European Union regulators on Tuesday said Apple must pay a tax bill of $14.5 billion on its European profits earned in Ireland. Lots of people are reacting, including the Irish finance minister, the White House and stock analysts.
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Apple is vowing to appeal the ruling by the European Union ordering the U.S. tech giant to pay more than $14 billion in back taxes. EU regulators announced the long awaited ruling earlier today, saying the tax arrangement between Apple and the Irish government is illegal and gives Apple an unfair advantage over its competitors. NPR’s Jim Zarroli reports.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: EU officials say that for years Apple benefited from a complex agreement that essentially allowed it to escape paying taxes on many of the products it sold overseas. The sales were recorded by a pair of subsidiaries called Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe. The head office for these two entities was ostensibly in Ireland. Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, spoke at a press conference today.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
MARGRETHE VESTAGER: This so-called head office only existed on paper. It has no employees. It has no premises, and it has no real activities.
ZARROLI: Vestager says even though profits were recorded by these Irish subsidiaries, Ireland itself ruled that Apple didn’t have to pay taxes on them. Reuven Avi-Yonah is a professor of tax law at the University of Michigan. He says Ireland didn’t view the subsidiaries as legally Irish.
REUVEN AVI-YONAH: Well, the way the Irish let them record it is that it’s not, from an Irish perspective, treated as being in Ireland at all, and the result is that the tax rate on that is effectively zero.
ZARROLI: Ireland was foregoing billions of dollars in tax revenue. Avi-Yonah says that may have something to do with the fact that Apple is a big employer there. It has nearly 6,000 workers in the country.
Whatever the reason, Ireland has insisted it doesn’t want the money. Finance Minister Michael Noonan told CNBC his government would appeal the ruling, a process that could take years.
MICHAEL NOONAN: If they owe tax, they do not owe it to the Irish authorities. They may owe it elsewhere but not to the Irish authorities.
ZARROLI: Apple issued a statement. It said, we find ourselves in the unusual position of being ordered to pay additional taxes to a government that says we don’t owe any more than we’ve already paid.
As for the U.S. government, Treasury Department officials said retroactive tax assessments are unfair, contrary to well-established legal principles and call into question the tax rules of individual states. Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
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Amanda McMacken, a registered nurse at Temple University Hospital, shows North Philadelphia residents how to slow bleeding in trauma victims. Kimberly Paynter/WHYYhide caption
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When a young African-American man dies in the city of Philadelphia, more than half the time there’s one main reason why, says Scott Charles.
“It’s because somebody pointed a gun at him and pulled that trigger. It’s not because of cancer; it’s not because of car accidents; it’s not because of house fires. It’s because somebody pointed a trigger,” he says.
Charles is trauma outreach coordinator at Temple University Hospital. The medical center now offers bystander first-aid training, called Fighting Chance, to give friends and family something to do in the minutes before help arrives.
At 6 o’clock one evening, kids run around while their parents and neighbors gather in an elementary school cafeteria. There are training stations set up, and at the back a nurse is showing people how stop blood flow from a gunshot wound.
“The pressure point is located on the inside of the arm,” he explains. “And basically, you’re going to take your hand and get up underneath the inside of the arm and clamp it down.”
Each person takes a turn, taking an old towel or T-shirt and wrapping it around the fake bloody arm tight until help arrives.
Registered nurse Danielle Vetter demonstrates use of a tourniquet. Kimberly Paynter/WHYYhide caption
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Everyone’s talking, but emergency medicine doctor Tim Bryan’s voice is the loudest. He’s a Navy veteran, a former combat medic, and he’s used to giving commands. A shooting scene is chaotic and frightening, but Bryan says in just two hours of training, people get enough of the basics so they will know how to respond.
“You have that ‘aha’ moment and people are like, ‘Wow, I can do this. I can control the scene. I can remember to call 911 and tell the person to put direct pressure on even if I don’t do anything else.’ And it does make a difference,” he says.
The topic is serious, but the mood isn’t. Alice Kellam, 63, wears a camouflage tracksuit and rhinestone hoop earrings. She’s chatty and laughs with friends all evening — except when she talks about her husband, who was murdered in 1990. She doesn’t have a lot to say about that, except that it was senseless.
“They took his sneaks and his hat. That was it,” she says.
Many people in this North Philadelphia neighborhood have a story about someone and remember a moment when they felt helpless.
Louise Smith (“Everybody calls me Miss Midge,” she says) is a perpetual volunteer, and at the big summer block party at 12th and Cambria, she’s the lady who hands out the flavored water ice.
“About a year ago, we seen a shooting around here,” she says. “It was a shame the two boys died right on the sidewalk, there wasn’t nobody there to help them.”
A severely injured person can bleed to death in less than 10 minutes. But it can take much longer for police to arrive and calm the situation, so the trainers teach the class how to move a victim away from danger and flying bullets.
Registered nurse Maureen Quigg explains how to do a two-person lift-and-carry.
“The knee closest to the victim is down and the other knee is up, and that’s what you stand up with, the power from your legs and not your back,” she says.
Quigg reassures the smaller women that they indeed can help a 200-pound person.
“If it’s someone you care about or in a situation where there’s a lot of activity your adrenaline is going — you have all this extra energy, you have all this extra power,” she says. “And if you focus on doing it and doing it the right way, you can lift someone you’d never think you could lift, and you can do it without hurting yourself.”
Advocates say learning first-aid skills to stop bleeding is the essential step in bystander education, not unlike learning CPR or making sure a defibrillator is nearby to jump-start someone’s heart. The federal Department of Homeland Security provides an introduction to these lifesaving techniques online in its Stop The Bleed program.
Neighbors learn how to move gunshot victims safely at the Fighting Chance emergency response training. Kimberly Paynter/WHYYhide caption
toggle captionKimberly Paynter/WHYY
At the end of the evening, the trainers stage a minidrama to test the group.
Bryan sets the chaotic scene and calls out directions. One person is the victim. There’s a pretend shooter.
“Remember, you can ask somebody: ‘Help me control the scene.’ That’s good,” he calls out.
Charles helped develop the first-aid education program after a local resident came to him to complain that he was sick and tired of hearing about young men who died before getting to the ER.
“As we wait for laws to be changed, many people are going to find themselves on the wrong end of a gun,” Charles says. “While those things are certainly important, we have to we have to put the power in people’s hands to address this issue.”
The goal is to saturate one neighborhood with people who have basic lifesaving skills. About 250 people have been trained so far.
Ryan Lochte poses with his gold medal. Harry How/Getty Imageshide caption
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If you doubt that Ryan Lochte is going on Dancing With The Stars to try to change the subject away from what he himself has called his “immature, intoxicated behavior” during the Rio Olympics, where he admits he lied about at least some of his story about being robbed at gunpoint, just ask him. It’s not a secret. He told USA Today, “It’s just an amazing show and hopefully when I’m on it, people will watch and enjoy the show and talk about the show … Hopefully, it changes everyone’s mindset and just focuses on something different.” (Lochte has been charged in Brazil with filing a false report, though NPR’s David Folkenflik provided some useful caveats recently on Here & Now to some of the strongest accusations against him.)
Redemption for Lochte — who, in the past, had eagerly embraced the role of professional public dummy, real or not — is how the show sees it, too. Executive producer Rob Wade says, “Hopefully, this opportunity will be something that shows Ryan in a good light.” And in a line you would not believe if you hadn’t seen it published in black and white, Wade said, “I think at the end of the day, he really wants to dance.”
Oh, don’t we all?
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Look, nobody is saying that Lochte has to be condemned forever for a single “I was like, whatever.” But the unseemly eagerness to turbocharge this one guy’s Limited Admission Of A Partial Possible Fabrication Apology Tour less than two weeks after Lochte began it cannot help but raise questions about which athletes are entitled to such pillow-soft landings after, let’s say, an international incident. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to prove, since there’s a relatively small sample size of Olympians who return from the Olympics apologizing for lying and acting like juvenile drunks (again, this is essentially the shape of his account of what he did). Not a lot of 32-year-olds are going with immaturity as a defense in the first place, so it’s hard to say when they’d get a pass for it and when they wouldn’t. But I have to wonder: even if there were, would they all have television producers less than two weeks later specifically saying the hope was to show them in a good light? As opposed to, for instance, an honest light?
Don’t get me wrong: an appearance on Dancing With The Stars is always a long infomercial for your basic geniality. Do you remember Joey Fatone from N*SYNC? Do you remember how much you like him? WHAAAAAT? You don’t? Well, here he is, agreeably learning the cha-cha! How about Kate Gosselin? Sure, you know her as a reality show star, but did you know that she is a very good sport about how she can’t dance?
There’s a deeply weird logic to who gets to do Dancing With The Stars, but there are types they return to over and over: star athletes; Disney Channel veterans and other Celebrities Of The Young; women over 75 who will be praised for still being active; women over 35 who will be praised for still being active; nostalgia acts; people specifically famous in conservative politics (Tucker Carlson, Bristol Palin, Tom DeLay, and now Rick Perry have been cast); country musicians; and ringers. (Why did Alfonso Ribiero get to be on a show for amateurs? He became famous in a musical called The Tap Dance Kid! He is famous for dancing! Don’t get me started on the figure skaters, either.)
The whole thing is a great big goof parade to begin with, whether you like it or don’t. It’s a shame that I can’t link you to a high-quality online version of Tom DeLay doing the samba to “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” while wearing a shirt with an elephant on it and dancing with a woman whose dress has a donkey on it. But it was real. As was his dance to “Wild Thing.” (Maybe Rick Perry will dance to “Third Thing.” No? Anyone?)
Maureen McCormick from The Brady Bunch is on this season, and assuming they don’t run into “intellectual” property issues, I think it’s a very good bet that you’ll see her dance to either “Time To Change” or “Sunshine Day.” And there are many more: Laurie Hernandez, who emerged from the Olympics with no scandals at all! Marilu Henner! Babyface, who’s been making special appearances since Beverly Hills, 90210! Amber Rose! Vanilla Ice, now well into his third decade of exceeding expectations, durability-wise! (Honestly, though, a dance teacher is the perfect person to understand the key difference between “ding-ding-ding-digga-ding-ding” and “ding-ding-ding-ding-digga-ding-ding.”) It’s not supposed to be anything serious.
It’s partly for this reason, in fact, that I would have let Lochte cool his heels and his new Refreshing Honesty Haircut in Subdued Chestnut for a little while longer. Not forever. I like Dancing as a way to rediscover Joey Fatone and check in with Maureen McCormick. I’m a little less sure how I feel about it as a PR machine for people who are still facing charges over an incident that’s still a little murky. I could have stood a little more of an interregnum of regret before they started airing clip packages and, I’m going to guess, having him dance to something like “Oops, I Did It Again.” You know, ironically.
They had other options. I’m sure he’s not the only one who wanted to dance.
