PHUKET: Tourism Malaysia announced today that it will close its Phuket office and all other offices outside of Bangkok by the end of this month. “There will only be one office in Thailand, and that will be in Bangkok,” Deputy Director General of Tourism Malaysia Chong Yoke Har said.
PHUKET: The BBC has denied claims that it wasted more than 7 million baht on a show in Thailand after an episode was reportedly scrapped.
PHUKET: Phuket’s police force will increase by 700 officers next year, with new officers starting to arrive in November, Royal Thai Police Commissioner Adul Saengsingkaew has announced. The move is to upgrade the island’s force to meet the demands of increasing numbers of tourists and residents on the island
PHUKET: Police scoured mangrove forest around Saphan Hin after having rounded up only six out of 38 Rohingya who escaped from the Phuket Immigration detention center in the early hours of Saturday morning. “We are still searching for the remaining 32 Rohingya.
PHUKET MEDIA WATCH– Thailand news selected by Gazette editors for Phuket’s international community Thailand arrests suspected leader of human trafficking gang Reuters / Phuket GazettePHUKET: Thai authorities have captured the suspected leader of a human trafficking gang, who confessed to selling Burmese migrants into slavery on Thai fishing boats and possibly murdering as many as seven, a Thai official said on Friday. Ko Myo, a 42-year-old Myanmar national, was shot and captured at a rubber plantation in southern Surat Thani, north of Phuket, during a raid by the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) and local police. The raid follows mounting international concern over the trafficking of Myanmar migrants in Thailand’s lucrative fishing industry, one of several sources of human slavery in the country that could trigger U.
PHUKET: The environmental damage to Koh Samet is not as great as initially feared, according to five Phuket-based marine biologists who have just returned from a fact-finding mission to the oil-spill stricken island (story
Watchara Srikacha, 26, has been catching snakes since he was 10 years old.
PHUKET: Three 11-year-old Phuket students will be competing in a national English-language competition in Bangkok this weekend after having come in second place in the southern regional competition in June. The primary school students, Fonthip “Plo” Tanphaibul; Satakamon “Mona” Sawasdiphat; and Poramate “Fluke” Phuchareon, began working on their 20-minute group presentation about the Phuket Heroines in May, and are now ready to stand before the judges of the National Academic Competition at Maung Thong Thani in Bangkok and share their local heritage – in English. “They’ve been working hard.
PHUKET: A full-scale emergency-response drill will take place at Phuket International Airport today – Wednesday, July 31 – as part of the Phuket International Airport Emergency Plan 2013. “The exercise will begin at 10am and last for one hour, at the parking lot, right in front of Phuket Airport Terminal 2,” said Airports of Thailand’s Acting Phuket Director Somsiri Kuengsopha. “The drill will involve explosives being detonated in the area.
PHUKET: Vachira Phuket Hospital has appealed for more blood donations of A-negative blood in order to continue treatment for British national Marc Harrington, 66 years old. Mr Harrington was admitted to the hospital for a head injury sustained in a motorbike accident on June 22 (story