kevin2852

I assume that the Government will not just give a foreign worker a wristband, it has not been mentioned yet but I would not be surprised to learn that there is say a 2000 Bt charge for the said wristband and that a new one has to be purchased for each visit to the Kingdom. Maybe the bottom line is the reason !

I spent 5 months in Mukdahan, Nong Khai and That Phanom and 50% of the traders were Laotian who came across the bridge every day free of charge to sell their goods in the markets. This has been going on for over a century ( via little boats ) and is a way of life. While I appreciate that Governments like statistics and strict control of foreigners, I think this move is overkill and is very non-Thai

Zydeco is right, moves have already been made as to the Russian demand for fish and crustaceans shipped overland from Vladivostok and via China. That will be the next great announcement

I bet that if he had resricted himself to cheating Fareng, it would have gone on for many years. He might have even become rich.

I think that wherever you go and whatever age you are, in our stressful society, many people are walking along the razors edge between coping and falling apart and sometimes only a microscopic push is needed to throw them off the side.

I wish that there was a way of predicting when and how they will fall, but the only one that seems to be used is hindsight after the fact. Feel pity for the cop, pray for the victims and just hope that it will not be you who tips someone's balance in the future. As to the perpetrator, he too is a victim, but he really doesn't matter since he has abrogated his rights. All the penalties in the world and all the education in the world will not stop someone who has lost it from committing completely unpredictable motiveless crime. How do you tell who that might be ? Perhaps, this situation might even become far more common in the future as living becomes harder, again, perhaps then, only hindsight will give us insights.

The Thai version of Fishermans Friend

While I agree that the roundabout is a fine way to manage traffic, unfortunately they demand space. it has to be possible for cars to be seen for time before they arrive at your position. In Manchester in the UK, there is a roundabout which is 1.5 Km in diameter and it works fine, but in our cities with tall buildings just a few feet from the road obscuring view, narrow roads, extreme dip angles which often need a turn of less than 45 degrees ( 30 or 120 depending on approach ) to enter the roundabout and fast drivers, there is virtually no chance at all of them being installed properly without demolishing half of the city which would remove it's "intimate Thainess". Love them or hate them, I think that they are only ever going to work in new developments.

I always thought that you have to give way to any vehicle already on the roundabout, I have learned something new today

Unconcealed stray weapon components, but no guns. Packed in sacks obtained from Garbage and cartridges in 7.62 x 39 which was only ever used in tiny quantities by the Prahan Phran and which the Thai military does not use.

This shit has been dumped by a " Private Collector " and warrants no attention at all unless fingerprints and DNA can be obtained from it. The fact it is old and left by the roadside shows that it was not intended to be used. Maybe there is an old Thai Communist ex warrior out there who has simply discarded it. No excitement warranted at all

If this is a genuine attempt to clean up the island then I bow to the Junta, but I suspect that it is simply a publicity drive to show muscle at the expense of a few low hanging fruit. We will see what happens after the jolted Police reports and the 4 clarifications with aoplogies

While I agree that a clutch of Somalis is a novel term does it warrant so much attention? Four people who are not yet guily of crimes having been only sought in relation to alleged offences is not really such an enormous collar. Just allow their own Police forces to extradite them at their expense and do not labour the subject

I like to think that this action on the part of a cabbie was most heroic. May he enjoy his reward and may he be honoured. Too often we above all forget the nicer aspects of Thainess. This is one of the main reasons why we are here after all.

Some years ago there was a special on TV about a company that manufactured armored cars. Thailand was specifically mentioned as one of the countries where many vehicles were bought.

I remember that special, but it was related to security companies who needed to move money from banks, very long distances to the Bangkok Head Offices, not to private individuals who just needed a tank to do their shopping in

Thai is no better or worse than anywhere else, the statistics on crime are skewed all over the world because they are based on numbers of crimes per head of population and as we have seen, not all heads are equivalently prone to violent crime. If you look at individual crimes which cause death then of course a poor country has many times the world average but if you look at a rich country, where people profit from drug deals, weapons trades, Slave trading, child exploitation and commodity exploitation then possibly the death rate may be significantly higher however, it is unrecorded. It is unfair to look at Thailad and say that it appears to be so much worse. Use a spade to look under the surface of your own backyard and try to imagine just what percentage of those millions of missing people just should fall into the statistics on murder, you might be surprised.

I disagree with the earlier post about computer use though, my machine is on like 10 hours each day and with a 600 W power supply that means I am using 60 Bt per day ( 1,800 Bt/month ) just to feed the computer. Laptops are more economical, but along with their running cost you have to look at replacement batteries every 2 years which can also cost 3,000 to 4,000 Bt or about 40 Bt per week just for that. Do not regard a computer as trivial usage. Everything hinges on the wattage of the power supply and VERY FEW of them are below 300 W

Just by way of interest, this is an item from today's news. It seems the 419 Advance Fee scam is catching on here more quickly than even I expected. Maybe it is time to start digging that moat and importing sharks....

Bangkok:- A couple has allegedly made more than Bt1.5 million from their fraudulent online advertisements about cute cats for sale.

The free advertisements say Persian or Scottish Fold cats are available at a very cheap price. However, after hundreds of victims transferred money to the advertisers’ bank account, they have never really got a kitty.

Tammanit Thaowannee, 31, and his girlfriend are behind this fraudulent scheme, according to police.

“I’ve got this idea because I was once a victim of a similar scheme,” Tammanit told police.

Describing himself as a cat lover, he said he spent much money on his cat’s medical bill in 2013 and thus decided to start the fraud.

“There must have been over 250 victims already,” he said. While he is now in police detention, his girlfriend is still on the run.

Pol Maj General Panurat Lakboon, commander of Patrol and Special Operation Division, says police tracked down Tammanit after a group of victims came forward.

“He and his girlfriend have lured each of their victims to transfer between Bt5,000 and Bt27,000 to their bank account as a deposit for the cat that has never been delivered,” he says.

Rattana Norarat, one of the victims, says she lost Bt10,000 to this con couple last month and immediately lodged a complaint with a police.

“After that, I have also created a Facebook page to bring together other victims,” she says. Rattana’s group has found more than 50 victims and they are preparing to pursue legal actions against the alleged con couple together.

Are Nigerians genetically programmed to commit crime?

It seems that way, but in fact, the issue in Nigeria is the same as in the Philippines and to some small extent Cambodia and Thailand. They have a huge population ( 173 Mill ) and there is effectively no middle class any more. Their world is full of The Super Rich and the Super Poor.

If you are part of the poor, the chances are good that you will not go to school past age 8. You might inherit a profession from your father, you may find a job or you more likely, will be unemployed for your entire life. In Ghana and Nigeria both I saw 3rd generation unemployed who are a larger percentage than you might imagine.

Being both poor and unemployed does not make you stupid, it programs you to see every possible opportunity and to take advantage of it in every way possible and it teaches you that Morals, Ethics and Standards are the tools of the rich which are only used as whips to control the poor. If you do not succeed in finding a shelf to sit on, you are literally doomed to starvation or working a 17 hour day for food scraps only.

I am critical of them and I detest their system but I must admit to a small respect for their inbuilt driving dynamic. They are not lazy and will work very hard to achieve whatever they need or want. They are attracted to bright lights and colours like moths to a flame because these expose weaknesses in human nature which can be exploited, and indeed, most forms of crime are simply the exploitation of human weakness and this is an area in which the Nigerian is well equipped to survive and even prosper. There is no competing with them one they become fixated.

As I commented earlier, 419 scams are always locally founded and deal with overseas suckers. I think that the delightful Chuttraporn is actually the boss and that she has co-opted a couple of Fareng Nigerians to tell her how to set up the system, make sure that it succeeds and explain the technicalities. She is probably even paying them a percentage as commission. The 419 Scam is a Nigerian National Obsession and even children there know how to make a scam work, how to avoid local regulations and what has to be done to keep it working. It is a great shame that it has been allowed to get started here, but hopefully, the Police will make sure that it is properly dealt with. The best way is to use Jail Sentences and fines combined with an exclusion from Privacy regulations which allows newspapers to publicise the names and addresses of the convicted. The Military Government can do this also.

This is why they call the scam an advance fee fraud it is a genuine 419 offence and will net a Nigerian running it a 10 years jail sentence. They avoid this by setting up a call centre with maybe 20 computers, each with 15 or 20 I.D.s in a private house staffed ONLY by Ghanaians, cote D'ivoirans, Senegalese and Burkinans. That way, when the Government busts the scam, the " Illegal Aliens " are all deported to a border 200 Km away and that leaves the Nigerian owner free to set up a new scam, It also leaves the "outlanders " free to come back in 3 or 4 weeks. I stayed in Ghana and Nigeria for 12 months and the 419 scam is virtually a national industry. The ID used belongs to a computer and that will be online 24 hours a day with 4 operators each day. Male or female, it makes no difference to them.

The important issue is simply to obtain $40 to $80 every few days when you are online and every now and then a bite of $200-300. These are not long term scams, relying on the victim just giving up and I have never heard of a Nigerian travelling to a foreign location. I suspect that Chuttraporn is an enterprising Thai who is setting up or has set up a 419 operation in Thailand where the rules are very different to the Africas. I hope that they nail her to a tree in the Marketplace so that everybody can watch her rot.

Wow64, it was clumsily put, but I agree completely. The old image of downtrodden, drug addicted and diseased girls working alone in a district is 60 years out of date. The supply of, the premises for and the conditions and charges for are all defined and set by that small sector of the population which I talked about earlier. If they are not unhappy, then the " Prostitution problem " will completely disappear because It is easy for the normal person to believe that something they never hear about does not exist.

All too often, the Thai laws are only used when that same ruling class thinks that it is necessary to teach an individual or a group to obey their rules.

Social Laws all over the world are written to suit a powerful few backed by their flock of sheep. I quote Prohibition in the US in the '20s.

Social legislation therefore seldom reflects the real state of either the nation or popular feeling and is it so surprising that the administarive upholders of the law choose not to Police the law to the limit of their power. There is nothing to be gained by smashing a few bottles, the supply is always available. The role of the Police is very properly, not to eliminate the issue, which would cause undue hardship, stress and suffering, but to simply try to ensure that it does not cause problems for the city or the state.

The best way to deal with Prostitution is simply to forget that it is there until it begins to intrude into more important legal areas, as in Child prostitution or Sex-Slavery and then to stamp out the offending elements, simply cauterize the wound and leave it to heal.

The Thai Police can only really be criticized for their off and on treatment of the matter. A consistent approach would be more in keeping with the Thai character and would be accepted by all.

The Barfine system was brought in so that an "employer" could be compensated for the loss of the valuable time of his treasured employee. Note the word employee.

This is the system which is used by so called legal venues. When the Barfine is applied and there is not an employee involved, it represents just a cut for the bar owner and as such, there are no records of it, no proof that it was ever paid and no cash can be found. This makes the difference between a casual bystander and a "Prostitute" hard to pin down and, they will never be able to tell the difference so will not try. The kink is that if the girl has a record, she is automatically guilty.

All this will achieve is a continual demand for new blood and recruiting drives through the country will start to work much harder, which will enrage the country. I think that this is all just Window-Dressing, the enforcement of it would upset the status quo and that of course would take money out of the pockets of the rich.

The effect for us will be that a large number of very small fish will be thrown in the garbage and then like so may other regulations, it will just suffocate because of inertia under it's own body mass. Just be sure that you are not one of the small sacrifices.

However he is now situated, Andrew is still liable for prosecution in England under sweeping new changes to the Journalist/leak/privileged Information situation which is putting international journalists making " unprovable allegations " at risk of prosecution by Crown investigators in England, this can also be the result of a complaint from foreign sources being made to the British authorities since these are now regarded as a crime which the British government will not shield Journalists living in England from.

The below is printed from NSBC for your information. Andrew will have to continue to tread very carefully even though he is no longer on-site.

Tom Crook (TC) : Britain’s rights to basic freedom of expression, which writers, journalists and free-speech activists fought for over centuries have been sacrificed and abandoned in the space of a few short disastrous years.

Free speech and the freedom of the press to do its job without fear or favour is one of the most important pillars of a true democracy. But this is in greater danger of being sacrificed than at any time in living memory.

What has happened to British journalism’s proud record of speaking truth to power? There is a shameful litany of ways in which journalists' ability to perform this key role is being compromised and undermined.

Confidential sources and public office

Take the use of sources: in a liberal democracy the unfettered flow of important information to the public is wholly dependent on confidential sources being protected when contacting and communicating with journalists.

Sometimes sources are committing crimes by leaking to journalists and taking that risk may mean they need to be paid for their information. Why is it a crime to pay a public official for information and not a crime to pay anyone else? This is inconsistent, and criminalising the act of rewarding whistle-blowers undermines the protection of sources.

But this notion of source protection has been wrecked by the machinations of News Corporation’s “management and standards committee”, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Director of Public Prosecution and judiciary.

It would appear thousands of confidential emails between journalists and their sources at The Sun and the former News of the World were accessed in evidence searching by the Metropolitan Police during Operation Elveden – an operation that has cost the public £11.3m so far.

Neither the journalists nor their sources were given any right to oppose this breach of their confidentiality. There was no independent hearing before a judge to decide if their Article 10 rights to free expression under the European Convention on Human Rights would be violated.

The careers and lives of senior police officers have been destroyed for simply making a mobile phone call to a news desk, or allegedly background briefing in a confidential journalist relationship.

The CPS, DPP and judiciary have done nothing to stop sources and journalists being criminally prosecuted for the common law offence of “misconduct in public office”, which has been conjured up and developed since 2007 to replace the old and discredited Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act to criminalise the mere telling of official information. It's sledgehammer force crushed and jailed a Scotland Yard security expert in 2007 for leaking a public interest story published in The Sunday Times.

In 2008 it was applied against a terrified weekly newspaper crime reporter, Sally Murrer, after police had bugged her contact with a source. She was only rescued at Crown Court when the judge stopped her trial for the breach of her Article 10 rights.

Police hacking

Juries are becoming confused and bewildered in trials where they see journalists in the dock for publishing stories they strongly argued were in the public interest. When they can’t agree, the CPS pursues retrials. One MP, Tracey Crouch, observed that the CPS"seems to be pursuing a vendetta“ while a leading media law QC, Gavin Millar, asked: ”What on earth is the criminality?"

It now turns out that the police have been “bugging” and “hacking” into communications between journalists and their whistleblower sources without any independent judicial oversight since at least the millennium.

The government and parliament show no willingness to place police and security/intelligence surveillance of journalist communications under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 in the same way that the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 did – which required a hearing before a judge at which the affected parties were properly represented.

Leveson’s chilling legacy

The deep freeze in public official and police sourcing to journalists was turned arctic by the Leveson inquiry in 2012. Leveson argued for a review of the purposes of journalism protections in PACE and data protection acts to see whether they should be narrowed and constrained. He argued for increasing the criminalising and retributive punishment for journalistic conduct and publication.

The wider context of media freedom is utterly depressing. Leveson, academics and a host of other campaigning organisations such as Hacked Off, The Media Standards Trust and even the journalists union, the NUJ, have come out in favour of a statutory underpinning of press regulation. This extraordinary alliance of interests supports the alternative proposed system of public authority oversight through the medieval executive power of a Royal Charter.

Even worse, the provisions for “publishers of news-related material: damages and costs” in the Crime and Courts Act 2013 punishes those media organisations who stand their ground for freedom from state interference. This appalling authoritarian measure imposes added costs and punitive damages in media litigation to media publishers asserting their basic constitutional freedom to be subject to the rule of law but not subject to regulation and approval by state interference.

The Royal Charter regime is a fundamental breach of the European Convention of Human Rights, English common law and constitutional convention. Article 10.1 of the Human Rights Act, which deals with freedom of expression, explicitly states that this right should be “without interference by public authority”. The only exception is for the regulation and licensing of “broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises”. And importantly, this does not include the press or online media.

Creeping powers

Another wider context of authoritarianism has been the slow sleep-walking into criminal privacy law for media conduct and publication. Not only has there been the development of a civil remedy with costs and damages for publishing truthful information deemed to be “private”. This has been accompanied by criminal legislation for privacy intrusion and publication of truthful though private information. This means prosecution, conviction and punitive sentencing for actions that are also sued over for civil damages.

Criminal libel was abolished in 2009-10 because in the field of media communication and freedom of expression, a double legal jeopardy was seen as generating a chilling effect. Giving journalists and publishers a criminal record and, indeed, sending them to jail for making mistakes in finding information and publishing words seemed disproportionate and authoritarian.

Yet it is extraordinary that the Guardian newspaper, some academics and the country’s political establishment have delighted in campaigning for and establishing this effective double jeopardy in privacy for journalists and media where a civil rememdy for invasion of privacy is backed by criminal offences in the Data Protection Act, RIPA and other legislation.

While it can be accepted that human dignity and honour is being protected, I don’t think enough thought has been given to the social risks of legally prohibiting and criminally prosecuting the publication of truthful and accurate information (as opposed to lies and untruths which are covered by libel laws). So, in the case of phone-hacking, News Corporation paid hundreds of millions of pounds in damages for breaching the privacy of mobile phone messages, but on top of this several of its journalists were criminally prosecuted and, in some cases jailed, in Operation Weeting at a cost of nearly £20m.

Fearful self-censorship

As a result of all this, British journalism is now running scared. Litigation involving libel in privacy has been falling, not because journalists and their publishers are behaving better. The real explanation lies in an industry conking out as a result of losing 50% of its circulation over the past 14 years. Media law and compliance costs have also increased exponentially and are the highest in Europe.

A few isolated commentators are lamenting how self-interest, false consciousness and political tunnel vision are dismantling the worthy and hard-fought reputation that defined us as a country the world looked to for respecting journalistic freedom. It is frightening and disturbing that seeking to publish truthful information that people do not want published, home or abroad – the very basic tenet of journalism – should be mocked as first amendment fundamentalism, which is an intolerant and propagandist turn of phrase that explains the spirit of the times we live in.

Tim Crook, The Conversation - Tim Crook is Reader in Media and Communication (Goldsmiths), Visiting Professor of Broadcast Journalism (Birmingham City University) at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Regulating speed will not help, neither will reducing the number of people permitted in the things, most of the vehicles are quite roadworthy but nothing anywhere in the world will reduce an accident in which the driver falls asleep. There are so many deaths in so many civilised countries and all of the best advice being given like " Drive at reasonable speed" and "stop for a 30 minute rest every 2 hours" all sound good and I have heard those phrases in Holland, Germany, England, Australia and the US but the accidents continue with many thousands dying worldwide every year. The only hope is education and to simply produce a driver who will not take risks like these. It has very little to do with road quality and almost nothing to do with intelligence, it simply needed a driver to say, " we must stop, I need to walk around and rest for a while !" No-one ever does that though.