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.

Q: That could all change with a controversial Nov. 4 ballot initiative in which voters will get to decide for the first time whether to abolish a 1963 state law designed to protect small businesses. The law requires North Dakota pharmacies to be owned by local pharmacists or run by hospitals with a local pharmacist on staff. Supporters of the initiative argue it will remove an embarrassing anachronism, give consumers more choice and lower prescription drug costs. Opponents say that allowing national chains would destroy North Dakota’s tradition of personalized pharmacy care and be yet another example of how the state’s neighborly way of life is changing too fast. Canada, Germany, France and many other countries, they also note, have similar laws requiring local pharmacy ownership. “Independent pharmacies are more apt to focus on customer service,” said Gabe Gretz, who bought Service Drug Pharmacy in Williston last year with his father. “This is our bread and butter. It’s not just a hobby for us.”  “North Dakota Nice” is a truism here, not an irony, and most retail stores are still prohibited from opening before noon on Sunday - a throwback to laws designed to encourage family time. Yet since the oil boom began around 2010, drawing thousands of new residents to jobs where roughnecks can earn more than $100,000 a year, drug use, assault and other violent crimes have jumped. Recent sex-trafficking charges brought against an oil field worker in Williston, a once quiet town that is now the epicenter of the boom, marked the first charges of that type ever filed in the area and has escalated tension between new and old residents. Many newly arrived oil workers, and even some locals, say they hope the ballot measure passes so that they can use the  same chains they’ve grown accustomed to elsewhere. Rite Aid Corp has no outpost in the state, North Dakota’s Walmarts have no in-store pharmacies and the state’s lone Walgreens, on the Minnesota border, is prohibited from selling prescription drugs. CVS is able to operate only a handful of pharmacies in North Dakota thanks to a 2006 buyout of several Osco Drug stores that operated before the 1963 law. “Honestly, it’s not convenient getting my prescriptions here,” said Jan Anseth, a resident of Williston who spends winters in Arizona where she gets her medications from a national chain. In North Dakota, Anseth says, she runs into problems transferring prescriptions and getting anything more than a 30-day supply. The ballot’s primary sponsor, North Dakotans For Lower Pharmacy Prices, was funded with $168,000 in contributions from Walmart, Walgreens, Kmart and others. In campaign materials, the group cites data the Kaiser Family Foundation compiled in 2009 showing North Dakota has one of the highest per capita costs for prescription drug and medical devices in the country. Walmart says North Dakotans are missing out on its popular $4 prescription program, which makes many generic drugs available at the sharply discounted price. Crying foul, the state’s independent pharmacists say they’re able to often meet or beat prices from national chains, most of whom lose money on pharmacy sales as a way to get customers in the door. A random survey by Reuters of North Dakota’s independent pharmacies showed that a 30-day supply of the generic blood thinning drug clopidogrel ranged in price between $10 and $59.95. A CVS in Bismarck, the state capital, quoted a price of $149.95 for the same dosage. “I get to set the prices here at my pharmacy,” said Jenna Wahlstrom, a pharmacist at Larsen Service Drug, which her grandfather founded in Watford City in 1952. “It’s not a corporate decision.”  Like the big chains, Wahlstrom offers her customers a smartphone app and online refill ordering. Her pharmacy has transferred hundreds of prescriptions from retail chains for workers who have moved to the state, she said. Ahead of the vote, the state’s top politicians are declining to take sides. Governor Jack Dalrymple, a Republican who took office in 2010, says he shops at locally owned Aerohead Plaza Drug while in Bismarck and believes it has been able to compete effectively with the nearby CVS. Yet in the 1990s, as a state legislator, Dalrymple voted to keep the pharmacy law intact. “I don’t know,” he now says, “if that was the right vote.”

A: Big pharmacies knock on door of oil-rich North Dakota.
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Q: Even before the new figures, the official British death toll was the fifth-highest globally and a senior scientific adviser to the government has said the country risks becoming the worst-hit in Europe. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said 5,979 people in England had died by April 3 with COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, mentioned on their death certificates - 15% more than numbers published by the health service. “I am not remotely surprised there would be an undercounting,” Bill Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Reuters. “The UK hospital death toll that you are seeing - the one on the news each night - is a composite of things that have been trickling in over a period of time. It is not an exact number and does not include the numbers dying in places such as nursing homes.”   The new numbers, which reflect both deaths caused primarily by COVID-19 and where it is mentioned as a factor, show how limited official data has been so far. Daily figures published by the health ministry record only COVID-19 deaths in hospitals. Public Health England Medical Director Yvonne Doyle said the government was working with the ONS to speed up the information. “We just need to be absolutely clear that the cause of death that is attributed is correct and that is what takes time on the death certificate to get right,” she said, adding the government hoped to produce more rapid data, preferably on a daily basis. Compared with the ONS figures, the daily hospital counts had understated the true death toll for England and Wales by 52% as of April 3, although this had narrowed from 70% a week earlier. Still, it raises the likelihood that the latest death toll for the UK as a whole - 12,107 as of April 13 - is in reality thousands higher when deaths outside hospitals are included. “These new figures ... clearly show the impact of COVID-19 for the first time,” said Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. London was hit particularly hard in the week to April 3, when the ONS said nearly half (46.6%) of deaths in the capital involved COVID-19. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is now recuperating from COVID-19 complications that almost cost him his life, initially refrained from imposing the same stringent controls as other European leaders to counter the outbreak. But as projections showed 250,000 Britons could be lost to the virus, Johnson moved to shutter the world’s fifth-largest economy and told people to stay at home. “The UK response was fractured and it was too late, and allowed a large number of people to become infected who didn’t need to become infected,” said Hanage at Harvard. “This is the start of the pandemic, not the end, and people need to understand that.”  Hanage suggested a focus on testing, using new digital technologies to give targeted advice to the population, or even detecting the virus in sewage. Government scientists have said the United Kingdom will do well if it manages to keep the coronavirus death toll below 20,000. Italy has reported a death toll of more than 20,000. Including Wales, some 6,235 people had died by April 3, the ONS said. Separate data from Scotland last week showed 354 deaths involved COVID-19 as of April 5. In Northern Ireland, the toll stood at 79 as of April 3. Across England and Wales, deaths mentioning COVID-19 accounted for 21.2% of all deaths, compared with 4.8% in the previous week. The broader reading of total deaths showed that 16,387 people died in the week ending April 3 — the highest total since weekly death data started to be compiled in 2005.

A: UK coronavirus death toll could be far higher than previously shown.
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Q: The Camorra mafia has been dumping and burning toxic waste for decades in the area between Naples and the province of Caserta. Ten million tonnes have been buried there in the last 22 years, according to environmentalist group Legambiente, and the World Health Organisation says that higher congenital abnormalities and deaths from cancer are “positively correlated” to waste exposure in the area. “The environmental disaster... has turned to a real humanitarian tragedy,” the Archbishop of Naples and bishops of local dioceses wrote in an open letter to President Giorgio Napolitano on Saturday. “Too many are paying the price for the arrogance, abuse, incivility, greed and stupidity of criminals,” the letter said, adding land had been poisoned causing “tragic and irreparable damage”. Authorities say the waste comes mostly from the industrial north and is dumped by mafia gangs for a fraction of the cost of legal disposal. In recent months protesters have taken to the streets of Naples to demand the government do more to clean up the region. Residents have banded together on social media to document the dumping of waste and burning of trash amid growing fears over its impact on health. The government banned the burning of rubbish last month in a decree aimed at tackling the crisis, but the clergymen’s appeal called for a wider response including a clean up, health screening, financial support for those affected, and programs to persuade businesses not to operate illegally.

A:
Church in Italy's 'Triangle of Death' demands cleanup of mafia waste.
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