Phuket Airport snubbed

– A daily, pocket-sized packet of news from around the world, compiled by Phuket Gazette reporters for foreigners who want it short, sharp and straight to the point.

PHUKET: Bangkok Airways, Thailand’s largest privately owned carrier, plans to turn Samui Airport, rather than Phuket International Airport, into a second international air hub, after Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, in the next few years.

According to bangkokbestflights.com, the airline would launch more direct international flights on medium-haul routes from the small resort airport. In the pipeline are plans to offer direct flights from Samui to Dubai, Shanghai, Bali, and Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Bangkok Airways is eager to make Samui Airport its second traffic base to support the airport’s new 500-million-baht passenger terminal that was completed early last year.

The new terminal is four times larger than the old one and can handle 16,000 passengers a day. It is intended to cope with surging foreign tourist traffic to the island over the next 10 years.

Phuket ready for protests today

Canada.com
Tourism workers in Phuket and other key travel destinations in Thailand are scheduled to conduct their own peaceful rallies today in an effort to bring to an end the mass protests in Bangkok by red-shirted supporters of fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Today’s demonstrations are planned for Bangkok, Phuket, Pattaya and Chiang Mai, and reflect deepening concern about the impact of political turmoil on Thailand’s vital tourism sector.

The ‘Red Shirts’ have thus far defied the mounting pressure from the battered tourism industry and are instead vowing to stage tomorrow their biggest rally since their latest round of protests began about three weeks ago.

“We don’t want to create mob against mob, but we want the political sector to hear our voice,” Charoen Wangananont, president of Thai Travel Agents Association said.

Malay journalist escaped to Phuket

The Star
Malaysia Today editor Raja Petra Kamaruddin, who is on the run after he failed to appear in court for defaming the Prime Minister’s wife in a story on his website, has allegedly been hiding in Phuket.

Former Kedah PKR Youth chief Zamil Ibrahim said he had managed to get a copy of an email written by Raja Petra to a Doha-based journalist relating how he and his wife, Marina Lee, escaped to Kedah in the dead of night before sailing to Langkawi and then on to Phuket where they stayed for a month, before flying to Manchester on March 24.

They are still at large.

Red shirt blood infected

MCOT
The Mahidol University medical group disclosed that test results of blood collected from sites targeted by the blood-pouring stunts of the Red Shirt protesters in Bangkok were tainted with severe communicable diseases, including Hepatitis B and C as well as HIV/AIDS.

The medics also say they found traces of cattle and pigs’ blood.

The medics expressed concern that people at the blood-pouring sites who had cuts might have been exposed to the tainted blood and thus be at risk of contracting the diseases.

Dr Somsak Lolekha, president of the Medical Council of Thailand, said that the symbolic blood-pouring protests will be raised in their ethics subcommittee meeting on April 8 to consider whether or not such blood pouring violates medical ethics.

— Gazette Editors