Bangkok Post
[Thailand]
18 December 2019
'Tampon tax' is fake news, insists govt
The government's
campaign against "fake news" took a bizarre turn yesterday when Prime
Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha spoke out to try and scotch a rumour that a 40% tax
would be imposed on tampons. The rumour spread after Puea Chat spokeswoman
Ketpreeya Kaewsaenmuang announced that, unlike sanitary pads, tampons were
regarded as a cosmetic product rather than a hygienic necessity. As such, they
might be taxed as "luxury goods", she added. The tax ceiling for
luxuries is 40%.
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The Daily Beast
21 December 2019
Why Does Starbucks Melt Conservative Brains?
Right-wingers keep falling for hoaxes and believing
the worst about the ubiquitous coffee purveyor.
[…] And all of this comes amid the annual right-wing
panic over whether Starbucks’ holiday cups are sufficiently Christian, and
whether its employees say “Merry Christmas.” Part of the problem is Starbucks’
role as a public meeting place in a country that invests little in so-called
“third places”: areas of community engagement outside the home or workplace.
[…] It’s a situation ripe for Fox News-style grievance narratives about the
embattled Republican, forced to endure liberal tyranny everywhere he turns. […]
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Elton John, Me
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019), 106-7.
We spent the first weeks of 1974 recording at the
Caribou Ranch, a studio up in the Rocky Mountains that gave its name to our new
album Caribou. […]
Stevie Wonder turned up one day and took out a
snowmobile, insisting on driving it himself. To pre-empt your question: no, I
have absolutely no idea how Stevie Wonder successfully piloted a snowmobile
through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado without killing himself, or indeed
anyone else, in the process, but he did.
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