Bangkok - Thailand's military has agreed to investigate reports that its navy pushed hundreds of Rohingya boat people back out to sea last month, leaving as estimated 500 missing and feared drowned, the army commander-in-chief confirmed Tuesday.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva requested the investigation after meeting with human rights groups at a meeting Monday at which the Rohingya refugee situation was raised.

Bangkok - Thailand's military last month pushed out to sea at least 992 Rohingya refugees - stateless Muslims from Myanmar - leaving 400-500 missing and feared dead, a Rohingya-watch group announced Monday.

In what is turning into a major embarrassment for Thailand's new government under Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, the Arakan Project has provided evidence based on the testimony of survivors that the Thai Navy pushed back to sea some 992 Rohingyas between December 18 to 30 in engineless boats on the high seas.

Bangkok, Jan. 19 : Australian writer Harry Nicolaides, 41, has been sentenced to three years in jail here for insulting Thailand''s revered royal family in a novel.

Nicolaides pleaded guilty to the charge earlier today. He has been in custody for nearly five months.

"He was found guilty under criminal law article 112 and the court has sentenced him to six years, but due to his confession, which is beneficial to the case, the sentence is reduced to three years," a judge told the court.

Bangkok  - The five-year-old conflict in Thailand's deep South has cost the state an estimated 109 billion baht (3.1 billion dollars) and lost 3,287 lives, an independent study revealed Monday.

Deep South Watch, an independent research group that monitors the conflict, has put the southern death toll over the last five years of violence at 3,287 lives, of whom 1,788 were Thai Muslims and 1,348 Thai Buddhists, with another 5,405 people wounded, The Nation newspaper reported.

Bangkok  - Government officials accounted for 3 per cent of HIV/AIDS patients to receive treatment in Thailand over the past 24 years, health officials revealed Sunday.

Public Health spokesman Suphan Srithamma said that since HIV/AIDS was first detected in the country in 1984, there were 337,989 accumulated patients at government hospitals of whom 92,111 had died, reported the Bangkok Post online news service.

Bangkok - Battered by the crisis in developed economies, East Asian economic growth is expected to drop to 6 per cent in 2009, down from 6.9 per cent last year and 9.0 per cent in 2007, the United Nations' World Economic Situation Prospects report predicted Thursday.

In South Asia, the UN's WESP report is forecasting 6.4 per cent gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2009 compared with 7.0 per cent last year.

South Asia faces a serious problem with outflows of foreign exchange, it warned.

During the first two weeks of October last year, foreign exchange reserves fell by more than 17 billion dollars and in Pakistan, during the same period, foreign exchange reserves fell from 16.5 billion dollars to 7 billion dollars.