ability to do his job had been weakened by the appointment of dozens of military personnel to jobs in the ministry. “Life is made up of choices and today I decided to leave,” Teich told journalists in capital Brasilia. He did not explain why he left the job and refused to answer questions. Braga Netto, the Cabinet chief, said Teich left the job “for personal reasons.” Bolsonaro did not comment. Teich’s resignation came one day after Bolsonaro told business leaders in a videoconference he would ease rules for using chloroquine to treat people infected with the coronavirus. Teich has frequently called use of the drug “an uncertainty,” and this week warned of its side effects. The Health Ministry previously allowed chloroquine to be used in coronavirus cases only for patients hospitalized in serious condition. At Bolsonaro’s urging, the country’s Army Chemical and Pharmaceutical Laboratory boosted chloroquine production in late March. Researchers last month reported no benefit in a large analysis of the drug or a related substance, hydroxychloroquine, in U.S. hospitals for veterans. Last month, scientists in Brazil stopped part of a study of chloroquine after heart rhythm problems developed in one quarter of people given the higher of two doses being tested. Governors who have recommended quarantine measures and refrained from touting the drug’s unproven potential said Teich’s resignation reflects Bolsonaro’s failure to manage the pandemic. Rio de Janeiro Gov. Wilson Witzel, a former ally of Bolsonaro, said “no one can do serious work with interference in ministries.” “That is why governors and mayors need to lead the pandemic crisis, and not you, Mr. President,” Witzel said on Twitter. The governor of Ceara, one of Brazil’s most hard-hit states, said Teich’s exit “brings enormous insecurity and concern.” “It is unacceptable that in the face of this serious health crisis, the focus of the government is still on political and ideological discussions. That is an affront to the nation,” Camilo Santana said. On April 16, Bolsonaro fired Teich’s predecessor, Mandetta, who had become the embodiment of challenges to the president’s opposition to governors’ quarantine recommendations and restrictions on businesses. Bolsonaro was eager to resume economic activity and warned failure to do so would cause Brazil to descend into “chaos”. Teich took office pledging to balance health care concerns and the president’s economic worries. He did not openly challenge the president’s views, but did defend stay-at-home measures. Miguel Lago, executive director of Brazil’s non-profit Institute for Health Policy Studies, which advises public health officials, said Teich wasn’t able to build his own team, didn’t have Mandetta’s political strength and wasn’t willing to violate the scientific recommendations. “He clearly had limitations,” Lago said. “He would not challenge what has been consensus among the scientific community. He would never accept the chloroquine thing that Bolsonaro wanted him to do, to recommend publicly that chloroquine was a remedy to be used in the public health system.”  Hours after Teich left the job, the Health Ministry began listing figures on chloroquine distribution as part of its main charts about government initiatives against the pandemic, alongside intensive care unit beds, personal protection equipment, tests and flu vaccines. Risk consultancy Eurasia Group analyst Filipe Gruppelli Carvalho said that the Health Ministry’s capacity for ”an effective coordinating role looks to have dropped with Mandetta’s exit,” . “Ultimately, Teich’s dismissal reinforces our view of increasing risks from the government’s poor response to the pandemic, which could contribute to a weaker presidency and decline in support for Bolsonaro in the post-pandemic phase,” he said. The newspaper Folha de S.Paulo published an editorial after Teich’s exit saying Bolsonaro is trying to “put his own survival above state policies and national interest.” “The resignation of another health minister — in less than a month and during the most serious sanitary emergency of contemporary history — exposes the downfall of a president that doesnt’t even pretend to govern the country,” the newspaper said. “As if the economic and sanitary calamities were not enough, he turned himself into a crisis to be faced.” After Teich’s resignation was announced, pot-banging protests were heard in different regions of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. _____ Associated Press writers David Biller and Diane Jeantet in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.

SOLUTION: Brazil’s health minister resigns after one month on the job.

PROBLEM: Twenty years and more than 12,380 shipments later, tons of Cold War-era waste from decades of bomb-making and nuclear research across the U.S. have been stashed in the salt caverns that make up the underground facility . Each week, several shipments of special boxes and barrels packed with lab coats, rubber gloves, tools and debris contaminated with plutonium and other radioactive elements are trucked to the site. But the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has not been without issues. A 2014 radiation leak forced an expensive, nearly three-year closure, delayed the federal government’s cleanup program and prompted policy changes at national laboratories and defense-related sites across the U.S. More recently, the U.S. Department of Energy said it would investigate reports that workers may have been exposed last year to hazardous chemicals. Still, supporters consider the repository a success, saying it provides a viable option for dealing with a multibillion-dollar mess that stretches from a decommissioned nuclear weapons production site in Washington state to one of the nation’s top nuclear research labs, in Idaho, and locations as far east as South Carolina. If it weren’t for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, many containers of plutonium-contaminated waste would be outside, exposed to the weather and susceptible to natural disasters, said J.R. Stroble, head of business operations at the Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees the contractor that operates the repository. “The whole purpose of WIPP is to isolate this long-lived radioactive, hazardous waste from the accessible environment, from people and the things people need in order to live life on Earth,” he told The Associated Press. Stroble and others in the communities surrounding the repository are steadfast in their conviction that the facility is a success. They point to 22 sites around the nation that have been cleaned up as a result of having somewhere to put the waste — including Rocky Flats, a former nuclear weapons plant outside Denver that had a history of leaks, spills and other violations. For critics, that success is checkered at best since the repository is far from fulfilling its mission. “It’s 80 percent through its lifetime, and it has disposed of less than 40 percent of the waste and has cost more than twice as much as it was supposed to,” said Don Hancock with the watchdog group Southwest Research and Information Center. “How great of a success is that?” Officials initially thought the facility would operate for about 25 years. Rather than wrapping up in the next few years, managers have bumped the timeline to 2050. The repository was carved out of an ancient salt formation about a half-mile (0.8 kilometer) below the surface, with the idea that the shifting salt would eventually entomb the radioactive waste. It was the National Academy of Sciences in the 1950s that first recommended disposing of atomic waste in deep geologic formations. Scientists began taking a hard look at the New Mexico site about two decades later. The scientists had to convince themselves and then federal regulators that it was safe. One of their tasks was determining that the ancient seawater trapped between the salt crystals and bound up in thin bands of clay within the salt deposit would pose no problems thousands of years later. “It was exciting to be working on what was then going to be the world’s first deep-geologic repository for that class of waste,” said Peter Swift, a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. “Nothing that radioactive had been put that deep underground before. And that’s still true 20 years later.” While the real test will be what happens generations from now, Swift is confident in the science behind the project. But the wild card in whether the repository is ultimately deemed a success will be the human factor. After all, missteps by management were blamed for the 2014 radiation release. With some areas permanently sealed off due to contamination, more mining will have to be done to expand capacity. The federal government also is spending more than a half-billion dollars to install a new ventilation system, sink more shafts and make other upgrades aimed at returning to “normal business.” Hancock and some former elected leaders involved in early discussions about the facility worry about the subterranean landfill becoming a dumping ground for high-level waste or commercial nuclear waste. But it would take an act of Congress to expand the repository’s mission, and getting consent from New Mexico’s delegates would be a tall order since the federal government still has no long-term plan for dealing with such waste. Nevada’s proposed Yucca Mountain project is mothballed, and no other permanent disposal proposals are on the table. Toney Anaya, who served as New Mexico governor in the 1980s, remembers the heated debates about bringing more radioactive waste to the state. He said there were concerns about safety, but the promise of jobs was attractive. Some also argued New Mexico had a moral obligation given its legacy of uranium mining and its role in the development of the atomic bomb. Another former governor, Bill Richardson, was on both sides of the tug of war — first as a young Democratic congressman who wanted to impose environmental standards and keep 18-wheelers loaded with waste from passing through the heart of Santa Fe. Then, he became U.S. energy secretary during the Clinton administration and pressured the state to clear the way for the repository to open. “For New Mexico, we’ve done our share of storing waste, and we’ve done it safely and effectively,” Richardson said. “It’s provided jobs, but I just think the future of the state is not nuclear.” Southeastern New Mexico’s ties to nuclear run deep and will continue for at least the next 30 years under the plans being charted now. Robust state regulation will be key in ensuring responsible management going forward, said Hancock, with the watchdog group. The problem, he said, is that besides the Cold War-era waste that has yet to be dealt with, the federal government and nuclear power plants keep generating more. “We need to decide what our capacities are actually going to be — how much nuclear power waste are we going to create, how much nuclear weapons waste are we going to create — so that we can then put our arms around the problem,” Hancock said.

SOLUTION:
First-of-its-kind US nuclear waste dump marks 20 years.