Hasta La Gadget!

What’s better than getting engaged? All the likes and comments you’ll get on your proposal photo, according to the millennials in the clip above. 

In a video from John Crist, the standup comedian pokes fun at millennials’ over-the-top proposals, elaborate engagement ring pictures and obsession with social media when it comes to getting engaged. 

“Wait you hired a photographer, right?” the actress in the video asks when her soon-to-be fiance drops to one knee and pops the question. What follows next is a few minutes of reshoots, re-proposing and reworking proposal camera angles to make sure the lighting is just right. All in the name of likes love. 

Because as Crist points out in the the clips’ description, “What’s the point of getting engaged if you don’t post it on Instagram?” 

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NEW YORK, April 12 (Reuters) – Lawyers for the passenger dragged from a United Airlines plane in Chicago filed an emergency request with an Illinois state court on Wednesday to require the carrier to preserve video recordings and other evidence related to the incident.

Citing the risk of “serious prejudice” to their client, Dr. David Dao, the lawyers want United and the City of Chicago, which runs O’Hare International Airport, to preserve surveillance videos, cockpit voice recordings, passenger and crew lists, and other materials related to United Flight 3411.

The filing with the Cook County Circuit Court likely presages an eventual lawsuit against United for the April 9 incident, where Dao was snatched from the seat he had paid for, and was dragged by his hands on his back off the parked plane, which had been bound for Louisville, Kentucky.

United Chief Executive Officer Oscar Munoz on Wednesday issued Dao an apology and said the company would no longer use law enforcement officers to remove passengers from overbooked flights after global outrage erupted over the way Dao had been treated by airline and airport security staff.

Munoz said United would be examining its incentive program for volunteers on overbooked planes.

The Chicago Department of Aviation said on Wednesday two additional officers involved in the incident were placed on administrative leave. 

The Sunday evening incident caused a furor around the world as video recorded by fellow passengers showed airport security officers yanking Dr. David Dao from his seat aboard the flight.

Much of the uproar stemmed from Dao’s status as a paying passenger who was being removed to make room for additional crew members on the overbooked flight.

On Capitol Hill, powerful Republican and Democratic lawmakers denounced how Dao was treated and called for United to explain the situation.

On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, announced plans for the Customers Not Cargo Act, which would prohibit the forcible removal of passengers already aboard an aircraft “due to overbooking or airline staff seeking to fly as passengers.”

Two online petitions calling for Munoz to step down as CEO had more than 124,000 signatures combined by Wednesday afternoon, but he told ABC that he had no plans to resign over the incident.

Shares of United Continental closed 1.1 percent lower at $69.93. They fell as much as 4.4 percent on Tuesday.

The backlash from the incident resonated around the world, with social media users in the United States, China and Vietnam calling for boycotts of the No. 3 U.S. carrier by passenger traffic and an end to the practice of overbooking flights.

Delta Air Lines Inc CEO Ed Bastian defended overbooking as “a valid business practice” that does not require additional oversight by the government.

“It’s not a question, in my opinion, as to whether you overbook,” Bastian said on a Wednesday earnings call. “It’s how you manage an overbook situation.”

As of Tuesday, Dao was still in a Chicago hospital recovering from his injuries, his lawyer said.

Footage from the incident shows Dao, bloodied and disheveled, returning to the cabin and repeating: “Just kill me. Kill me,” and “I have to go home.”

In the ABC interview, Munoz apologized profusely to Dao, his family, passengers and United customers.

“This can never, will never happen again,” he said.

(Reporting by Alana Wise in New York; Additional reporting by David Shepardson in Washington, and Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Richard Chang)

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Biblical historians have long pondered what dishes may have been on the table at the Last Supper. One thing that’s almost certain is that Jesus and his disciples were drinking wine.

Many elements of the Last Supper remain contested. Scholars even dispute the question of whether the Last Supper was a Seder ― a traditional meal observed during the Jewish holiday of Passover ― which might have indicated the specifics of the meal.

The canonical gospels contradict one another on that front. Three out of four of them locate the Last Supper during the Jewish holiday, while one, the Gospel of John, says the meal happened “before the Feast of Passover.”

Jonathan Klawans, a religion professor at Boston University and expert on ancient Judaism, weighed the evidence in a January article published by the Biblical Archaeology Society. Klawans noted that the traditional Seder ritual as we know it today didn’t emerge until around 70 A.D. ― nearly two generations after Jesus’s death. The Last Supper, the scholar concluded, likely “was not a Seder but a standard Jewish meal.”

Seder or no, a “standard Jewish meal” in Jesus’s day would have included wine. The land of Jesus’s life and death has a long history of winemaking. In 2016, Israeli archaeologists discovered an ancient wine ledger that contained what they believe to be the earliest written reference to Jerusalem outside the Bible.

Research conducted by Dr. Patrick McGovern, an anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the school’s Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages and Health, has indicated that winemaking in the Middle East may date back 5,000 years or more. 

“All our scriptures are full with wine and with grapes — before the French were even thinking about making wine, we were exporting wine,” Israeli oenologist Eliyashiv Drori told The New York Times in 2015.

Today, archaeologists and winemakers alike are eager to know how this ancient wine may have tasted. Drori heads a team at Ariel University in the occupied West Bank that is using DNA testing to try to analyze and recreate the ancient wines King David and Jesus would have enjoyed.

Drori’s research has revealed that white wine made from the Dabouki grape, native to Armenia, might be among oldest varieties in the region and a promising candidate for what Jesus might have had in his lifetime.

In their book Divine Vintage: Following the Wine Trail from Genesis to the Modern Age, Joel Butler and Randall Heskett note that wines in Jesus’s day were often infused with honey, dried fruits and spices like pepper and curry. Winemakers also often added tree resins like myrrh, frankincense and terebinth to preserve the beverage.

A team of archaeologists uncovered a 3,700-year-old wine cellar near Nahariya, Israel in 2013 with evidence pointing to ancient wines that were mixed with honey, mint, cedar, tree resins and cinnamon bark.

“It’s not wine that somebody is just going to come home from a hard day and kick back and drink,” Andrew Koh, one of the archaeologists working on the excavation, told the BBC.

Discoveries like this led McGovern to speculate the Last Supper wine might have tasted a bit like an Amarone, a rich red wine made in Northern Italy. But, of course, there’s no way of knowing for sure. In an interview with wine app Vivino, which culls ratings and reviews of wines for users on the spot, McGovern joked: “If someone can find me the Holy Grail and send it to my lab, we could analyze it and tell you.”

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Just three years ago, Michigan had the fourth-highest rate of unvaccinated kindergartners in the nation. But when a charter school in northwestern Traverse City reported nearly two dozen cases of whooping cough and several cases of measles that November, state officials were jolted to action.

Without much fanfare — or time for opponents to respond — they abandoned the state’s relatively loose rules for getting an exemption and issued a regulation requiring families to consult personally with local public health departments before obtaining an immunization waiver.

The new rule sidestepped potential ideological firefights in the state Legislature, which have plagued lawmakers in other states trying to crack down on vaccination waivers. The regulation had a dramatic effect. In the first year, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported that the number of statewide waivers issued had plunged 35 percent. Today, Michigan is in the middle of the pack among vaccination rates.

“The idea was to make the process more burdensome,” said Michigan State University health policy specialist Mark Largent, who has written extensively about vaccines. “Research has shown that if you make it more inconvenient to apply for a waiver, fewer people get them.”

Michigan’s experience demonstrates a way for governments to increase immunization rates without having to address religious or philosophical opposition to vaccines.

For many years, opposition to mandatory childhood vaccines has served as a frequent rallying point for those who see immunizations as interference with nature’s intentions, rebel against them as government meddling in family affairs or raise concerns about their safety.

Vaccine advocates and health professionals regard these views as dangerous, noting that the drugs have dramatically lowered the number of serious childhood illnesses and that studies suggesting they are not safe have been debunked. They also note that vaccines’ proven effectiveness lies in “herd immunity”— the higher the participation rate, the greater the community’s protection against outbreaks of infectious disease.

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Many states adopt strategies to curb exemptions “by making applications complicated to fill out or complete,” according to University of Georgia public policy expert W. David Bradford, who studies immunization. Some states require parents to notarize applications or have them certified by a physician before sending them in, and “generally speaking, anything that raises the opportunity cost [of exemptions] works to some degree,” Bradford said. “Michigan took it a step further.”

Increasing the number of vaccinated kids in Michigan, which has a Republican governor and Republican majorities in both legislative houses, took a degree of political finesse.

“Health and Human Services wanted to do something, but the legislative option wasn’t there,” Largent said. Instead, Michigan decided to use a strategy he calls “inconvenience.”

Since 1978, Michigan had required schoolchildren entering kindergarten and middle school to obtain vaccination waiver certificates from county officials. “Some counties allowed you to do it over the phone; in others you mailed in a form and some even let you do it online,” Largent said. But in studying vaccine policy across the country, he noted, “one thing is really clear — health departments that require you to go in and get the waiver have much lower rates.”

Michigan offered the perfect vehicle for introducing inconvenience into the process. The Joint Committee on Administrative Rules reviews state agency regulations and, if it takes no action, allows them to go into effect after 15 legislative days. The committee is composed of lawmakers, giving it a legislative imprimatur, but it is not the Legislature itself, thus avoiding the political rancor that can accompany debate on controversial issues.

During the 2013-14 school year, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found, Michigan had the fourth-highest rate of children entering kindergarten who had been exempted from vaccinations. The state Health and Human Services officials proposed a simple requirement: Parents seeking vaccine waivers must be briefed in person by a county health educator before a waiver would be granted. The joint committee approved the rule Dec. 11, 2014. It took effect Jan. 1, 2015. 

“We were not aware of the rule until the day it happened,” said Suzanne Waltman, president of Michigan for Vaccine Choice, an anti-vaccine organization. “We thought it was a stealth move.”

The office of Gov. Rick Snyder did not respond directly to requests for comment on the political hazards of vaccine policy. Retired Republican state Sen. John Pappageorge, co-chair of the administrative rules committee in 2014, voted to adopt the rule and described the procedure as a simple one designed to ensure “that implementation is in concurrence with the law.” Republican Rep. Tom McMillin, who was co-chair of the committee at the time and voted against the rule, did not respond to requests for an interview.

In a look at one key metric, before 2015, about 22 percent of Michigan children did not get the fourth round of immunizations for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis that is required by the state. That had fallen to 15 percent one year later, slightly better than the national average.

The Traverse City outbreaks were overshadowed in the national media by a more dramatic measles outbreak in Southern California’s Disneyland, which also occurred over the 2014-15 holidays and ultimately led to 150 cases of the disease. But the states’ responses were quite different.

California’s solution was what Largent calls “eliminationism.” The state Legislature, with Democratic supermajorities, passed a measure doing away with religious and philosophical vaccine exemptions. Passage of the law triggered widespread protests among opponents of vaccines. Besides California, only West Virginia and Mississippi disallow non-medical waivers.

Largent said a small number of children need waivers for medical reasons, usually because of allergies or immune deficiencies. Much larger numbers seek waivers for religious or philosophical reasons.

“The idea was to bring the waiver rate down,” Michigan Health and Human Services spokeswoman Angela Minicuci said. “From the perspective of the general population, vaccinations are recommended. This doesn’t take away choice. It simply ensures that people have education.”

But Largent said most vaccine opponents are not necessarily swayed by arguments in favor of immunization. Instead, “by heightening the burden, you change some of the incentives” for obtaining waivers. “Moral claims and ideology don’t matter as much when it’s inconvenient.”

Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whose stories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editorially independent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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Toward the end of the 2016 presidential election, as polls showed a tighter-than-expected contest in Michigan, the Hillary Clinton campaign faced a dilemma over just how aggressively it needed to act.

While aides worried about the possibility of losing the industrial Midwest stronghold, they also feared that if they moved significant resources into the state it would send a dangerous signal to Republicans that it was actually in play, setting off a political arms race. They ultimately chose to stay away in hopes that Donald Trump would only realize how close he was when it was too late.

Clinton went on to lose Michigan by 12,000 votes.

Months later, the first congressional campaign of the Trump era took place. And once again, the Democratic Party played possum. Instead of investing resources into the special election in Kansas’ 4th District that took place on Tuesday night, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee kept their distance under the assumption they only would have motivated Republican voters had they engaged.

The Democratic candidate James Thompson, an attorney and Army veteran, ended up losing the race by 7 percentage points. And because he was never expected to make it that close, Democrats now are asking not just whether more could have been done, but why the party continues to assume it can’t help out (some of) its own without hurting them.

“I don’t buy that if the race is close, that you can hide it to the other side and they’ll fail to nationalize it the way they could,” said Jeff Hauser, a longtime progressive operative. “The DCCC couldn’t prevent [anti-Thompson] ads from happening by staying out. He’s a Dem. If the best way to attack him is to claim he would support [Nancy] Pelosi, well, it is true. The notion that they can suddenly prevent that is bullshit.”

Above: A former top spokesman for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) seems to jokingly weigh in on the DCCC’s strategy.

The parallels between how Clinton approached Michigan and how the DCCC approached the Kansas special election are limited. It’s not just that Clinton was expected to win and the DCCC was expected to lose (one top Democrat said that internal polling they saw of the Thompson race had him more than 20 points out three weeks before the vote). It’s that presidential elections have dramatically different voter turnout patterns than special elections, and the Michigan electorate is far more amenable to a Democrat than the lower portion of central Kansas.

“You do not get to the single districts in a district like this if you’re a nationalized Democrat,” said Meredith Kelly, the communications director for the committee. “End of story. That’s just the way it is. There are just certain races where it is not helpful to be attached to the national D.C. Democrats. It is the calculation you make in even the most competitive swing district.”

Even within the progressive community, this argument has held sway. Some of Thompson’s proudest backers insisted that he only got as close as he did precisely because he was perceived as a product of the grassroots culture (more associated with Bernie Sanders than Nancy Pelosi) and didn’t have a taint of political careerism.

“I sort of view a race like this as a showdown between a large standing army and a nimble band of guerrillas operating deep in enemy turf,” said David Nir, political director at the liberal site Daily Kos, which helped raise nearly $200,000 for Thompson online. “If the guerrillas engage in a direct firefight, they’re going to get crushed. Instead, they have to catch their opponents unawares and carry out a sneak attack under cover of darkness.”

But in both Michigan and in Kansas, the conclusion was reached by the party that the harder the race was contested the harder it would become. (Clinton only stopped in Michigan the day before the election, and her team left a negligible footprint compared to Democratic candidates of the past; in Kansas, the DCCC did 25,000 live get-out-the-vote calls on behalf of Thompson just one day before the election.)

And in making those calculations, both the Clinton campaign and the DCCC picked at an insecurity that runs through many Democrats: the feeling that top officials often obscure or hide their progressive skin rather than proudly own it.

“A head fake is a good move on a basketball court. But for getting electoral votes in a presidential campaign, head fakes don’t work that well,” said Tad Devine, a longtime party strategist who was Bernie Sanders’ senior adviser in the 2016 campaign. “In this day and age, sneaking anything by anyone is ridiculous. People have Twitter and are online. People share information so quickly. The idea you can sneak something by someone is absurd. You could do it in the ‘80s maybe. That is not the age we live in anymore.”

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s closer-than-expected loss, Thompson’s campaign manager said he did not begrudge the DCCC for its decision to keep strategic distance from their race. 

And DCCC officials said they had no second guesses about their approach. Kelly noted that despite a strong fundraising month, the DCCC lagged behind their Republican counterparts, making it even harder to justify a $100,000 investment in a race where they worried it would backfire. But, she said, the committee’s calculations could potentially change based on Thompson’s success ― not just because enthusiasm has heightened after Tuesday’s results but because it’s now clearer that the party can contend in once-unthinkable races.

“We all knew there was amazing grassroots energy out there but we didn’t know how it would translate at the ballot box,” she said. “Now we do. And I think you will see strategies shifting. There are a lot of races ahead of us.”

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