Politics

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Google has stopped accepting political advertisements in Singapore months before a widely expected election, according to documents shared by a small political party which said it was angered by the decision that denies it voter reach. FILE PHOTO: A man passes a Google signage outside their office in Singapore May 24, 2019. REUTERS/Edgar Su/File Photo In email correspondence between the Singapore Democratic Party and a senior Google public policy official, the tech firm said it “will not accept advertising regulated by the Code of Practice for Transparency of Online Political Advertisements”. A spokeswoman for Alphabet Inc’s Google told Reuters the email exchange was authentic but declined to comment further. The new code of practice, part of a controversial ‘fake news’ law introduced in October, requires advertising intermediaries to maintain detailed records of political adverts and their sponsors and make those records … [Read more...] about Google halts political ads in Singapore as election looms: documents

Denver children board a bus to travel to a non-neighborhood school in compliance with a court-order desegregation plan in 1969. Photo: Bill Wunsch/Denver Post via Getty Images When Kamala Harris upbraided Joe Biden in last week’s Democratic presidential debate for his history of anti-busing activism back in the day, it electrified audiences and made her the clear winner of the evening. The very direct confrontation worked in part because Harris was able to testify to her own experience as a beneficiary of busing as a child, and in part because Biden floundered in answering, lapsing back into states’-rights jargon about the evils of federally mandated busing. More than ever, it made Biden look like a walking political anachronism. He didn’t quite sound like George Wallace with his signature denunciations of “the asinine busing of little school children,” but it was a reminder that Obama’s veep was on the same side of the issue as every racist in … [Read more...] about Kamala Harris’s Call for a Return to Busing Is Bold and Politically Risky

Email By Rebecca Opie Updated February 04, 2017 13:11:15 Photo: SA MPs Michael Atkinson and Jennifer Rankine will quit at the 2018 election. (SA Labor) Related Story: Key Labor MP to quit SA politics Related Story: SA Labor heads to court over redrawn electoral boundaries Map: SA South Australian Parliamentary Speaker Michael Atkinson and long-standing MP Jennifer Rankine have become the latest Labor MPs to announce they will not contest their seats at the next state election. External Link: Jay Weatherill tweets: Thank you @JenRankineMP, you've been a champion for the homeless, people with disabilities and other vulnerable South Australians The partners, who were first elected in 1989 and 1997 respectively, have decided to retire together at the March 2018 election."Jennifer is of the view that you can't have one member of the household still in politics while the other is retired and I tend to accept that view," Mr Atkinson said.Police Minister Peter Malinauskas is … [Read more...] about Veteran SA MPs Michael Atkinson, Jennifer Rankine to retire from politics

For a lot of people, the good old days weren’t so great. Photo: Ron Sachs/Shutterstock During Wednesday evening’s Democratic debate, Joe Biden didn’t look so inevitable. Pressed on the Obama administration’s immigration record, and then on his personal support for an infamously regressive crime bill, he found himself defending Obama’s judgement nearly as often as he defended his own. Asked by CNN moderator Don Lemon if he’d resume the Obama administration’s high deportation rates if he became president, Biden said no, and criticized another candidate onstage: Julián Castro, who served as the administration’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development and had previously explained his plan to decriminalize border crossings. “I found that Julián — excuse me — the secretary, we sat together in many meetings. I never heard him talk about any of this when he was the secretary,” Biden said, in an apparent … [Read more...] about Joe Biden Is the Reason Obama’s Legacy Is on Trial

If guitar music, as we’re told, is entering its niche-interest jazz phase, rap is having its psychedelia moment. Experimentation is the norm, boundaries are tumbling, anything goes. And if Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky and Future are the era’s fab four, and Kanye West increasingly its Syd Barrett, Run the Jewels must surely be the Monkees. A pre-scripted collaboration between Killer Mike and El-P with a cartoonish comedy aesthetic – this is the duo who tempered their darker second album Run the Jewels 2 with a remix album that used only cat meows for beats – they are nonetheless creating some of the most direct, masterfully crafted and memorable music of the age. As the pair arrive, miming to Queen’s We Are the Champions beneath two huge inflatable zombie hands making the band’s trademark gun-and-fist sign, their double-act dichotomy is instantly apparent. Mike is the old-school master, hyper-rapping boastful verses laced with jabs at … [Read more...] about Run the Jewels review – a political awakening beneath the jokes