Hasta La Gadget!

United Airlines announced Thursday it has reached a settlement with a passenger who was injured and bloodied after officers dragged him from his seat on a flight earlier in April. 

Dr. David Dao’s lawyer said he reached an agreement for undisclosed terms over the incident in which his nose was broken and several teeth were knocked out after he refused to give up his seat for a United employee on a flight from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky. 

In a statement, United said that it had “reached an amicable resolution of the unfortunate incident that occurred aboard flight 3411.”

“We look forward to implementing the improvements we have announced, which will put our customers at the center of everything we do,” the statement added.

The settlement with Dao came the same day that United announced new policies to handle similar situations when flights are overbooked. Passengers can receive up to $10,000 in incentives if they get bumped from their seat. 

“Dr. Dao has become the unintended champion for the adoption of changes which will certainly help improve the lives of literally millions of travelers,” said Thomas Demetrio, his attorney, in a statement. 

Other passengers recorded video of Dao screaming before police at Chicago O’Hare International Airport dragged him through the plane’s aisle. Some passengers could be heard complaining about how Dao was treated. 

The flight was not technically overbooked, but United staff demanded that four travelers who had already boarded, including Dao, give up their seats for employees needed in Louisville the next day. 

United bungled its response to the altercation with a series of statements that criticized Dao and contained industry jargon that rang hollow.

“After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate,” the airline said in one statement. 

Later, CEO Oscar Munoz followed up by saying on Twitter that “I  apologize for having to re-accommodate these passengers.”

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WASHINGTON ― Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had a tart message for President Donald Trump on his tax reform proposal Thursday: You’re doing it wrong.

Schumer pulled out the old internet meme after Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said he couldn’t guarantee that the tax cuts would benefit the middle class. The one-page outline of the plan released Tuesday would definitely represent a large cut for the wealthiest Americans. 

“The president’s outline yesterday is a direct assault on the middle class,” Schumer told reporters on Capitol Hill.

“If on one piece of paper you can guarantee that the wealthy and special interests will pay less, but can’t guarantee that for the middle class, you’re doing it all wrong,” Schumer said.

He added that the blueprint looks more like a self-interested ploy to aid Trump and the billionaire and millionaire members of his cabinet.

“What President Trump unveiled yesterday is not the Trump tax plan, it is the plan to lower President Trump’s taxes, the taxes of his Cabinet and people as wealthy as they are,” Schumer said.

Republicans have hailed the president’s outline as the right path to reform the nation’s complicated tax laws, arguing that increased economic activity will offset any revenue lost due to the cuts.

Many analysts said there was not enough specificity to the short document to say exactly how large the tax cuts would be. But based on Trump’s campaign platform, the cuts could add some $8 trillion to the deficit, according to a New York Times tally.

Schumer suspected ill intent lies behind such a proposal from a party that complains about deficits when it comes to things like disaster relief and helping 9/11 responders, but not when it comes to giving the wealthy tax breaks.

“The Trump tax breaks blow such a gigantic whole in our deficit, it could endanger Medicare and Social Security, which may well be the nefarious ultimate goal of the hard right,” Schumer said. “You can be sure a few years down the road that our Republican colleagues on the hard right will come to us and say the deficit is so big, we have to reduce Medicare and Social Security.”

The Senate minority leader described Trump’s tax ideas as a “non-starter” for Democrats.

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On March 14 MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow took to the airwaves and presented an hour-long segment on two pages of President Donald Trump’s 2005 tax returns. Those documents, obtained by journalist David Cay Johnston, revealed that Trump made $150 million in personal income that year, on which he paid $38 million in taxes.

It was one of the most hyped segments to air on cable news this year, with Maddow tweeting ahead of time, “BREAKING: We’ve got Trump tax returns. Tonight, 9pm ET. MSNBC. (Seriously).” It was also widely felt to be one of the most disappointing cable news segments of the year. The National Review’s Jim Geraghty opined that it was a “waste [of] everyone’s time.” Slate’s Willa Paskin called it “a cynical, self-defeating spectacle.” The Observer’s Ashe Schow summed it up as an “epic fail.”

While most of the criticism centered on the lengthy way Maddow constructed the segment, perhaps unaware that such long wind-ups are her stock in trade, her critics had a point. It was weird, knowing that she’d only obtained two pages of documentation to bill the matter on Twitter the way she did ― only afterwards could you see that the phrase “we’ve got Trump tax returns” allowed her the linguistic wiggle-room necessary to claim to have billed the show properly. Moreover, the tax returns on hand were more than a decade old, and weren’t sufficient to get into the meat of Trump’s tax return mysteries ― like the extent to which he is leveraged by debtors, or the breadth of his international business entanglements.  

But while Maddow may have not delivered on the day, the segment nevertheless planted a seed of inquiry. And now that we have the broad contours of Trump’s tax cut proposals, there’s new light to be shone on what the MSNBC host did back in March.

One of the few things that viewers were able to ascertain during Maddow’s segment was the amount of money Trump paid through the alternate minimum tax (AMT). In fact, that’s the vehicle through which Trump paid the bulk of that $38 million. In terms of regular federal income tax, Trump and his wife paid $5.3 million, which would peg his tax rate at less than four percent. However, the AMT collected $31 million in tax revenue.

Trump has long wanted to eliminate the AMT, and guess what? His tax proposal would do just that.

Trump is not the only person who’s called for the repeal of the AMT. While the AMT primarily hits high income earners, it’s not aimed at the mega-rich. As the Tax Policy Center summarizes, “The individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) primarily affects well-off households, but not those with the very highest incomes. It is also more likely to hit taxpayers with large families, those who are married, and those who live in high-tax states.” Those who want to eliminate the AMT can do so knowing that this isn’t a tax break that lets plutocrats off the hook ― it can be framed as a benefit for upper-middle class strivers and entrepreneurs.

And liberals, like Bernie Sanders, have called for the AMT’s elimination as well ― though there are important distinctions to note. But as Business Insider’s Frank Chapparo reported back in March, Sanders also “called for a number of ‘provisions aimed at high-income households’ that would essentially do what the AMT was intended to do: make sure the extremely wealthy pay their fair share.” His aim: to secure the necessary proceeds to expand the safety net on more vulnerable Americans. Trump’s tax plan doesn’t make any attempt at doing this ― it’s just a straight up giveaway to the wealthy.

Knowing that 81.5 percent of the taxes he paid in 2005 were facilitated through the existence of a tax he wants to eliminate puts Trump’s own interests under the spotlight. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, eliminating the AMT is one of the mechanisms in his tax plan that would pay off big for Trump down the line. Thanks to Maddow, we have a feel for how much he’ll save. (A lot!)

But the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) estimates that another potential windfall awaits Trump through another part of his tax plan: his proposal to drop the tax rate on mechanisms called “S-corporations” down to 15 percent. S-corporations can be considered a federal government subsidy for the wealthy because they permit an entity to claim limited liability benefits while also allowing them to pay the corporate income tax rate.

As the CEPR notes, Trump’s proposal would mean that “while the top marginal tax rate will ostensibly be 33 percent on the rich, those who are not too dumb to breathe will get their money through S-Corporations and pay just 15 percent.” This, they conclude, would “lead to tremendous job growth in the tax shelter industry, as hundreds of thousands of rich people rush to hire lawyers and accountants so that they can get all their income through pass-through corporations.”

And Trump would benefit as well. Per the CEPR:

While he has refused to release his tax returns he claims he has assets of $10 billion. Let’s say that he gets a 5 percent annual return, or $500 million a year, as income. This is certainly a very modest assumption for a person with Donald Trump’s business acumen.

Now, if he had to pay the 28 percent alternative minimum tax he would be paying $140 million a year in taxes. But after the Trump tax plan goes into effect, he would only have to pay $75 million in taxes. This means that the Trump tax plan will save Donald Trump $65 million a year in taxes. Trump’s savings would be only a bit less than the annual wages of 4,500 minimum wage workers. Now isn’t that terrific?

Of course, the CEPR can only guess at how much Trump stands to benefit because he has not released his tax returns. That we have only two pages of his personal tax returns from 2005 is not enough to evaluate how much skin Trump has in the game he’s asking the entire country to play.

Given the fact that the man is indistinguishable from his business interests, perhaps we need to shut down Trump’s tax proposal until we know what’s going on. But what little we know, we know because of what Maddow and Johnston told us. And if that Maddow segment left audiences wanting more, well…maybe that was the point.

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On Tuesday, the highly insular North Korea conducted a massive artillery drill to mark the foundation of its military as tensions with the United States continued to escalate.

Like many aspects of North Korea’s political and economic systems, its military came into being under the late president Kim Il Sung. Born into a Christian family during a time of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, Kim rose to power with a vision of an isolated, almost hermit-like independence for his fledgling country.

It was under Kim that the political ideology of “juche” ― a guiding philosophy that places commitment to the state above all else ― took hold in the 1950s and solidified in subsequent decades.

Juche’s pervading influence on civic life explains why freedoms of any sort, including religion, are scarce in a nation that treats its current and past leaders as heroes of mythic proportion.

Juche literally means self-reliance. As a political philosophy, it entails utter independence to the exclusion of any kind of outside influence. Kim described the ideology in a 1955 speech in the aftermath of the Korean War by saying: “All
 ideological
 work
 must
 be
 subordinated
 to
 the
 interests
 of
 the
 Korean
 revolution.” In other words, the state, its leaders and its political vision come before the interests and identities of individuals.

In practice, said Korean history scholar Donald Baker, juche ― and the unconditional loyalty it demands of the citizens ― has “evolved into a functional equivalent of religion.”

As a result, organized religion is tolerated at best and viewed as secondary to juche, which operates to maintain North Koreans’ faith in the government and in the Kim family. “Juche serves as an ideological tool for unifying the country,” Baker, a professor of Korean history and civilization at the University of British Columbia, told HuffPost. “It says, ‘We don’t need God. Instead, we rely on the leader.’”

Immortality comes about in that if your body dies, as long as your community survives you’ll have some sort of continued existence.”

Like religion might, juche even promises North Koreans a kind of immortality through their dedication to the state.

“In juche human beings are defined as members of a sociopolitical community,” Baker said. “There’s no individual apart from the community. Immortality comes about in that if your body dies, as long as your community survives you’ll have some sort of continued existence.”

As scholar Grace Lee wrote in an article on juche published in the Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs: “When Kim Il Sung unilaterally declared juche to be the governing principle of all aspects of North Korean life, as well as the ideological basis of all state policies, the philosophy gained the full authority of Kim Il Sung’s godlike status.”

There are an estimated 40,000 statues of the late president throughout the country. Every home in North Korea is required to have portraits of Kim and his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, who died in 2011, displayed. The portraits are treated like sacred objects and must be kept clean and well-maintained.

The bodies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are embalmed and on display at Pyongyang’s Kumsusan Memorial Palace, a site known at the “palace of the sun” and treated like a shrine. Like his father, Kim Jong Il is also revered with an immortal status and carries the title “eternal leader.”

Kim Il Sung’s grandson and the current leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, is often referred to as having “a sacred bloodline,” Baker explained. As long as he and his descendants survive, the juche community lives on.

Some say juche builds upon Marxist ideals, which governed the country for the first half of the 20th century, but Baker argues the ideology has more to do with Korea’s history of Confucianism than with communism.

“Confucianism has a focus on the family and on community,” Baker said. “There’s the idea that your identity comes from your family and your community. You’re alive as long as your descendants remember you.” 

Confucianism, a spiritual philosophy that developed in China some 2,500 years ago, was a guiding ideology in Korea for centuries and dictated an antagonism toward organized religion long before Kim ever came into power. 

Under Confucianism, citizens were required to observe certain rituals, including funeral rites. When someone died, their children were required to honor the deceased by commemorating a tablet with their name on it and bowing before it during rituals. In Catholicism, this treatment of a sacred object was considered to be idolatry. Paul Yun Ji-Chung, a Korean Catholic man alive in the late 18th century, angered the government by failing to perform the tablet duty after his mother died. He was executed in 1791.

Pope Francis beatified Ji-Chung in 2014, bestowing upon him a blessed status one step away from sainthood.

The Catholic leader also honored more than 100 priests and laity who met a similar fate to Ji-Chung in Korea. One man, Bishop Francis Borgia Hong Yong-ho of Pyongyang, was imprisoned in 1949 under Kim and is believed to have died in a prison camp.

North Korea continues to view Christianity with distrust. The government sees the 2,000-year-old faith as a tool of foreign powers, Baker said, evidenced by the arrival of missionaries who came from abroad throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Buddhism, one of the other main religions maintaining a fragile presence in the country, is largely seen as the product of the past.

The government allows religious organizations to exist, but membership is small for a country of some 25 million. There are an estimated 10,000 members of the Korean Christian Federation, North Korea’s Protestant organization. North Korean authorities have reported roughly 3,000 members of the country’s Catholic association, about 10,000 in the Buddhist federation, and some 15,000 in the indigenous Korean Chondoism movement.

Pew Research Center reports higher numbers of religious affiliation in the country, derived from estimates from the World Religion Database, with some 480,000 Christians, 370,000 Buddhists and 3 million adherents of folk religions in North Korea as of 2010. 

But the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook notes: “Autonomous religious activities [are] now almost nonexistent [in North Korea.] Government-sponsored religious groups exist to provide illusion of religious freedom.”

“One of the reasons they allow religious organizations to operate is for international cooperation,” the scholar said. “They can send representatives to religious conferences, like the International Council of Churches, and spread propaganda.” Namely, an international presence at faith conferences allows the country to maintain a facade of religious freedom.

Folk religious practices, including shamanism and fortune-telling, exist in parts of the country, according to Ji-Min Kang, a North Korean writer for The Guardian. Kang, who left North Korea in 2005, reported that it’s common for people in North Korea to turn to shamans and fortune-tellers for help in their daily lives. “Many North Koreans invest their money in fortune-telling,” Kang wrote in a 2014 article. “North Koreans, you see, would rather trust the spirits than the party or nation.”

The government is outwardly opposed to fortune-telling, but Kang said there are rumors that even the country’s top elites and officials consult fortune-tellers or, if they’re men, send their wives to do so.

Activists have indicated that citizens get around the government’s restrictions on religion by worshipping in secret churches. Reports of an underground church network helping smuggle refugees out of the country have painted an inspiring image of resistance in recent years. But Baker is skeptical about the presence or impact of such a reported network.

People are too afraid to even engage with religion.

“Most of the Christians who could fled to the South during the war. It’d be very difficult to maintain a Christian community in North Korea because you really don’t have any privacy,” he said. “Government officials could break into your home at any time to make sure you have your Kim Il Sung portrait displayed. And none of the refugees I know who have left have said they know anything about an underground church.”

Resistance to the government’s overwhelming demand for loyalty in the form of religious organizing is scarce ― or at least inconspicuous ― because “people are too afraid to even engage with religion,” Baker said. Where the government does occasionally crack down, though, is on foreigners. If a tourist so much as leaves a Bible in their hotel room, they could be arrested at the airport and detained for questioning.

In 2015, Korean Canadian pastor Hyeon Soo Lim was arrested during a humanitarian trip to North Korea and accused of using religion to try to destroy the country and help foreign powers lure North Korean citizens away. The 62-year-old was sentenced to life in prison with hard labor. His fate remains uncertain.

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People often make reference to the immune system when feeling under the weather, but we wondered how many people truly understand the complexities of this internal task force?

To put it plainly, the immune system is a network of cells, tissues and organs that work together to protect the body. It is the immune system’s responsibility to tell your body what belongs and what does not. In rare chronic cases, like primary immunodeficiency, the immune system is either missing or isn’t working properly, but for most healthy people, it separates friend from foe ― and responds to enemies (like bacteria, viruses and parasites) that threaten invasion.

In order to maintain overall wellness, all of the organs and cells that make up this defense network have highly specific assignments to carry out. That’s why we’ve partnered with Shire to uncover five little-known facts about the body’s top defense team.

1. The Immune System Can (Usually) Course-Correct

Your immune system is designed to work behind the scenes to keep you healthy. For most healthy people, the immune system adapts to changes by responding to new germs like bacteria, viruses, and parasites every day. This constant exposure to new germs allows our immune systems to learn as they go, building immunities day to day. However, in rare cases, people with chronic immune conditions, like primary immunodeficiency, have a defective immune system that is unable to course-correct like a healthy immune system does, which leaves them prone to infections.

2. The Gut Acts As Gatekeeper

The largest part of your immune system is in the gut (or gastrointestinal tract), according to Dr. Katharine Woessner, a California-based physician who specializes in allergies, asthma and immunology. “[The gut] is also the hardest working part of the immune system… as it is constantly regulating what is going on,” she says. Your gastrointestinal system works to differentiate bad bacteria from the good ones that are key for overall immune health. Believe it or not this, er, gut checking, starts when a baby is in utero.

3. The Thymus Gland Has A Prime Time

Much like a high school prom king, your thymus sees its best days and is in prime condition during its youth. The thymus ― located behind your sternum and in between your lungs ― is responsible for producing an important type of white blood cell called T-lymphocytes or T cells. Immature T cells are sent to the thymus where they mature and become an important part of the body’s innate and adaptive immune system, as defenders against bacteria and viruses. And interestingly, once you hit puberty, the thymus begins to shrink and slowly becomes fatty tissue deposits.

4. Yes, You Can Live Without Your Spleen

The spleen is one of the largest lymphatic organs in the body, and works to clean your blood of virus, bacteria and other illness agents. Located behind your stomach and under your diaphragm, this multi-purpose organ filters defective red blood cells, as well as stores white blood cells that can produce antibodies. The spleen grows temporarily when your body is fighting an infection, but if it ruptures, it has to be removed. Though you can live without your spleen, it’s easier to stay in optimal health with it, according to the Mayo Clinic. “Your immune system has a lot of built-in redundancies,” Woessner says, so in most cases if there are deficiencies, there are also work arounds.

5. Antibodies Are A Microscopic Infantry

When your body detects germs, or foreign substances that elicit an immune response, it may trigger the creation of antibodies. Once created, antibodies remember the invaders, and prevent these same antigens from making a repeat attack. This scientific discovery made the efficacy of vaccinations a reality.

Though antibodies are your body’s safeguard, a little TLC from time to time can, for most people, keep the immune system functioning smoothly. It seems obvious, but remembering to wash your hands is one of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of illnesses. Though more than 90 percent of Americans agree it’s important to wash up after using a public bathroom, only 2 out of 3 actually admit to doing so.

Lifestyle changes that may help give the immune system some support include getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, eating healthy foods, and practicing stress-reducing techniques, like meditation and yoga. However, people who feel they get sick more often than usual should consult their doctor.

A healthy immune system is important when it comes to living a healthy life; however, some people have chronic conditions where their immune system is either missing or working improperly.  Shire is a leader in providing support to those with chronic diseases, such as Primary Immunodeficiency (PI), and offers a broad portfolio of immunoglobulin (IG) products and support services for people living with PI. Click here to learn more.

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