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

Sources close to Thaksin in Bangkok could not confirm the development but said it might be linked to his recent decision not to seek political asylum in the United Kingdom.

"He has relinquished the application process for political asylum in the UK," said a close aide to Thaksin who asked to remain anonymous. "A few days ago he decided to terminate the process."

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.