Bangkok  - Britain has revoked tourist visas for fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his wife Pojaman, media reports said Saturday.

Thai newspapers claimed a cancellation notification was sent to various airlines by the British UK Border Agency at a time when the former first couple were travelling outside London where they have been living in self-exile.

"Airlines are advised not to carry these passengers to the UK," said the e-mail message to airlines, signed by Bangkok-based immigration liaison manager Andy Gray.

Bangkok - Thai police on Friday released on bail famed social critic Sulak Sivaraksa after arresting him on charges of lese majeste for a speech he made last year.

Sulak, 76, was arrested in Bangkok Thursday evening and driven to Khon Kaen, 370 kilometres north-east of the capital, where he was interrogated for three hours on charges of insulting the monarchy in a speech he delivered at Khon Kaen University on December 10,
2007.

Sulak was informed of another police charge of lese majeste on Monday for an article he had written in the Seeds of Peace magazine published several years ago.

"This is strange," said Sulak of the two charges, both based on old incidents.

Bangkok - A 23-year-old Thai man who woke up with a cockroach in his ear on a public bus has sparked a public health drive to improve sanitation on the kingdom's provincial bus routes, media reports said Friday.

Kittipong Khamdong, who had taken an overnight bus from Khon Kaen province to Chiang Mai Monday, awoke in the middle of the night with an unwanted passenger lodged in his left ear, the Bangkok Post reported.

Bangkok - The announcement that Barack Obama is the next US president was welcomed Wednesday by cheers and beers from a packed audience of Democrats Abroad gathered at a Bangkok restaurant to view the televised polling results.

For many at the Roadhouse Restaurant it marked the end of eight years of embarrassment abroad under Republican President George W. Bush.

Bangkok - Thailand has issued box jellyfish warnings for tourists visiting beach resorts on its southern coastlines where the killer invertebrates have recently been spotted, media reports said Tuesday.

The Marine and Coastal Resources Department has raised an alert for tourists that the highly venomous box jellyfish, not common in Thai waters, has been discovered off Phi Phi Island and Krabi province in southern Thailand, the Bangkok Post newspaper said.

Over the past six years, two deaths in Thailand have been attributed to box jellyfish, the first in 2002 at Phangan Island in the Gulf of Thailand and the most recent in April this year at Koh Lanta in Krabi on the Andaman Sea coast.

Pattani, Thailand - Suspected separatists detonated two bombs in the violence-wracked province of Narathiwat on Tuesday, killing a woman and injuring 71 other people, police and hospital sources said.

The two separate bombs, planted in motorcycles, exploded outside a district office and a fruit market shortly after 11 am (0400 GMT) in Sukhirin district of Narathiwat province, 850 kilometres south of Bangkok, near the Thai-Malaysian border.

The explosion took place while village leaders from the area where about to enter the Sukhirin district office for a meeting, police said.

One woman was killed in the explosion. Of the 71 wounded, 30 were hospitalized with serious injuries, hospital sources said.