The event, from 2pm until 9pm, is called Maha Songkran, Tamnan Thai and will be held to express gratitude to former monarchs as well as celebrate the culture and traditions of the country.

This Friday, the Supreme Patriarch will preside over a religious ceremony to make merit for Her Majesty Queen Sirikit, wife of HM the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

The ceremony, involving 239 monks, will start at 6pm. Privy Councillor General Surayud Chulanont will represent the King.

The monarch has also ordered that the statue known as the Prachai Langchang will be brought to the ceremony as the presiding Buddha statue. This statue belonged to HM King Rama I, who took it with him to every battle, and was believed to help him win.

The King’s view is that the public should have the opportunity to worship the Buddha statue for their personal blessings and the blessing of the country during Songkran.

Prayer books will be published and distributed to participants in the ceremony.

People will also have the opportunity to pay their respects to, and pour water on, the Phra Buddha Kamnerd Kasawapat statue. This Buddha statue was built when the King entered the monkhood on November 6.

The venues will feature exhibitions on the history of Songkran and the country’s culture and traditions, and souvenirs and other goods will be on sale.

Thai people are encouraged to wear traditional costumes and dress modestly. Water guns and powdering others will not be allowed.

Prostitution allegedly also involved minors working as sex workers.

Pol Lt-Colonel Supat Thamthanarug, director of the DSI’s Bureau of Human Trafficking Crime, led officers to deliver the case report to the Office of the Attorney-General on Chaeng Wattana Road in Bangkok at 9am.

The deputy attorney-general for Trafficking in Persons Litigation, Bodin Saensadee, said the case related to the second part of the DSI’s investigation into the massage parlour for offences committed in Thailand involving 45 suspects.

The suspects are staff members and others charged with conspiring to commit human trafficking and other offences related to procuring women as sex workers.

Bodin said the Attorney-General would set up a team to consider the case so a decision on an indictment could be rendered before the suspects’ final detention period expires on Thursday.

Last Friday, DSI officers submitted the first report in the case, requesting public prosecutors to indict seven suspects, including the parlour’s owner, Kampol Weerathepsuporn, 61, whose whereabouts are unknown, and six other alleged accomplices.

Supat said Kampol faced an arrest warrant but was believed to have fled the country without going through an immigration checkpoint. Authorities are trying to locate him and pursue his extradition.

The DSI and military raided the massage parlour in Bangkok’s Huai Khwang district in January and detained more than 80 women and girls suspected of working as prostitutes. At least 11 of the suspects were later found to be under 18.

The clip, which has been circulating on social media, has been described as depicting the military officers’ alleged attempt to demand a bribe from Patong Paragon Hotel executive Visith Eiumvirojrit. The clip shows three Army officers accusing Visith of violating the law and acting as an “influential figure” and engaging in a verbal argument.

Many social media users have speculated that the officers were pressuring the man in order to then demand a bribe from him. Internal Security Operations Command (Isoc) Region 4 staff have claimed the clip was doctored to deceive the public with the intent to tarnish the image of military officers and the Fourth Army Region.

Phuket police chief Maj-General Theerapol Thipcharoen said he had told Patong police superintendent to conduct an investigation into whether there had been inappropriate acts committed by two police officers seen guarding Visith in the four-minute clip.

There are allegations that the officers were inappropriately providing services to a man whom the Fourth Army Region aimed to probe whether he were a dark influential figure. The investigation is supposed to conclude within seven days.

National police chief Pol General Chakthip Chaijinda separately affirmed that the two police officers – whom Provincial Police Region 8 chief Pol Lt-General Sorasak Yenprem had already transferred to inactive posts pending a fact-finding probe result – would face disciplinary action if found guilty.

Isoc Region 4 spokesman Colonel Pramote Phrom-in told a press conference that the three military officers seen on the clip were performing their duties under Article 44 and the National Council for Peace and Order orders regarding a crackdown on “influential figures”. Article 44, which is enshrined in the interim charter, gives Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha near-absolute powers.

Pramote said the military officers, led by Second Lieutenant Wattanachai Khlongpradit of the 25th Infantry Regiment, had contacted the hotel executive to tell him that a special taskforce of the Fourth Army Region, led by Lt-Colonel Surasak Peungyaem, would investigate a staff member’s complaint.

The employee allegedly had told authorities that Visith and others had threatened him and pressured him to quit his job.

Pramote said the executive had told officers he would provide an explanation backed with documentary evidence later on Monday.

“Officers just performed their duties and did not assault [the man], use force or demand any bribes nor benefits,” he said.

The clinic, which makes prevention, testing and treatment services more readily available for high-risk individuals, is operated by the community-based Mplus Foundation.

It is funded by the government in partnership with the United States President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) through the US Agency for International Development (USAid) Linkages Project implemented by FHI 360, a non-profit human-development organisation.

The Thai government is providing funds under a new cost-sharing model. The National Health Security Office has initially allocated 14 per cent of the operating budget, or Bt980,000, while Pepfar/USAid provides the balance.

“This new partnership is a key milestone demonstrating Thailand’s commitment to financing a community response to HIV,” US Ambassador Glyn Davies said at the opening last Friday.

“This year, as the United States and Thailand celebrate 200 years of friendship, we are proud of our three generations of public health cooperation with the Kingdom, and pleased to work with national health officials and communities to take, together, the final steps toward ending Aids,” he said.

Mplus provides access to high-quality services and provides rapid testing and HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, a combination of drugs to be taken daily to substantially reduce the risk of infection.

People testing positive for HIV will be able to start treatment quickly.

The government will reimburse the community health centre for part of the cost of services provided on a per-client-served basis.

Mplus Chiang Rai will also receive a small grant from Chiang Rai Hospital to implement HIV-related activities.

“The new Mplus clinic is a great example of the government-supported and co-financed Key Population-led Health Services Model for ensuring access to HIV services for all citizens,” said Praphan Phanuphak, director of the Thai Red Cross Aids Research Centre.

“We believe this model can be replicated across Thailand as well as in other countries.”

The Safety Analysis  study, by King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang’s Smart City Research Centre (SCRC), found that 250,000 trucks and buses had exceeded a legal speed limit 17,218,811 times. It also found that cargo trucks travelled at an average speed of 101.58 kilometres per hour.

File photo

The researchers analysed the 2017 data from the Highway Accident Information Management System (HAIMS), identifying the seven most dangerous spots for crashes and fatalities.

They were:

1. Highway No. 1 between the 708th-726th kilometre markers;

2. Highway No. 2 between the 20th-36th kilometre markers;

3. Highway No. 4 between the 126th-130th kilometre markers;

4. Highway No. 9 between the 30th-38th kilometre markers;

5. Highway No. 32 between the 132nd-137th kilometre markers;

6. Highway No. 41 between the 366th-379th kilometre markers;

7. Highway No. 304 between the 165th-176th kilometre markers and between the 190th-250th markers (cutting through the national forest).

The SCRC joined with the Department of Land Transport to develop a “Smart Mobility” system using global positioning system (GPS) technology to collect data, study drivers’ behaviours, positions and travel directions, and detect vehicle speed.

The findings were revealed on Sunday after several serious road accidents involving buses.

They include the March 21 double-decker coach crash in Nakhon Ratchasima’s Wang Nam Khieo district that killed 18 passengers and wounded 30 others, and the March 30 incident in which a double-decker bus loaded with Myanmar workers crashed and burned in Tak, killing 20 workers.

The former case involved a meth-taking driver who was speeding beyond the 60km/hour legal limit while driving on winding downhill road.

In the latter case, Dr Thanapong Jinawong, chief of the Road Safety Policy Foundation, raised questions over the bus’s condition, speed and the likelihood of it being overloaded as possible contributing factors.

IF THE Early Childhood Bill sails through the National Legislative Assembly (NLA) this year, young children will be able to say goodbye to exams.

“We hope it will be legislated in time for use in the 2019 academic year,” Assoc Professor Daranee Utairatanakit, a member of the Independent Committee for Education Reform (ICER), said in a recent interview with The Nation.

Assoc Professor Daranee Utairatanakit

The National Education Reform Commission is set to consider the draft law tomorrow, after which it will be forwarded to the education minister, the Cabinet and then the NLA. Before it goes to the Cabinet, opinions from stakeholders including parents will be gathered.

The bill defines children of early-childhood stage as foetuses through to children aged eight years old – making a big change to the now-used definition of children aged between three and six.

“Human brains have developed the most during our newly-defined early childhood,” Daranee said. “Before the age of eight, children have not yet stepped fully into the world of reality.”

She said the Early Childhood Bill was drafted with the aim of laying down a firm foundation for children, which will be useful to lifelong learning.

To prevent children from unnecessary stress and the loss of self-confidence, the bill is expected to bar schools from testing children during the enrolment process and also to ban exams for students from Prathom 1 to 3 levels. Primary schools that organise entrance exams will face a fine of up to Bt500,000 if the bill becomes law.

Many parents have enrolled their children in tutorial classes at a very young age in the hope of equipping them with various skills, academic knowledge and the opportunity to enter the country’s most prestigious schools.

Some children have been forced to prepare for exams for entry to top primary schools at the age of just two-and-a-half.

Many parents have also enrolled their children in 300-hour tutorial courses as they come close to sitting exams for renowned primary schools such as demonstration schools. These courses cost about Bt160,000 per head.

Daranee said such practices could do more harm than good.

“At such a young age, children should be allowed to learn with fun and develop naturally based on their potential,” she said. She said the focus on children’s ability to read or write as well as to understand academic knowledge could take place at a later stage.

According to Daranee, the bill seeks to ban exams during the early-childhood stage so as to protect children.

“Those exams are prone to imposing way too much pressure on children. So many Prathom 1 students are in fact not yet ready to sit in classes, even though they have good intellectual intelligence. They are unhappy in classrooms, affecting their abilities to learn and hurting their self-confidence,” Daranee explained.

She said many children became disappointed when they could not successfully pass exams to famous primary schools, because of their parents’ expectations.

Daranee said many of these disappointed children had better potential than those who learned to study well at a young age.

“I must emphasise that when children are happy, they will be capable. When parents don’t try to dictate to them in all aspects of their life, children will naturally learn to solve problems on their own,” she said.

Although the Early Childhood Bill will not force a ban on tutorial schools for children aged under eight, it should still be able to end the practice, she said.

“When there are no competitive exams for kids, no one will want to put their children in tutorial classes,” she said.

Last year, a five-year-old pupil developed clear bruises after a teacher at a tutorial school hit him for failing to live up to the school’s expectations. The school is known for having produced several successful applicants to a top demonstration school.

“This reflects the pressure that these types of courses have imposed on young children. Stress negatively affect their brains,” Daranee warned.

She said the Early Childhood Bill was not impractical, as it would push for the establishment of a policy committee that would determine how schools could recruit students without sitting tough tests.

“We do offer flexibility. But in essence, if this bill is introduced, there will be no gruelling exams for young children,” she said.

A BOAT carrying 56 Rohingya that landed in Thailand yesterday was the first batch of hundreds fleeing across Southeast Asia from conflicts in Myanmar’s Rakhine state as well difficulties now plaguing refugee camps in Bangladesh, sources said.

The group of boat people was found before dawn in an area between Koh Ha and Koh Lanta in Krabi province, local officials said, adding that 19 children were onboard. The group was then held in Lanta district yesterday.

Krabi Governor Kitibodee Pravitra confirmed that people travelling on the boat were Rohingya, but said he did not know where they had come from.

“The initial report said they were docking near Koh Lanta this morning to avoid the storm,” he was quoted as saying by AFP, referring to the Thai island popular with tourists. “They want to go to Malaysia.”

The people on board would continue on their destination, he added.

About 700,000 people have fled from Rakhine state to Bangladesh since August last year, when a militant group attacked Myanmar security outposts, prompting a harsh crackdown under a “clearance operation” by authorities that killed thousands of people.

Atrocities including arson, torture, gang rape, murder and massacres have been reported by international organisations and the media, as most of Rakhine’s Rohingya population was forced from the state. The United Nations human rights body has said there have been “elements of ethnic cleansing” in some areas and “genocide” may have been perpetrated.

Myanmar authorities refuse to recognise Rohingya as national citizens, calling them “Bengali” to suggest their origination outside of the country. The country’s de facto civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi has allegedly been complicit in the violence in the state.

It remained unclear yesterday where the Rohingya discovered near Koh Lanta had come from, with it being possible that they had left directly from their homes in Rakhine or had escaped from the crowded refugee camps in Bangladesh, a Rohingya man in Thailand told The Nation on condition of anonymity.

While the camps in Bangladesh are tightly controlled by security forces, trafficking syndicates have resumed operating given the high demand for people seeking refuge farther abroad, he said.

“As far as I know, some 400 people have paid for the boat trip across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia countries Thailand or Malaysia,” he added.

Siyeed Alam, chairman of Rohingya Association in Thailand, said his association was seeking ways to reach the group, but Thai authorities had not allowed them to be contacted as of yesterday.

Thailand and Asean have heard frequent warnings that the Rohingya crisis could become a regional issue as members of the ethnic minority will continue to disperse across the region, including with the involvement of abusive human-trafficking rings, as were exposed in 2015.

Violence in Rakhine continues and life in the refugee camps is difficult as Bangladeshi authorities and aid agencies struggle to take care of the displaced population.

Bangladesh and Myanmar recently reached a deal to repatriate thousands of Rohingya to Rakhine, but the plan has been delayed due to a lack of readiness on the Myanmar side to receive them.

Rohingya in the refugee camps and the international community have called for guarantees of a safe return and establishment of protected areas in Rakhine before repatriation begins.

As the March 31 deadline passed, official records showed that 1,320,035 workers from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, or 96 per cent of the target population, had registered to legally to work in Thailand. Of the documented number, 961,946 workers had completed their registrations and 127, 429 were only partially finished, which counted as them being effectively registered, the minister said. About 190,000 workers who registered online but could not complete the entire process in time would be allowed to work as authorities continued to finish the work, he said. There were no further details about the remaining workers considered to be registered.

People who failed to register needed to return home and be reprocessed through other channels in their respective countries, Adul said at a press briefing concluding the registration process.

Registration is especially significant because the new migrant worker laws entail harsh fines of Bt400,000 to Bt800,000 for each illegal migrant worker, which would be paid by employers, while workers could face five years in prison, fines of Bt2,000 to Bt100,000 or both. The law has been amended with lower punishments but that has not come into effect yet.

A group of NGOs working with the cross-border population yesterday called on the government to make further exceptions for migrants who failed to register on time, saying authorities were responsible for the inability to register everyone on time.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha thanked concerned parties including employers for their cooperation registering massive numbers of migrant workers.

Nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have sought shelter in southern Bangladesh since Myanmar launched a brutal crackdown on insurgents in August that the US and UN have called ethnic cleansing.

Photo from: White news’s Facebook fanpage

But the refugees have arrived to find cramped settlements and often squalid conditions in Cox’s Bazar, where hundreds of thousands who fled previous waves of persecution are already living.

An agreement to repatriate Rohingya from Bangladesh to Myanmar’s Rakhine state has yet to see a single refugee returned.

Photo from: White news’s Facebook fanpage

Rohingya migrants attempting the boat routes south have been a rare sighting since Thai authorities clamped down on regional trafficking networks in 2015, leaving thousands of migrants abandoned in open waters or jungle camps.

The Rohingya boat arrived off Thailand’s western coast in Krabi province early Sunday due to bad weather.

Photo from: White news’s Facebook fanpage

Images showed the passengers being interviewed on shore and then getting back into the boat before departing.

Krabi governor Kitibodee Pravitra confirmed that the people travelling on the boat were Rohingya but did not know where they had come from.

“The initial report said they were docking near Koh Lanta this morning to avoid the storm,” he said, referring to an island popular with tourists. “They want to go to Malaysia.”

Photo from: White news’s Facebook fanpage

The Rohingya on board would continue toward their destination, he said.

He said there were about 56 women, men and children on board.

Many of the Rohingya ensnared in the 2015 boat crisis wound up in Muslim-majority Malaysia and Indonesia as Thailand stuck to a policy of not accepting the vessels.

Photo from: White news’s Facebook fanpage

Bangladeshi economic migrants have also taken the boat routes.

There are nearly 70,000 Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers living in Malaysia, according to the most recent statistics from the UN refugee agency.

“The O-Net questions were within the content taught at schools and they were not more difficult than the ones asked in last year’s test,” NIETS director Sampan Panpruk said on Sunday. He said schools should analyse the information the NIETS had sent them about the test results and compare with other schools in the region so they could improve themselves.

The average scores among some 372,000 Mathayom 6 students were 49.25 in Thai language, 28.31 in English, 24.53 in mathematics, 29.37 in science and 34.70 in social studies, religion and culture, Sampan said.

The average score for English saw a slight improvement over last year, the scores for social studies and maths remained the same but there was a fall in Thai and science.

The test results, previously scheduled to be announced on April 3, was brought forward to March 31 so that Mathayom 6 students could use them for the Thai University Central Admission System for academic year 2018.

Sampan also said that the NIETS board on March 22 had decided not to announce the English test results of students who had leaked English test questions via the Line group chat, as they had violated the rule.