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: Authorities have managed to mitigate the spread of the virus and the COVID-19 respiratory disease it causes among Singapore’s citizens by rigorous contact tracing and surveillance, earning praise from the World Health Organization. The Ministry of Health reported just 14 cases among Singaporeans and permanent residents on Saturday. But the disease is spreading rapidly within the large migrant worker community, highlighting what rights groups say is a weak link in containment efforts. Authorities have ramped up testing for the disease in the dormitories. Saturday’s new cases takes the total in the city-state, which is under a partial lockdown, to 5,992. It has reported 11 deaths from the disease.

SOLUTION: Singapore reports 942 new COVID-19 cases in record daily jump.

PROBLEM: "We don’t know yet if the Ebola scare will help either party or be an afterthought in the midterm elections, but liberal blogger Doug Muder argued that confronting Ebola shows that it makes sense to vote Democratic. For Muder, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul is the poster child for a distinct partisan contrast. ""Ebola points out why we need a fully funded government,"" Muder wrote. ""When there’s no immediate threat of disease, government agencies like the CDC look like bureaucratic waste. When Rand Paul put out a ‘Tea Party budget’ in 2011, it included a big cut in the CDC, and virtually no explanation as to how this would affect its mission."" In this fact-check, we look at whether Paul proposed a ""big cut"" in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Muder had blogged about Paul’s budget in 2011. Back then, Muder asked how the CDC would be able to fulfill its mission if, as Paul wanted, its budget was cut by $1.165 billion. We went back to Paul’s original budget documents. One posted January 2011 called for the $1.165 billion reduction that Muder mentioned. Paul then assembled a more complete budget plan in May 2011. It would cut the CDC budget by 20 percent from its Fiscal Year 2008 levels. Depending on whether you include special funds to evaluate federal health programs, Congress appropriated between $6.049 billion and $6.375 billion for the CDC in FY 2008. So Rand’s 20 percent reduction amounts to either $1.209 billion or $1.275 billion in cuts. That’s slightly more than Muder described. Paul wrote in his plan, ""The center is often mentioned in media reports highlighting their lavish accommodations. For example, in 2005, the CDC built a conference center for $106 million, complete with large-screen plasma TVs. They also spent tens of millions of dollars on state-of-the-art anti-gravity seating for employees, as well as luxury furniture. Taxpayers can no longer afford the luxury working atmosphere of the CDC."" That budget plan remains posted on the website randpaul2016.com, Paul's Senate re-election website. Brian Darling, a Paul spokesman, agreed that the senator has proposed these cuts in the past, but said that funding and the ability to fight Ebola don’t inevitably go hand-in-hand. ""If you look closely at the CDC budget, there are funds that have been wasted on projects that have nothing to do with disease prevention,"" Darling said. Darling then noted that Congress has been at least as supportive of the CDC as the Obama administration. Darling said that in an omnibus spending bill, Congress appropriated $6.9 billion for the CDC, about $240 million more than the administration requested. Darling highlighted another $88 million for Ebola in a continuing resolution bill approved in September. However, neither action undercuts Muder’s point, and Paul voted against both measures. It’s important to remember that those bills doled out money across many government agencies, not specifically for the CDC alone. Sometimes reasonable people can quibble over whether a cut is ""big"" or not. In this case, Paul himself called his cuts ""serious"" in a 2011 op-ed he penned for the Wall Street Journal. ""My proposal, not surprisingly, has been greeted skeptically in Washington, where serious spending cuts are a rarity,"" Paul wrote. ""But it is a modest proposal when measured against the size of our mounting debt."" Our ruling Muder said that in 2011 Sen. Paul proposed cutting the CDC budget by $1.165 billion. Budget documents confirm that. In fact, Paul’s most detailed budget that year would have trimmed CDC spending by slightly more, about $1.2 billion. While the Senate approved two broad spending measures to fund the CDC in 2014, Paul voted against both."

SOLUTION: "Doug Muder Says Sen. Rand Paul’s 2011 budget ""included a big cut in the CDC."

PROBLEM: Bloomberg’s detractors have derided him for trying to impose a “nanny state” in America’s largest city, pointing to his bans on smoking, trans fats and the attempt to limit the sale of large sugary drinks. Public health advocates have applauded those same efforts. Only weeks after New York became the first major city to raise the legal age for buying tobacco to 21, the City Council will vote on a ban that would add electronic cigarettes to the city’s Smoke-Free Air Act. If the bill passes, smoking e-cigarettes - or “vaping” - would be prohibited at public and private venues such as beaches, parks, restaurants and office buildings. “While more research is needed on electronic cigarettes, waiting to act could jeopardize the progress we have made over the last few years,” New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley said at a city council hearing on the bill earlier this month. E-cigarettes are slim, reusable metal tubes that contain nicotine-laced liquid in a variety of exotic flavors such as bubble gum and bacon. As a “smoker” puffs on the device, the nicotine is heated and releases a vapor that, unlike cigarette smoke, contains no tar, which is known to cause cancer and other diseases. Critics of the law contend that such a ban would do more harm than good. Richard Carmona, a former U.S. Surgeon General and a current board member at NJOY, one of America’s largest electronic cigarette manufacturers, sent a letter to the council recently to urge rejection of the bill. “I’m extremely concerned that a well-intentioned but scientifically unsupported effort like the current proposal to include electronic cigarettes in New York’s current smoking ban, could constitute a giant step backward in the effort to defeat tobacco smoking,” Carmona wrote. The debate over risks versus benefits of e-cigarettes is far from being settled, but a study published recently in the British medical journal, The Lancet, said they are as effective as nicotine patches for smokers trying to kick the habit. Three states - Utah, North Dakota and New Jersey - and Washington, D.C. have already passed legislation banning e-cigarettes wherever smoking is prohibited.

SOLUTION:
New York City Council mulls adding e-cigarettes to smoking ban.

