Deputy Prime Minister General Tanasak Patimapragorn said the event, “Ruam Palang Haeng Kwarm Pakdee”, which the government will stage at various venues around the country, will allow people to pledge their loyalty to the Royal Family in front of the King’s portrait and sing the Royal Anthem together.
Authorities said the “Rurm Palang Haeng Kwarm Pakdee” event at Sanam Luang would not affect people queuing to enter the nearby Grand Palace to pay their respects to the late King.
“I would like to invite all the people to join tomorrow’s [today] event to pay respects to our beloved HM King Bhumibol and remember his good deeds to the people and our country,” Tanasak said.
“On this occasion I would like to thank all Thai people who are united together in this time of grief. This is the power that will drive our country to a stable future, which the international community admires us for and we have to preserve it dearly.”
He said the main event venue was at Government House, where Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha will lead the Cabinet and civil servants in pledging their loyalty before the King’s portrait and then sing the Royal Anthem.
National Council for Peace and Order deputy spokesperson Colonel Sirichan Ngathong revealed the event would be held from 8am nationwide. And it was also being staged to celebrate the late monarch’s 89th birthday in advance.
He said the event would promote the King’s work to all Thai people to let everyone carry on His Majesty’s mission and fulfil his achievements in relation to all royal-initiated projects.
Maj-General Pongsawat Panchit, deputy commander of the First Region Army and deputy head of the Joint Administration for Maintaining Security and Order in the Grand Palace Vicinity (JSO), said there would only be a live broadcast of the event at Government House and no special event at Sanam Luang in order to avoid any impact on mourners queuing to pay their respects before the Royal Urn inside the Grand Palace.
For the management of people entering the Throne Hall, Pongsawat said there will nine more tents set up and 12,000 chairs provided for them. Each tent can accommodate 1,600 people, he said.
“By next week, we are planning to have 30,000 more chairs to support more visitors on the weekends. JSO affirms that we will try our best to facilitate the people, but we still face area adjustment problems after the rain, so we currently still cannot set up more tents, portable toilets and food tents,” Pongsawat said.
He noted that the most common problem was that most people started queuing very early in the morning, so there was congestion and they had to wait up to 10 hours to enter the Palace. So, he suggested that people go to the venue in the afternoon or after the 100-day merit-making ceremony.
In a bid to solve the problem of people cutting in line, he said the JSO had made queue cards to use when people line up and have to go to the toilet. He said it ensured that only people with the cards were allowed to cut into a queue after going to the toilet.
Tanasak, meanwhile, revealed that all drafts and details about the Royal Funeral Pyre had been completed and building would start in January and be finished by September.
He said people with special relevant skills could participate in the construction of the Royal Funeral Pyre and estimated that around 8,000 experts would join the upcoming cremation ceremony.

The NLA has a schedule to convene the meeting to deliberate on some urgent law amendment agendas proposed by the government on December 1-2 but there have been some unconfirmed reports from Parliament that Pornpetch had internally instructed the NLA members to get themselves ready for the whole attendance as there would be “a special agenda” to consider.

The charity organises free surgeries for children.
“In as few as 45 minutes, you can change a child’s life forever,” the charity organisation announced as it raised funds for the cause.
Every three minutes a child somewhere in the world is born with a cleft palate and in rural areas children with cleft palates have very limited access to treatment, Operation Smile Thailand reported.
The charity also provides post-operative care for indigent children.
Under the initiative, a fundraising event will be held at Dusit Thani Bangkok on Friday.
Operation Smile Thailand has helped children in the farthest corners of the Kingdom in 2016, with medical missions to Mae Hong Son, Yasothon and Nong Khai provinces.
A team of medical professionals is set to take part in its final mission of the year at Mae Sot district in Tak province in partnership with Mae Sot Hospital, which will screen patients in the province and surrounding |areas.
To meet the growing demand for safe and effective treatment solutions, Operation Smile Thailand is funding hospitals |that have full-time plastic surgeons.
It conducts fundraising activities to pay the necessary costs to provide for patients.
This benefits patients who are often unable to travel for surgeries due to restrictions such as conflicting school schedules and the harvest season.
The other benefit of the initiative is that surgeons are available at hospitals for follow-up surgeries and post-operative care when necessary.

The university’s “Volunteers For Dad” programme was carried out in cooperation with the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration to assist millions of Thais who flocked to the Grand Palace and Sanam Luang to pay their respects to the late King.
All 33,517 volunteers as well as donors, who provided bottled water, snacks and first-aid medicine to visitors, were thanked for their contributions from October 19 to last Saturday. Yesterday was the 23rd day when people were allowed to enter the Grand Palace to pay their respects before HM the King’s Royal Urn.
Among yesterday’s notable visitors to the Dusit Maha Prasat Throne Hall where the Royal Urn is placed was a group of 300 blind and visually-impaired persons who were accompanied by about 100 volunteers.
Thida Thavornseth and Weng Tojirakarn, leaders of the red-shirt United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), yesterday handed out 1,500 sets of ready-to-eat meals and bottled water to people who came to the Grand Palace to pay homage to the late King.
According to Thida, Bangkok-based UDD members prepared the meals for the general public to express their sorrow regarding the great loss.
So far more than 8 million Thais nationwide have expressed condolences in writing following the King’s passing after a seven-decade reign.
Several foreign leaders, including the prime ministers and presidents of India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, have come to Bangkok to personally pay their final respects to the King.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Pol Lt-General Sanit Mahathaworn issued an urgent order at 5.30pm to transfer acting Huai Khwang police chief Pol Colonel Nakharin Sukhonthawit to an inactive post at the operations centre of the Metropolitan Police for 30 days.
Nakharin and the three other transferred officers were appointed to lead the station after the previous top five officers were removed following a raid of massage parlour, which was found to employ illegal immigrants as sex workers. One position had not been filled.
The three other officers transferred yesterday were Pol Lt-Colonel Prapoj Anusiri, acting deputy chief of the station, Pol Lt-Colonel Jirapol Praphanchan, acting deputy chief in charge of investigation, and Pol Lt-Colonel Surayut Mekmankorn, crime suppression inspector of the station.
Police and 15 soldiers raided the Carnation Complex, an entertainment venue, in Huai Khwang district on Saturday, arresting 21 men and 17 women and seizing more than Bt500,000 in cash.
Before his transfer, Nakharin said the suspects included five operators of an alleged gambling den. One of the five was identified as Kitti Sae-khor, the house’s owner, while the other four are three Cambodians and a Vietnamese man.

‘Too slow to get a warrant’
Nakharin claimed his police station planned the arrest but he did not have enough personnel on hand because many officers had been sent to help with security at Sanam Luang. He added that said it would have taken too long to secure a court warrant for the search of the venue so he sought help from the peace-keeping taskforce, which can invoke Article 44 of the interim charter to bypass the requirement of a court warrant.
The policy has been that a police station chief and four other top officers would be suspended if soldiers or police from another jurisdiction are forced to initiate a raid on a gambling den within their jurisdiction, as a measure to curb police corruption.

AT THE HEART of representative democracy is the ideal that politicians and parties truly reflect and represent voices of the people. But contrary to that notion, Thai politics has often seen political parties and politicians dominated by special influences – a situation that undermines not only their ability to represent constituents, but also the very spirit of democracy itself.
As organic laws are being written following the new charter, the bill concerning political parties will tackle the issue with a renewed attempt to free parties from such domination through a rearrangement of the links between people, political parties and politicians through the decentralisation of power and stronger democratic institutions, while also demanding more transparency, drafters said.
“The new political parties law we are writing is aimed at freeing parties from influence and making them belong to the people,” said Udom Rathamarit, a spokesman of the Constitution Drafting Commission (CDC) told The Nation in an exclusive interview. “It would see changes in how a party is established, as well as how it is run.”
The new law drafted by the CDC requires a more participatory process in forming parties and determining membership, with an increased role for party branches and members, including in MP candidate selection. It also requires more transparent donations and accounts, plus more commitment by parties in regard to their formulation of public policy.

In regard to the establishment of new political parties, the CDC wants the process to be easy, so that ordinary people can engage in politics and encourage a sense of ownership. However, engagement must be based on readiness, Udom said, adding that the law would require founding members to contribute financially so the party would have sufficient capital to operate independently.
“To found a new party, we [the CDC] agree that it should require just 500 people joining together and jointly contributing Bt1 million for the party to start. We believe that this would make them feel the party is theirs,” Udom said.
The number of 500 was reduced from 5,000, as proposed by the Election Commission (EC) under the slogan that “a political party should be difficult to form, maintain and disband”. However, CDC chairman Meechai Ruchupan has said drafters did not share that view and would instead consider the charter that passed the referendum and the potential consequences of the new mechanisms in the proposed law for ordinary people.
However, the 500 founding members must come proportionally from all parts of the country and not be concentrated in particular areas, Udom said.
The proportion of members in each of the country’s four regions would also affect the operation of political parties as specified by the organic law, he added.
While traditional party operations relied strongly on patronage systems, the CDC was trying to distribute power more to regional and provincial levels, promoting their participation in the decision-making process, which has been concentrated in Bangkok or dominated by party board members, Udom explained.
The CDC sought to encourage parties to have branches in each region and members in every province rather than concentrating only in big cities including Bangkok, Udom said, emphasising the importance of branches outside the capital. The CDC has specific rules requiring that branch members must participate in parties’ assemblies when making decisions on essential issues, including the selection of candidates for the House of Representatives.
“We don’t want the selection of candidates to be influenced by individuals or group of individuals in the party who could be financiers. We want members to come together and decide who should run in an election,” Udom said. “However, that would be too difficult as it would involve a lot of people so a selection panel would be a good solution for better participation.”
Apart from the decentralisation, transparency would be emphasised, Udom said, adding that donations from the general public and financiers would still be permissible but parties must be transparent about funding.
“Donations are in fact encouraged in the new law,” he said. “We have to accept the truth that money is still very important for political parties to run smoothly.”
Parties would be obliged to submit extensive financial reports to the EC, he said.
Udom said the CDC believed the rule would boost transparency and enable the public to scrutinise parties and determine possible sources of influence.
The CDC has completed half of the draft bill, he said, adding they had not written the rules on the dissolution of political parties yet. However, the CDC had always been clear that existing parties would not be dissolved in a “reset”, he said.
He added that the CDC’s organic law on political parties was in line with principles proposed by the committee on political reform of the Nation Reform Steering Assembly (NRSA).
Sompong Srakawee, head of the NRSA working group overseeing the political parties law, has said that his group proposed that political parties should be institutionalised and freed from the influence of financiers.
The veteran political activist said party members must pay annual membership fees to increase the sense of belonging within the party, adding that requiring members to pay annual fees would be an indirect way to screen members as only those who were willing to contribute financially would stay involved.
The NRSA has also proposed a fundamental shift in the political process by using a primary system to allow members and branches to have a part in selecting electoral candidates as well as key political positions, such as the premiership and the ministerial posts. Sompong said such a system would mean that party members would make such crucial decisions, not just the party leader.
Satitorn Tananitichote, a political scientist specialising in political parties and elections at King Prajadhipok’s Institute, said the organic law could be headed in the right direction.
He said the key to freeing political parties from influence and strengthening ties between the members and their parties lay in the decentralisation of power and promotion of democracy within the party.
“In order to make that happen, branches outside Bangkok must be strengthened. Instead of having a selection panel, maybe the law could require that candidates must be proposed only by the branches and are decided at the party’s meeting,” he said.
Satitorn added that he believed the law should provide options for bigger parties, including well-established parties that would like to adopt the primary system as well.
He said branches should also have roles in shaping the party’s policies to promote participation.
As for transparency, he agreed that political parties needed sufficient funding to compete in elections. However, he said there should be monitoring to determine sources of funding as well as how the party spends money during the election, as the EC currently does.
Lastly, he said the EC should play a supportive role in addition to its current duties of monitoring parties, including providing funding to smaller parties to enable them to compete and encouraging new participants in politics.

The World Health Organisa-tion (WHO) has announced that the Zika virus outbreak, which has been linked to deformities in babies’ heads and brains, no longer poses a world public health emergency – but warned the epidemic remains a challenge.
Brazil, the epicentre of the outbreak, has however refused to downgrade the risk, while experts sharply criticised the world health body’s decision.
“The Zika virus remains a highly significant and long-term problem, but it is not any more a public health emergency of international concern,” World Health Organisation emergency committee chairman Dr David Heymann said.
Meanwhile in Thailand, the Disease Control Department (DCD) has found that religious sites are the main breeding grounds of the Aedes aegypti mosquito that can spread Zika. Its recent survey showed that almost 86 per cent of religious sites were found to have mosquito larvae.
While Zika causes only mild symptoms in most people, pregnant women with the virus risk giving birth to babies with microcephaly, a condition that leads to abnormally small brains and heads.
It can also cause rare adult-onset neurological problems such as Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), which can result in paralysis or death.
Since the outbreak in mid-2015, more than 1.5 million people have been infected with Zika, mainly in Brazil, and more than 1,600 babies have been born with microcephaly since last year, according to the WHO. The UN’s global health agency declared the Zika epidemic a global health emergency in February this year.
Researchers earlier this year warned that at least 2.6 billion people, over a third of the global population, live in parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific where Zika could gain a new foothold, with 1.2 billion at risk in India alone.
Brazil on Friday said it would continue to treat the outbreak as an emergency. “We will maintain the emergency [status] in Brazil until we are completely tranquil about the situation,” Health Minister Ricardo Barros said.
The WHO was careful on Friday not to dismiss the risk still posed by the virus, which has been detected in 73 countries, mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“We are not downgrading the importance of Zika. In fact, by placing this as a longer-term programme of work, we’re sending the message that Zika is here to stay and the WHO’s response is here to stay in a very robust manner,” said Dr Peter Salama, director of the agency’s health emergencies programme.
There are still, he added, “a lot of unknowns” in the battle against Zika.
The WHO believes the “Zika virus and associated consequences remain a significant enduring public health challenge requiring intense action but no longer represent” a global health emergency, it said in a statement.
“Many aspects of this disease and associated consequences still remain to be understood, but this can best be done through sustained research,” it added.
Emergency committee head Heymann said Brazil’s decision to continue dealing with the epidemic as an emergency was “appropriate”, even as he affirmed the virus need not be dealt with as an emergency of international concern.
Gobal health and law expert Lawrence Gostin, of Georgetown University in Washington DC, described the WHO decision as “quite worrying”, particularly since the southern hemisphere will soon enter the high-risk summer season for mosquitoes.

Religious sites a problem
In Thailand, a recent survey by the DCD showed mosquito larvae had been found at 85.71 per cent of religious sites.
“These larvae are mostly found in largely overlooked stuff that can contain water such as tree pots or unused tyres,” DCD director-general Dr Jedsada Chokdamrongsuk said yesterday.
He said 63.64 per cent of schools had hosted mosquito breeding grounds. Larvae had also been found in a quarter of hotels and about 18 per cent of factories.
DCD deputy director-general Dr Panumard Yarnwaidsakul said Zika had already become an endemic disease in Thailand with new cases being reported on a daily basis. He said the department is currently monitoring one case of microcephaly.
Public Health Ministry permanent secretary Dr Sopon Mekthon said that in order to fight against such communicable diseases, it was necessary to crack down on mosquito breeding grounds.
“If we can launch a complete crackdown, we can prevent the spread of not just Zika virus but other [mosquito-borne] diseases such as dengue fever and Chikungunya fever,” he said.
Sopon said 33 new Zika virus patients were reported during the past week in 12 provinces.
He said about 80 per cent of Zika-infected people do not know that they have caught the disease because in healthy adults the virus hardly causes any symptoms.
Thailand has reported more than 680 cases of Zika since January.

She said it was the duty of any government to provide help to farmers without any concern about making a profit or a loss.
The ex-PM from the Pheu Thai Party said that farmers are suffering from declining rice prices. She added that without any measures to help them, the farmers would be severely impacted.
“I want to see systematic assistance for farmers to help them become self-reliant. Debt suspension alone, without any other measures, will not help the farmers to go any further,” Yingluck said.
She said that although the government preferred to think of its rice-subsidy programme as being different from her administration’s corruption-plagued rice-pledging scheme, both programmes were designed to help farmers.
Yingluck also said that she would seek fair and non-preferential treatment in the legal action against her stemming from her government’s rice-pledging scheme.
She is being tried by the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division for Political Office Holders on the charge of criminal negligence, as she was head of the government when the scheme was implemented.
The authorities have sought civil liabilities of Bt35 billion from her for the damage caused to the state by the project.
Meanwhile, large amounts of rice have been sold directly to consumers at prices preferred by farmers.
In Nakhon Ratchasima province yesterday, rice produced by local farmers was offered for sale at Bt25 to Bt30 a kilogram.
Booths were set up at Thao Sura Nari Memorial Plaza, a landmark of the northeastern province. Over the past two weeks, more than 15 tonnes of rice have been sold there.
The Interior Ministry’s Local Administration Department will today sell rice to consumers for Bt100 for a 3.5kg bag from the northeastern province of Surin. There will be 15,280 bags of rice on sale.

Metropolitan Police Area 2 deputy chief Colonel Khomsak Sumangkaset yesterday said that case investigator Lieutenant Theerapol Hongsri had received the autopsy result on Friday that revealed Don Daengchantip had died from blood circulation failure combined with the fact that he had ischemic heart disease.
He said Don had resisted arrest, resulting in officers chasing and tackling him and causing his death.
The action would not have caused death under normal circumstances, he added.
Regardless, Khomsak said the seven officers had been charged with assault causing death, a crime punishable by between three and 15 years in prison.
The seven officers were shifted to administration work and their supervisor had filed this case with the Royal Thai Police to consider suspending them, he added.