Bangkok - Thailand on Monday allocated 6.9 billion baht (191 million dollars) for short-term occupational training this year when 1 million people are expected to lose their jobs.

Thai Deputy Prime Minister Kobsak Sabhavasu said the training initiative aims at providing short-term occupational courses for the unemployed and new graduates.

"The programme is set to continue for two years and is expected to help some 500,000 people find jobs," Kobsak told the state-run Thai New Agency.

Bangkok  - Police killed an accused associate of a fugitive Thai Muslim drug lord after an all-night gunbattle in central Thailand, news reports said Saturday.

Four police officers were injured in the attempt to apprehend Bares Meesri in his rented home in Pathum Thani province just north of Bangkok.

When officers were finally able to enter the house Saturday morning, they found guns and heavy weapons next to the body of the accused drug trafficker, the Bangkok Post reported, adding that 100 officers were involved in the operation.

Pattani, Thailand - Suspected Muslim insurgents on Friday ambushed and killed three Thai soldiers and wounded another on the 46th anniversary of the Pattani separatist movement.

Amid beefed-up security throughout the deep-South region, separatists ambushed a Thai military patrol in the Srisakorn district of Narathiwat province, 700 kilometres south of Bangkok, leaving three dead and one wounded after a ten minute gunbattle, said Army Colonel Mandate Shinawatra, deputy commander of the regional special task force.

Beijing  - The wife and children of leading Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng have escaped from close police surveillance and travelled via Thailand to the United States, US-funded Radio Free Asia reported Friday.

Gao's wife, Geng He; their 15-year-old daughter; and 5-year-old son walked into Thailand after fleeing from virtual house arrest in Beijing and crossing a border in southern China, the broadcaster quoted Geng as saying.

"I left China because my family had been under tight surveillance for a long time," she said.

"We experienced in our careers and daily life great hardship and difficulty," Geng added.

Bangkok  - Frogmen on Thursday retrieved the bodies of five foreigners from a boat that sank in a sudden storm over the weekend after a diving tour to Thailand's Similan Islands in the Andaman Sea.

"We found the bodies of three foreign men and two women who had been trapped inside the boat when it sank," Marine Police Lieutenant Colonel Wanlop Phuangbaka said.

On Tuesday, authorities found the body of a Caucasian woman floating near the area where the boat sank Sunday. One Thai national, a member of the dive boat's staff, was still missing.

Bangkok  - Coup-ousted former Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra Thursday thanked the military for freezing his fortune in Thai banks, thus saving it from unwise investments in stocks.

"I don't know whether I should condemn or thank the military junta when they froze my assets in Thailand, otherwise I probably would have invested a lot in the stock exchange and lost it," Thaksin said, in a live televised speech to the Foreign Correspondents Club of Hong Kong that was relayed on to Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand.