A daily wrap of Thailand news, with a Phuket perspective, plus relevant reports from national and international media.

usmagazine.com Gatorade has announced that it is discontinuing the Tiger-Woods-branded beverage. Gatorade (a division of PepsiCo Inc.) says that the decision to shelf the drink was made before Woods' minor car accident and the related tumult of adultery allegations, the Associated Press reports.

people.com It's 2:35am and Elin Nordegren is in a panic. ''Oh my God! My mom just collapsed,'' Nordegren tells the emergency operator in a 911 call. ''She collapsed in the bathroom. What do I do?'' According to a tape released by fire officials, for the next 3 minutes and 21 seconds, a dispatcher calms down Tiger Woods's wife then helps her cope with yet another family crisis.

huffingtonpost.com Globally, more than a third of the mangrove forests have disappeared over the last 20 years, 38 percent of these decimated to make way for shrimp farms - shrimp farms which are often abandoned after 5-8 years, leaving behind a wasteland for decades. ''Escapees'' from these farms can carry diseases and antibiotics into the wild population, wreaking further havoc. And negative social impacts and human rights abuses have been documented in numerous communities.

theage.com.au Lisa Robertson, 41, the former Qantas flight attendant who had a 2007 mile-high sex romp with actor Ralph Fiennes, was convicted and ordered to do 100 hours of unpaid work after pleading guilty to charges including concealing $201,000 in media payments about the Fiennes incident from bankruptcy proceedings.

abcnews.com A six-and-a-half foot statue of President Obama as a 10-year-old boy has been commissioned in Jakarta, Xinhua reports. A group called ''Friends of Obama'' made the announcement, saying the statue will be inaugurated on December 10 in a playground in the Jakarta suburb Menteng Dalam, where Obama lived from 1967 until 1971 with his mother and stepfather.

thestar.com.my The behavior of unscrupulous taxi drivers is worse than the condition of toilets in Malaysia, said Minister in the Prime Minister's Depart????ment Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz. ''If you ask tourists, the first thing they complain about is our taxi drivers. Their second is dirty toilets. (The behaviour of) our drivers is worse than the toilets,'' he said.

bernama.com Padang Besar, a laid-back Malaysia-Thailand border town, is to bloom into an international-class trade centre if plans by a China investment company to develop a trade centre along the border fringes materialises. If the project gets off the ground, Padang Besar, once nicknamed ''Cowboy Town,'' would emerge as the catalyst for regional economic growth given its central location of the Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle.

Associated Press An ecumenical group launched more than 10,000 twinkling paper lanterns into the night sky from a beach in Indonesia, setting a world record. The exact number of the white paper lanterns that floated gently above Carnaval Beach in Jakarta was to be determined after Guinness World Records officials figured out how many each of the 7000 participants launched.

afp Bangladesh, Burma and Honduras were the countries most severely affected by extreme weather events from 1990 to 2008, according to a climate change risk study published on Tuesday. When only 2008 is considered, the top three worst-hit countries were Burma, Yemen and Vietnam, said the paper which was published on the sidelines of the ongoing UN talks in the Danish capital.

channelnewsasia.com Social networking sites are keeping half the youths in Singapore glued to the Internet for three hours each day. One in five have dated a stranger they met through a social networking site, and one in 10 have been sexually harassed on such sites. Some 800 Singaporeans between the ages of 15 and 34 took part in the survey.

smh.com.au For the first time this generation, the two best boxers on the planet will collide in a mega-event poised to break all viewing and earning records. For Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, their March 13 showdown will be about dollars ($25million each guaranteed, with early pay-per-view predictions set to take each fighter above $40m in total) and status as the best now, and probably the best ever.

Phuketwan Update Mom Tri's Villa Royale in Phuket is proud to be selected by World Luxury Hotels as a finalist for 2009 in the category of most romantic hotel. The World Luxury Hotel Awards are accepted as the pinnacle of achievement for Luxury Hotels worldwide. Mom Tri's Villa Royale is a boutique hotel situated on a hillside offering an intimate setting overlooking the Andaman Sea and the white sand beach of Kata Noi.

Phuketwan Update Hilton Phuket Arcadia Resort & Spa has won the Bronze Award, Best Hotel-Far East & Australasia 2009, awarded by the travel agency, Virgin Holidays. The award is rewarded based on the highest customer satisfaction in a Virgin Holidays customer survey among more than 3500 hotels around the world in 2009. John Kidd, General Manager of Hilton Phuket Arcadia Resort & Spa, announced the award and shared the success with all team members at the hotel's monthly team celebration recently.

Phuketwan Update Malaysia Airlines announced the launch of MHmobile that not only allows the airline's 14 million passengers to book, pay, and check-in and board their flight simply using their mobile phone but, in a world first, it also harnesses the capabilities of smart phones to offer passengers context-aware services using geolocation.