LOSERS

Football refugee

A very scary and cross-border Bahrain secret police operation was revealed when Manama demanded Thailand arrest and turn over a wanted political refugee. Hakeem AlAraibi, now a Melbourne football player, came to Thailand for vacation. Bahrain knew he was coming, and demanded the Foreign Ministry instruct the Immigration Bureau to seize him at Suvarnabhumi airport. A court is supposed to decide whether AlAraibi will be allowed to return to Australia, or extradited to face more torture and charges of lese majeste of the Bahraini emir. The Foreign Ministry is cooperating with Bahrain, while most other people believe AlAraibi’s case is 100% political and should be dropped by Thailand.

One-use plastic bags

If you do your supermarket shopping on Fridays, try to remember that on the first Friday of the New Year, there’ll possibly be no plastic bags for you. A lot of the biggest operators — Central, Big C, Tesco Lotus, even Watson’s and OfficeMate — have vowed to refuse to give customers’ plastic sacks on the 4th day of every month from now on. They and some customers feel that by reducing plastic-bag usage by 3% they’ve saved the world. Others feel it’s difficult to be more token-ish. But a journey of a thousand li begins with a single step, and a ban on plastic supermarket bags begins with one day without them.

Economy

The voracious Revenue Department continued its spirited race to keep up with the ever-expanding populis ... oops, we mean social-welfare programmes of the green-shirt government. The newest tax bill was detailed last week, and will be sent out for the first time in 13 months. It’s a tax on e-commerce, aimed at small, medium and mom-and-pop businesses that rely on the internet and (probably mostly) social media. At the same moment, the people who track consumer confidence reported it is dropping. That’s the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, which has kept an index of confidence for years. In November, it fell to 80.5 — not a record, but the lowest in six months, and a continuing downward trend. Chief worries: falling farm prices and falling numbers of Chinese tourists.

Graft-busting

The general prime minister appeared in front of a fired-up crowd at Impact Muang Thong, not one of whom spoke, shouted or demonstrated in favour of corruption. The Friday festivities were to celebrate International Anti-Corruption Day, which is actually today, but would-be graft-busters will be in motion on bicycles. Like every government in memory, Gen (Ret) Prayut has absolutely no patience for corruption — Zero Tolerance being the hackneyed T-shirt slogan of the crowd. Unkind sideline hecklers noted the general prime minister might be ever-so slightly tolerant when graft is discovered in the family, literally or militarily speaking. Those examples were not raised.