Re: "Samui, Phangan firms in the crosshairs" (BP, May 10).
It is encouraging to see the efforts of the Department of Business Development to expose and clamp down on the high percentage of illegal nominee companies in Surat Thani, Koh Samui and Koh Phangan.
I wonder why there is no mention of Pattaya and Phuket? The problems there are surely equally concerning.
Despite environmental concerns, some manufacturers are producing ever-larger vehicles, especially work-related ones. But is there a limit?
A work vehicle I saw recently would not fit in a standard car park -- too wide and too long, taking up much of four spaces.
Hardly fair.
Another troubling trend is the growing number of large vehicles parked in disabled bays, simply because those are the only spaces wide enough to accommodate them.
Governments concerned with pollution and fairness should restrict vehicle sizes to 90% of a car park's dimensions.
It might also encourage some of us, myself included, to lose a little weight so we can get in and out comfortably.
Be a big enough person to drive a small car.
Re: "Hungary vote shows limits of propaganda" (Opinion, May 9).
George Soros and his Open Society Foundations fund activist media networks that, critics argue, skew public narratives through ideological pressure, selective amplification and elite influence.
This risks weakening journalistic independence and centralising cultural power within transnational institutions -- a danger, some contend, no less real than the concentration of political loyalty around any individual leader.
The author of the cited piece argues that oligarchs surrounding President Trump are "offering political loyalty in exchange for financial windfalls and lucrative government contracts".
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle's Larry Ellison and Elon Musk were reportedly named as central to the efforts to build a Maga-aligned media ecosystem.
Yet mainstream outlets including MSNBC, CNN, NBC News, CBS News, ABC News, PBS, the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and many others command enormous reach.
Mr Trump was re-elected despite that dominance -- evidence, his supporters argue, of his authenticity rather than of authoritarian appeal.
10 May 2026
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