PeterRS

To suggest it is "strange indeed" is putting it far too mildly. In this day and age to suggest that a law passed centuries ago by a new country should remain unchanged given massive changes in society is an outright abomination.

I have never had the faintest idea how Michelin stars are awarded other than their inspectors are anonymous - or so I am told. But then my understanding is they also limit the number of hostelries they visit in all countries. It would clearly be totally impossible to visit every restaurant. In the USA its own site states it visited 1,557 restaurants. It also states that the number in the UK was 1,062. And you are wrong in your list of cities. You are clearly unaware that inspectors also now visit restaurants in Atlanta and the state of Colorado. And perhaps ironicallywhen you add up the poulations of the 5 areas you listed and add in Atlanta and Colorado, you have within 1% the population of the UK. So while my total number was out, the US still has 50% more restaurants visited than the UK. But it certainly does not have 50% more Michelin starred restaurants! And you are again totally wrong. To suggest that the restaurants the inspectors visit in the UK are all serving non-British food is still nonsense. In the first 48 listed on the first UK page of the Michelin's own Guide, 6 serve "Traditional British" cuisine and 9 serve "Modern British" cuisine. Another 11 serve what is termed as "mdern cuisine" which includes cuisine from Britain and other countries. A total of 63 restaurants in the UK serving "Traditional British" food were awarded Michelin stars. And that blows a big hole in your suggestion that Michelin stars go only to restaurants serving other cuisines. Now compare that with the USA restaurants. 5 are listed as serving American cuisine and 6 Californian Cuisine. The UK has 220 Michelin starred restarants while the USA has 235. Your facts were a little more than slightly out!

To some, this will seem a somewhat petty reason to engage in a global conflict. But this involves NATO. All countries that signed up for NATO membership agree on Article 5. This is a core principle of NATO membership and it involves collective defence. It states quite simply “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. At approx. 1:30 pm on 9 September, 19 Russian made kamikaze drones entered Polish airspace after being launched from the Russian Federation. At least four were shot down in Polish territory as a result of which four Polish airports had to be closed including the main one serving Warsaw. Wreckage of the remaining drones were stewn across the Polish countryside, smashing into homes and damaging cars. The Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has stated - "This situation brings us the closest we have been to open conflict since World War Two" The BBC reported this is the first time Russian drones have been downed over NATO territory since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia's defence ministry said there had been "no plans" to target facilities on Polish soil. What? No plans? Are their drones so incredibly inefficient that all 19 effectively misfired? Belarus, a close Russian ally, claimed the drones entered Polish airspace accidentally after their navigation systems were jammed. Poland is to the west of both Ukraine and Belarus. Why Russia would have fired kamikaze drones so close to Polish airspace is not known. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c2enwk1l9e1t

I found most of @stevenkesslar's post heartwarming and thank him for it. But that does not necessarily mean I agree with it. Yes the gay movement finally overcame its many obstacles - more or less - but it took time. It may have been a movement based on love but the opposing side did not sit back and willingly let the gays march in. Many actually resorted to murder. Just in the USA alone who murdered Sal Mineo and why? Who murdered Harvey Milk and why? Who murdered Julio Rivera and why? Who murdered Than Nguyen for why? Who murdered Nicholas West and why? Who murdered Matthew Shepard and why? Who murdered Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder and why? Who murdered Steen Fenrich in New York, had his body dismembered and the words "gay nigger number one" scratched on his skull along with his social security number? The "why" in this case is not necessary as it is obvious. That poor man's step-father murdered him and then killed himself. The fact is that love has not won. It has made giant strides but it is still attacked and is still on the defensive in many places. The Conservative agenda is still very much a homophobic one. In an article in The Guardian on 1 September 2023, New York journalist broadcaster Dan Clark who had come out 20 years earlier wrote, "I have never, in my adult life, felt less safe to be gay in public in the USA." He then added - "A recent Gallup poll found the sharpest decline in acceptance of same-gender relationships among adults in the US since at least 2001, the earliest data available from the polling firm." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/01/lgbtq-homophobia-rise-new-york The names I have quoted above are merely a small fraction of those murdered in the USA only because they were gay. To their murderers they were not men; not living, breathing, loving human beings. They were objects of hate and violence. Exactly the sort of hate and violence that is now being preached by Kirk and his hideous group of followers and others around the USA, much of it directed at the gay community and using lies, ghastly insinuations and bigotry to fuel their agenda. If he did not deserve to die, did 21-year old Matthew Shepard deserve to be beaten, tortured and then left to die such a hideous and prolonged death? His killer's girlfriend had informed the police that he had been motivated by anti-gay sentiment. Gays have not killed hate. They have not killed bigotry "all over the planet". Try telling that to gay men in the 64 countries that still have anti-homosexual laws in their criminal code. In six countries the penalty is death. In another five countries the penalty is vague but death is a definite possibility. In Brunei, a gay man can even be stoned to death. We must face facts. We have not won!

And you still believe what is written in that rag?

Your post is rubbish as you have clearly not been to Britain and eaten some fabulous dishes in a vast number of cafes and restaurants. For many decades the British have travelled overseas a great deal - far more than Americans. They learned aeons ago that they were not prepared to put up with the typical British stodge they had been served till then. Then food writers like Elizabeth David in the 1950s became hugely popular by introducing different forms of continental cuisine. I learned my basic Italian cooking from one of her books! Add to that the introduction of a wide range of celebrity chefs whose influence was spread though television. There was soon a vast change in the food served in most British restaurants. At the top end, Britain now has 208 Michelin-starred restaurants; the USA whose population is over five times larger than the UK's has 235 Michelin-starred restaurants. Go figure! No doubt that's in part because far too many Americans gorge themselves and become far too overweight on fast food. You mention Indian restaurants. For more variety, like many British people try some of the simple Chinese restaurants in British cities serving various types of utterly delicious Cantonese, Shanghainese, Szechuan, Beijing, Chiu Chow and Hunan cuisine. Or Thai restaurants are found in most cities serving dishes that would give many restaurants in Thailand a run for their money. On a personal point, though, you mention haggis which is of course a Scottish dish. You may not happen to like it when it is served in its simplest form with bashed neeps and chappit tatties (mashed turnips and potatoes). But pour some Drambuie liqueur over it and it becomes a very different almost gourmet dish. 😀

I am delighted. Please recall that my post stated the conversations took place ten years ago. A new generation of Asians is clearly changing the profile.

With the perfectly ghastly, snake-like Roy Cohn as his mentor, Trump was certainly never good. Down in hell, Cohn will be exhilarated at how well his pupil is doing!

As I wrote in another thread, in the USA it all comes down to money. Cash is king. As long as they have their own money or it is being fed to them by the mass of special interests, bigots, liars, cheats, scammers and the whole host of rotten humanity is provided with a platform to spew out their dirt. It's called "free speech" in the USA. And as I wrote yesterday, unless free speech is guarded by a host of caveats, people like Kirk and Bannon and Trump and many, many others - including those calling themselves Christians whose churches happen not to have to pay taxes - have an open playing field. We had a thread recently about the televangelists prompted by the death of the loathsome Jimmy Swaggart. These men used the airwaves to con millions to enrich themselves. They did not as a result murder anyone as far as I know. But the crazies in the USA are now basically using exactly the same tools. The result has been murder, and it will continue if @floridarob's peaceful future has any hope of happening.

Interesting point made in several of today's media. The presence of American troops in Qatar and its largest air base in the Gulf States with all the intelligence capability surrounding them failed to stop Israel breaching Qatari defences - and by extension US defences. Other Gulf states have noted this very strongly.

I find this post total rubbish. How anyone can claim that the 2nd amendment is applicable in 2025 and that guns manufactured for the battlefield can be used on American streets in a country where there are more firearms than people is, in my view, ridiculous! Equally the freedom of speech amendment is total nonsense UNLESS it is accompanied by a whole host of caveats. Charlie Kirk believed in anarchy. Full stop!

As I have written elsewhere, I started my career as a general trainee with the BBC. In those far off days, standards were high and the BBC news department in particular was particularly regarded worldwide for its quality and accuracy. I cannot speak of BBC television today for the little I see is on an annual two week visit to the UK. The World Service on BBC radio used to be broadcast around the clock each day. The foreign language news programmes used to broadcast in 45 different languages several times a day. I understand the English Service is still in existence but the number of languages for foreign language news has been reduced to 27. That apart, and accepting that there have been a few scandals as with programmes on the pedophile Jimmy Savile after his death and most recently its fired primary television news reader for exchanging indecent images of underage boys, I am told by former colleagues that the quality of most of its news-type programmes is still pretty high. The quality of some of its senior management and its own internal reporting standards need revamping, but there is seemingly no desire to dumb down as with any networks eslsewhere. But the recent programme on Thailand is clearly a major exception. Complaining to the BBC through its complaints page is a useless exercise in frustration. I happen to enjoy badminton, but while its sports pages have a dedicated badminton page, it never reviews the world's main badminton events. It is also massively out of date. The last "news" item about badminton is on 8 March 2020! Complain and it advises your letter will be passed to heads of departments. Then you get a mail saying these people do not agree. I do not believe any of the complaint letters actually are read by anyone. Heads need to be bashed together - but it will never happen.

I remember chatting with some Japanese and Taiwanese guys around ten years ago. They were in their own groups of 2 or 3 and the conversation developed around nightlife. I asked what they liked most about Bangkok. The universal opinion was that all planned in their separate groups to go for massages, then to a gogo bar and finally to a disco like DJ Station. I rather innocently asked what type of boys they liked to take off from the bars. None, was the answer. They only went to see the shows. None of them had ever offed a guy! Going to a disco to end the evenings was the priority. Given that this was the relatively new market starting to invade the gay scene in Thailand, it made me just a litte concerned about the future. Bars with boys for offs would obviously survive with the western tourists who still visited in some numbers and other individual Asians. But if a majority of Asians were not in the market for offs, I wondered how the bars would survive in the longer term. I still wonder!

Dropping a relatively ingenue reporter into Thailand and expecting them to make a series of programmes that will convey the reality of life in the country is a typical BBC habit, it seems. There are plenty of reporters, some like Jonathan Head who has been based in Bangkok for more than 20 years, who work for the BBC and who could do what I am certain would be a much better job. But he knows the pitfalls and the corruption and the police and the laws. He would probably turn such an assignment down. On the other hand, there are some excellent BBC reporters. I think particularly of two the BBC managed to infiltrate into Myanmar - the latest being Quentin Sommerville last year - who really gave viewers a far better idea of what real life was like with the militias fighting the junta forces.

I have been to only one Michelin-starred restaurant in my life, although several times. That prints its basic menu for checking in advance. It also has a relatively short list of daily specials inside. There are certain foods that I utterly dislike and that is one reason for my wanting to know what is being served. I have been to two or three very fine restaurants in different countries with no menus whatever. You just take the set menu of the day. But I am one of probably just a few that loathe oysters, for example, and if the starter happened to be oyster based, my meal would be all but ruined.

Which adjective would I use? Inevitable. I had never heard of this guy, not being an American, but I know well there are enough nuts, especially extreme right-wing ones, that at some point someone was going to attempt murder. A huge problem with extremist leaders like Trump is that they only encourage counter extemes. And in a country like the USA where there are more guns than people, the urge for one - or indeed some - to express their beliefs in the most extreme way by resorting to a firearm is in my view inevitable. I am sad for this man's family and loved ones, but I am even more sad for all those innocent people who over the years have been murdered by guns. What I now fear most is that we are going to witness more extreme cases of the counter extreme. So far, it seems to me, the war in the USA has ben a a war of words. Now it is a war of death and, again in my view, no amount of increasing protection is going to stop the further violence that will result. And to extend the premise a little further, Trump's extremism will not stop at the USA's borders. We have already witnessed the utter madness of the crook Netanyahu bombing Israel's ally Qatar. This tiny nation state has problably - but this is clearly a guess as none of us know the real facts - done more to get Israeli hostages released than any other, a typical Arab state which Israel has traditionally condemned in past decades. It is also a large base for American troops. Now the Prime Minister of Qatar has furiously stated that Israel has "killed all hope" that Hamas will ever release the remaining israeli hostages. For how much longer will Israel's moderate population put up with a leader intent on wiping out many tens of thousands of Palestinians, on the utter destruction of the Palestinian State, and continually kowtow to the very small group of ultra-right wing aggressive Orthodox Jews in his country? We all know that the root cause of all the fighting is to keep Netanyahu out of jail. Yet how many have been slaughtered in that process? That the world in general has stood by and allowed this to happen is an atrocity in itself. Have we all gone stark raving mad? Have we lost all sense of proportion, of shame, and of sheer human decency?

I have never used poppers but many years ago I did bring some into Thailand as I have a Thai friend who loves using them. Before my fight, I tore off all the wrappings placed a couple inside shoes covered by dirty socks and others in my toiletries bag with a lot of other materials. Surprisingly my bag was opened at BKK but the check was cursory at best. However, checks now may be more rigorous since popers are highly flammable.

Never use such apps. But I honestly cannot believe you are so incredibly busy that you have no time to read the forum. You have made many, many dozens of posts so clearly you had time to make them and read many of the responses! Do you have a new job? Or do you now spend so much more of your time looking up gay travel sites to answer some of your questions?

Absolutely not!

I wonder if they now feel the extra large bribes (oops fees) he must have paid them to lie were worth it.

I suspect a lot of people will be watching this time to ensure that he is actually in a prison and not in a VIP hospital suite. Perhaps his recent trip outside the country was to collect a good amount of cash to try and buy his way out of prison. But I doubt if this time he will be successful.

The Supreme Court of Thailand has sentenced Thaksin to jail for one year. It ruled that his previous prison term was a sham. At that time, on his first day he complained of feeling ill and was taken to the VIP Wing of a hospital where he spent the entire period of his jail term in a great degree of comfort before being pardoned after 6 months. The Supreme Court ruled this was unlawful and Thaksin was not in fact ill. That case is known in Thailand as the "14th Floor" case as it was on that floor in the hospital where Thaksin lived in a degree of luxury. Last week Thaksin flew on a private jet to his second home in Dubai allegedly to receive medical treatment. He must have assumed that by returning he could escape a prison term. He must now be wishing he had not come back! The Thaksin political dynasty has finally suffered what must surely be a fatal blow. Sic transit . . . .!

Poppers are illegal in Thailand - and in several other Asian countries. If you buy on the streets, I suspect there is a very good chance they are fake.

It also appears he was not only alone at the time he made the jump, he had been alone in his room all day. It also states "luxury" hotel. That would indicate he could have had a certain degree of wealth, either that or he blew his savings before ending everything. As far as the sound from above is concerned I would not count on the Pattaya Mail's reporting being accurate. Presumably it was an eye witness statement when the poor man's landing might have sounded as though it had come from above. The attached article from another news outlet says nothing about sound from above - merely "a loud noise from meters away". It also ooints out a Chinese fell to his death just last Sunday. Why the British man fell can only be a matter of speciulation. Boy friend problems? Girl friend problems? Health issues? Acute depression for another reason? Probaby we'll never know. It makes me wonder, though. What facilities exist in Pattaya for foreigners to consult suicide hotlines (if any) or psychiatrists about issues with which they are struggling mentally? https://www.thaiexaminer.com/thai-news-foreigners/2025/09/08/uk-man-the-latest-foreign-tourist-to-die-in-high-rise-balcony-fall-in-nong-prue-pattaya-last-saturday/

For virtually the first time in decades, the Myanmar junta's army is losing both territory and manpower. Consequently it is also losing much-needed cash. The various militias have gained a lot of ground fighting largely with hope and without proper military gear. The junta uses its air force to try and keep its territory, and primarily as a result of a large number of desertions conscription is now fully in force, even to the extent of men being hauled off the streets in major cities to become soldiers. Most recent supplies to the junta's air force have come from Russia in the form of six advanced Su-30MSE fighter jets. The purchase was financed by a Russian loan and was made necessary due to problem issues with older Chinese military aircraft. The junta maintains that these jets will be used to maintain the country's territorial integrity, but it is well known from various sources that they have been used against anti-junta militia forces The junta has a wide assortment of fighter jets and military helicopters in its arsenal. In the 1990s it bought 20 Mil Mi-2 and PZL W-3 Sokol helicopters from Poland and 13 Mil Mi-17 from Russia. In 2001 it bought 12 MIG-29 fighter aircraft from Belarus. This was followed by an additional order of 20 MiG-29s as part of a $570 million defence package in December 2009. 10 MiG-29Bs were upgraded to SM standard in 2017. The air force also ordered 10 Mil Mi-35 gunship helicopters as part of a $71 million defence package signed in December 2009. Private airlines have also been forced to hand over to the government a number of French-made ATR turbo prop aircraft which have been adapted for military use. All this has to be paid for! And given the strike power of the airforce, it is remarkable how successful the militias have been.