BANGKOK: To survive the economic crisis, a Thai businessman has pioneered cockroach farming by raising thousands of the insects as bait for fishermen, a newspaper said on Saturday. Somkiat Phanmanee, 33, told the Matichon daily that he earned up to 540 dollars a month selling dried cockroaches from his two farms near Bangkok to fishing enthusiasts and stores. One cockroach sells for nine US cents. ``It is a little bit cheaper than artificial bait.

Fish love it and it is rich with protein,'' he said, claiming to be the world's first cockroach farmer. Somkiat returned home two years ago when the economic crisis began with a degree in business administration from India. He, like other thais, had problems finding a job. As a sports fisherman who had used cockroaches as bait, Before getting started, Somkiat surfed the Internet for information about insects and began experiments. He caught cockroaches for breeding at rice mills. Expansion followed andnow Somkiat's two farms turn out 3,000 cockroaches a week.

Man who sank Barings Bank to be freed

SINGAPORE: Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who broke Britain's oldest merchant bank, was due to be freed from a Singapore prison on Saturday. Braving a tropical storm outside the jail complex, a horde of international and domestic reporters and cameramen waited to glimpse the man who sank Barings Bank. Leeson, 32, who is fighting colon cancer, is being let out early for good behaviour and was expected to return to England on a midnight flight.

Leeson broke Barings by burying under 1.4 billion dollars worth of debt during his high flying days as a derivatives trader here. In December 1995, Leeson was sentenced to six and a half years prison for fraud and cheating connected with his attempts to conceal his losses. His lawyer dismissed reports Leeson had a huge hidden fortune waiting for him, the subject of huge media speculation in Britain.

30 dead in collision off Mexico coast

MEXICO CITY: Atleast 30 people died when two overcrowded boats carrying Central American immigrants collided off the Pacific coast of southern Mexico, navy officials have said. ``We're aware of 30 corpses that have been recovered in the fishing community of Aguamuchil, Oaxaca,'' a navy official told AFP on Friday. Rescue teams have found only two survivors so far, said Juan Rodriguez, a city official from the fishing community of La Gloria in the southern state of Chiapas. Officials could not say how many passengers the boats might have been carrying.

The ministry of the navy said rescuers had found two boats which each had a maximum capacity of 20 passengers but which were frequently overcrowded. ``This is a common practice for immigrant traffickers,'' Antunes said. ``We only know they were Central Americans,'' and that they were trying to evade Mexican immigration officials, he said.