News from Thailand – August 22, 2013
If the complaint is true, Thailand has a scandal reminiscent of the French scandal in the early XNUMXs, when contaminated blood was used in blood transfusions. A private company carrying out health checks at schools and businesses would use the same hypodermic needles several times.
Parents of students at the Saraburi Witthayakhom school in Saraburi have filed a complaint about this with the local office of the Internal Security Operations Command. But because Isoc is not authorized to investigate the complaint, it has been forwarded to the Department of Special Investigation (DSI, the Thai FBI). The DSI has not yet decided whether to investigate the case.
According to the parents, needles to draw blood were used several times. They also questioned the tests because the blood groups found for some students were incorrect. The company carried out the checks between July 29 and August 2.
The DSI says similar checks have been carried out on 80 educational institutions and companies. If the company has done the same there, 80.000 people will be at risk of being infected with HIV and hepatitis B and C.
– A 31-year-old Thai (photo homepage) has been sentenced to death in Ho Chi Minh City. It is the second time this week that a foreigner has been sentenced to death. The woman had tried to smuggle two kilos of cocaine from Brazil. It was hidden in two photo albums. According to the woman, she did not know she was carrying drugs; she had been given money to take the albums to Vietnam.
The consul general in HCMC has asked the Vietnamese authorities for permission to visit the woman so that he can inform her about her rights. She can appeal or request a pardon from the Vietnamese president. Earlier this week, a Nigerian was sentenced to death. He was caught with 3,4 kilos of methamphetamine, which he tried to smuggle from Qatar.
Vietnam has not carried out the death penalty for 2 years due to a lack of chemicals. It resumed earlier this month. According to Amnesty International, two executions were carried out in 2011 and 23 new death sentences were handed out this year, mainly to drug smugglers. In June last year, a 23-year-old Thai student was sentenced to death. He had tried to smuggle 3 kilograms of methamphetamine into the country.
– Another 332 Thai, mainly students, are evacuated from Egypt. They do not travel via Dubai like the previous 614 Thais, but fly directly with a chartered plane from Egypt Air to Bangkok. About 200 Thai workers prefer to stay in Egypt because they are not in danger and some are also afraid that they will lose their jobs otherwise.
According to the Thai ambassador, the situation in central Cairo has improved somewhat and the demonstrators have moved to the suburbs. The Egyptian army has closed streets and public places. Few people dare to show themselves on the street.
In addition to the 332 Thais who are now leaving, 164 students have indicated that they want to leave. They are divided into smaller groups and accommodated on Egypt Air, Etihad, Emirates and Singapore Airlines flights. According to the Thai Students Association, a total of 406 students have requested repatriation, but only 332 have confirmed.
Students who have canceled their trip will not be admitted. That rule was introduced because an army plane returned empty on Sunday after nearly a hundred students had changed their minds. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not consider it necessary to call in the army for help again. Thai Airways International has eighty empty seats on its flights from Dubai to Bangkok every day.
– Today a special meeting of the government and army will decide whether the five demands that the BRN resistance group has made for the progress of the peace talks are acceptable. Army commander Prayuth Chan-ocha has already said they are not, but yesterday he was a bit more wary: the army will not accept the demands that violate the law. Each requirement will be discussed in detail to see if that is the case, he said. The BRN made its demands known in April in a video posting on YouTube.
According to Prayuth, the military is still willing to protect the safety of the 2 million people in the Deep South. He calls on the manufacturers of butane gas bottles to make the bottles from a different material so that they can no longer be used as bombs. Prayuth also believes that local authorities should control the sale of mobile phones because they are used to detonate bombs from a distance.
– In Nong Chik (Pattani) yesterday is a Religious teacher, an Islamic religious teacher, shot dead from an ambush. While driving his car to the Islam Community School, he was shot at by a man in a rubber plantation. The teacher later died in hospital.
Two rangers were injured in a bomb attack yesterday in Bannang Sata (Yala). They were part of an eight-man patrol. The explosion left a crater 30 cm deep and 1 meter in diameter.
– The National Pension Fund (NSF), an initiative of the previous government, has been cancelled. Today angry citizens, united in the People Pension Network, are going to the Ministry of Finance to ask for an explanation. The fund was set up to enable informal workers, some 35 million in total, to build up a pension, but it was never activated.
According to the ministry, the same goal can be achieved through the Social Security Fund (SSF), a fund for employees. This fund provides unemployment benefit and a pension, but it only applies when the employee and employer pay contributions.
Wasan Panich, a lawyer for the network, says the government cannot place the NSF under the SSF because the two serve different purposes. He calls the cancellation of the fund 'unprecedented'. "They [the government] are fighting a group of informal workers, who have filed a complaint with the Administrative Court over delays in putting the fund into operation."
Participants in the National Pension Fund would deposit 100 baht each month, supplemented by the government with an amount of 50 to 100 baht, depending on one's age.
– Environmentalists and academics are asking the government to set up an independent commission to investigate last month's oil spill off the coast of Rayong. The Ao Phrao beach on Kohn Samet was then contaminated with oil. The request is contained in a letter, signed by 30.000 people, which will be delivered to Prime Minister Yingluck on Tuesday.
"This is a good opportunity for the prime minister to show the people her sincerity by telling the truth about the incident," said Penchome Sae-Tang, director of Ecological Alert and Recovery Thailand (Earth). She said that yesterday at a seminar devoted to the oil spill.
According to Buntoon Sethasirote, director of the Good Governance for Social Development and the Environment Foundation, many questions remain about the spill and the company's response, particularly about the impact of the solvent used. The agent would have been used too close to the coast. According to the guidelines, it should not be used within two nautical miles from the coast, when the sea is 10 meters deep. The company is also said to have used far more solvent than it was authorized by the Pollution Control Department.
– The use of electronic detention will start in mid-November. The first two hundred arrested street racers to receive an ankle bracelet. If the trial is successful, other detainees will follow, such as the terminally ill and prisoners who are caring for their parents or children.
Electronic detention should help alleviate overcrowding in Thai prisons. There are 188 inmates in 270.000 prisons and 3.000 are added every month. [It is not stated how many are reduced by being released.] Seventy percent of them are related to a drug offense. Thailand also has 78 juvenile detention centres.
– A 73-year-old man of Chinese birth, arrested in November 2004 on charges of lèse-majeste, will not hear what the Supreme Court has to say about his case until December. At the request of the man's guarantor, the reading of the verdict is postponed because the man needs surgery (on his testicles, the newspaper reports).
Bandit Aneeya is said to have been guilty of lèse-majeste during a forum in 2003. The case has already served in court (4 years in prison, 2 years suspended) and the Supreme Court (2,8 years). Bandit has been free on bail since his appeal to the Supreme Court.
– With the help of soldiers, villagers are busy constructing a 350 meter long bamboo pontoon, so that they can cross the river Song Kalia again. The pontoon serves as a temporary bridge because the wooden bridge has partly collapsed.
– A 45-year-old woman was crushed by falling metal pipes on a construction site in Huai Khwang (Bangkok) and died. The pipes had been lifted by a crane, but fell because the band that held them together broke. The crane operator fled.
– The 14-year-old kickboxer who was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in Nakhon Si Thammarat last month, died in hospital yesterday. The boy was shot at along with the 44-year-old owner of a boxing gym in Muang district while they were driving a car. The owner died shortly afterwards. Two other boxers who were also in the car were unharmed. According to the family, the attack was related to a dispute over land ownership.
– The police arrested two women aged 17 and 19 in Chon Buri yesterday who filled balloons with nitrous oxide. According to reports, the 'funny air' balloons are widely sold on Walking Street in Ban Lamung. Anyone who inhales the gas bursts into a fit of laughter for 5 minutes. Laughing gas is a prohibited substance.
– Because he had had enough of her nagging for repayment of the borrowed 30.000 baht, a man strangled the owner of a restaurant in Muang (Ayutthaya) and dumped her body on the side of the road and set it on fire. The man has since been arrested and confessed.
Political news
– No skirmishes, like the day before. The joint meeting of the House of Representatives and Senate ended last night at a quarter past ten with no police in the conference room. With a large majority, the assembly agreed to amend the constitutional article that regulates the election of the Senate. The change means that the entire Senate will be elected and half will no longer be appointed. In addition, senators are now allowed to serve two consecutive terms.
The cold was out of the air yesterday because the whips agreed that all 57 Democrats who were not allowed to speak on Tuesday could still have their say. On Tuesday, only two were allowed to do so, causing a huge uproar and the chairman enlisted the help of the police to restore order.
The opposition unsuccessfully opposed the removal of the appointed senators. According to Jurin Laksanavisit, the government is trying to seize power in the Senate through this back door. “It's a case of 'for what you pay', a bargain between the government and some senators. Wives and children of current senators are now also eligible to run for office. We don't think that's right; there is a great political conspiracy going on here.'
Financial economic news
– The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of Thailand (BoT) decided yesterday the policy rate maintained at 2,5 percent. The MPC based its decision on economic stability, capital outflows and rising household debt. According to the committee, the current monetary policy is necessary and appropriate for the ongoing adjustment of the Thai economy.
Household debt currently stands at 8,97 trillion baht or 77,5 percent of gross domestic product. The MPC does not expect debts to rise any further as consumers no longer have the financial room to borrow more. But she can't predict when the debts will go down.
The MPC assumes that the economy will pick up in the second half of the year as a result of the gradual economic recovery in the G3 markets (US, EU and Japan). The downturn in the Chinese economy appears to have come to an end.
Thailand is currently in a "technical recession" (two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth), but according to an economist from the Standard Chartered Bank, this is only temporary.
De policy rate is the rate that banks charge when they borrow money from each other. It forms the basis on which interest rates are set.
- Smartphone use in Thailand's urban areas will double this year and tablet use will triple, which is the strongest growth of any country in Southeast Asia. This is shown by a poll by the Swedish company Ericsson among 38.000 people in 43 countries.
The penetration of smartphones goes from 17 to 36 percent and of tablets from 2 to 7 percent. The three top activities on smartphones are browsing the internet, using social networks and sending IMs. Tablets are mainly used for internet surfing, playing games and entertainment. Forty percent of Thai respondents in the poll said they use Wi-Fi on their tablet and 21 percent do so on their mobile.
– The governor of the Bank of Thailand reassures the nervous financial markets: economic growth picks up in the third quarter, ending two quarters of negative growth figures. Private investment remains robust. Only domestic consumption lags behind because people have less money because of their higher debts.'
Prasarn Trairatvorakul responds to the fall of Thai stocks, 5,2 percent in two days, and the baht-dollar rate at 31,62/67, which is at its lowest level this year; both indications of concerns about economic growth. In the first two quarters of this year it shrank by 1,7 and 0,3 percent. Economists therefore speak of a 'technical depression'. But that's a rough consideration.
Prasarn attributes the decline in the first quarter to the unusually high growth in the fourth quarter of 2012 that followed the floods at the end of 2011. So it makes sense that the first quarter of this year showed negative growth compared to the previous quarter . But the Thai economy is still growing, Prasarn says.
Ekniti Nitithanprapas, deputy director general of the Fiscal Policy Office, warns that continued stimulus measures could push household debt to worrying levels. He believes that the emphasis should be on domestic investment and not driving up consumption.
– Bangkok Airways introduces a service to Nay Pyi Taw, the new capital of Myanmar, a month earlier than Thai AirAsia (TAA). In June, TAA announced it would be the first airline to connect the Thai and Myanmar capitals, but that "honor" now goes to Bangkok Airways.
Until recently, Nay Pyi Taw was not on Bangkok Airways' wish list. The airline flies to Mandalay and from September 15 to Yangon. Nay Pyi Taw will fly three times a week with an ATR 72-500 turboprop, which can accommodate 70 passengers.
TAA deploys the A320, which has 180 seats. Four flights per week are scheduled.
Both airlines are the only ones with direct scheduled flights to the capital; other airlines only fly on a charter basis. Bangkok Airways flies from Suvarnabhumi, TAA from Don Mueang.
– Foreign buyers still have strong interest in luxury condominiums despite simmering political conflicts, says Magnolia Finest Corporation, the Chearavanont family's real estate company. Last year the company sold for 2 billion baht and this year it expects to collect 1,5 billion baht with Magnolias Ratchadamri Boulevard.
According to the company's director, the buyers are not deterred because they are familiar with Thai politics. Potential buyers from Singapore do not ask questions about politics, but about preparations in Thailand for the Asean Economic Community.
www.dickvanderlugt.nl – Source: Bangkok Post