Speaking to Vientiane Times on Sunday, Deputy Head of Vientiane Fire Prevention and Protection Police Department Major Sisouvang Xaysouthep said the fire started at about 5:30 pm and took more than three hours to extinguish.

Fortunately, no one was reported injured in the blaze.

A pickup and a sedan were destroyed.

According to authorities, over 20 fire engines were deployed with more than 100 firefighters from the department and rescue teams fighting the quickly-spreading blaze that engulfed the structure including outlets primarily stocked with clothing.

Police and authorities are continuing their investigations into the incident and are still assessing the approximate extent of the damages.

Opened since August, 2007, the San Jiang market built on 15,000 square metres in Sikhottabong district is the largest in the capital, attracting customers from the city and further afield to purchase items on offer.

It has long proved popular among local and foreign traders of foreign goods, particularly those from China.

The fire at San Jiang is one of several to afflict markets in the capital and country over recent years.

In May, the Dongdok campus market at the National University of Laos (NUoL) was gutted by fire, wiping out 158 shops and 15 stalls with damage estimated at almost 4 billion kip.

In 2014, Thongkhankham market in central Vientiane burned down, with 400 shops affected and 110 billion kip of damage inflicted.

Thongkhamkham market site is located near the heart of Vientiane, a well-known and primarily fresh food market boasting a variety of products including fruit and vegetables and items for religious ceremonies.

During the ongoing rainy season, Major Sisouvang advised members of the public to check that electrical devices were turned off before leaving home.

He called on people to take extra care when incinerating garden waste and not to let children play with fire.

He also repeated warnings for people to be on their guard against accidental fires and not to take any risks with electrical wiring or appliances or leave burning candles unattended.

According to the Fire Prevention and Protection Police Department under the Ministry of Public Security, 104 fires were reported around the country in the four months from January to April this year in which four people were killed and seven injured.

The estimated cost of the damage from these fires was more than 33 billion kip.

The department reported that 104 detached houses burned down and 16 others were damaged.

An office, two factories, a market, an apartment block, 60 shops, three school buildings, three monks’ living quarters, and two restaurants were also damaged or destroyed.

In other incidents, two fuel tankers, a truck and two motorbikes caught fire and burned.

Twenty-three fires reported were caused by electrical short circuits, another 11 by arson, 17 through carelessness or forgetfulness, 14 resulted from cooking fires, and 20 more remain under investigation.

A total of 298 trees have been planted in the shape of a green ribbon, one for each of the victims who died on board the Malaysia Airlines flight en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima will join government and international officials at a solemn ceremony to dedicate the memorial in the park of Vijfhuizen, close to Schiphol airport in Amsterdam where the flight took off from on July 17, 2014.

The names of all the 298 passengers and crew killed in the disaster will be read out by their families, and 17 local children will lay flowers.

While most of the victims were Dutch, there were 17 nationalities on board including Australians, Britons, Malaysians and Indonesians.

“A tree symbolises ‘hope’ and ‘future’ in many cultures,” the victims families association said in a statement.

“We not only want to honour the MH17 victims, but also want to create a place where everyone can keep their memories of the 298 passengers alive.”

Funded by donations, the project was designed by artist Ronald A. Westerhuis and landscape architect Robbert de Koning after it was chosen out of three proposals by relatives in late 2015.

‘Never forget’

As the third anniversary of the tragedy dawns, no suspects have been arrested although it was announced this month that any trials will be held in The Netherlands.

About 100 people are wanted in connection with the disaster, after Dutch-led investigators concluded the plane was shot down by a Russian-made BUK missile transported from Russia into areas held by pro-Russian rebels.

The trees in the memorial will be surrounded by sunflowers, which bloom in July, and will “radiate a golden glow” over the trees, the foundation said.

The flowers also represent “the sunflower fields in eastern Ukraine where some parts of the plane wreckage were found”.

Each of the trees bears the name of one of the victims. And at the heart of the forest of 11 different tree varieties is a steel memorial shaped like an eye, turned upwards looking at the skies.

One apple tree has been dedicated to 16-year-old Gary, from Rotterdam, whose body has still not yet been identified.

“It’s nice to think that he has a tree, since we have not received his body. We don’t want Gary to be forgotten. We don’t want any of the 298 victims to be forgotten,” his father Jan Slok, told the daily AD newspaper.

The 16-metre-long steel eyebrow above the eye represents “the burden of the loss,” the Trouw daily said, adding with time it will rust, a symbol of the slow passage of pain. The victims’ names are also engraved in the pupil of the eye.

“If you look inside, you can see both yourself and the name of your loved one,” Westerhuis told Trouw.

On a recent visit to New York City, I lost my way on two separate occasions while walking through Central Park. There was a time when that would have been a far from pleasant experience; in the 1980s, for sure, which was when I first visited the city as a child with my parents and younger brother and wondered why our Chan Brothers Travel package tour included a stop at a park that struck me as dirty, dusty, pockmarked by graffiti and reportedly riddled with crime.

In the decades since then, America’s most famous urban park has undergone a remarkable transformation. To get lost in it today is to meander through a 341ha green oasis – more than four times the size of Singapore’s Botanic Gardens – that stretches through the heart of northern Manhattan, a place of lush foliage and flowers, running streams, sculptures and playgrounds, full of joggers, sunbathers, picnicking families and city residents walking their dogs and babies.

Just how did the change come about? It was the result of citizens working in partnership with the private sector and city authorities to raise money and mobilise resources to clean up the park and restore it to health, safety and beauty.

Today, the Central Park Conservancy – a private, not-for-profit organisation formed in 1980 by a group of concerned citizens – manages the park under a contract with the City of New York. Thanks to donations from individuals, corporations and foundations, as well as funds from the city authorities, the Conservancy has invested more than US$950 million (S$1.3 billion) in the park, making it a model for urban parks worldwide. It also takes charge of all aspects of park maintenance, capital improvements and restorations.

It is an inspiring example of how energised citizens can rescue and revitalise a part of their city, if empowered to do so by enlightened authorities or, at least, not prevented from doing so by those in charge.

There are many such efforts taking place around the world. Two interesting ones which have been in the news lately are Wecyclers in Lagos, a social enterprise that tackles the Nigerian capital’s waste crisis and empowers low-income communities to turn trash into cash, which won this year’s Le Monde Smart Cities Global Innovation Grand Prize; and the city of Malang in Indonesia, shortlisted for the 2016 Guangzhou Urban Innovation Awards for the creative way it responded to floods in a slum area by planting trees and organic vegetables to act as sponges, thereby also providing an additional source of income to its poor residents who were able to sell the vegetables.

What is worth emphasising in these technocentric times, when smart cities are all the rage, is that successful urban innovation springs from citizen participation and enterprise, and does not always require large investments or new technology.

Even when information technology is involved, it may not be the sophistication of the technology that matters but the sophistication with which a city’s residents tap their networks and know-how to solve specific problems they encounter on a daily basis, using whatever technology is available. This is not to discount the important role of technology in helping to bring about change for the better, but to clarify that the proper role of technology is to enable the change that people have imagined and conceived.

That distinction matters because, in the push to develop smart cities, governments can either choose to put technology at the centre of their plans, or people.

That was an insight I gleaned from last month’s Smart Cities conference jointly organised by French newspaper Le Monde, The Straits Times and Business France.

I had the privilege of moderating a panel discussion entitled Which Models In Asia?, during which Dr Sameer Sharma of India’s Ministry of Urban Development shared his experience of steering the Smart Cities Challenge, the first time India used an open national competition to allocate funds for urban transformation.

The organisers of the challenge took as their starting position that “there is no universally accepted definition of a smart city”, as the term means different things to different people. “The conceptualisation of Smart City, therefore, varies from city to city and country to country, depending on the level of development, willingness to change and reform, resources and aspirations of the city’s residents. A smart city would have a different connotation in India than, say, Europe. Even in India, there is no one way of defining a smart city,” they wrote.

Embedded in this statement is the recognition that a city’s residents should be free to define a smart city on their own terms, based on their aspirations and other factors such as the pace of change they are comfortable with.

What is equally remarkable is that the winner of the competition’s first round, the ancient city of Bhubaneswar in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, has gone on to win this year’s Pierre L’Enfant award, a prestigious prize given out by the American Planning Association (APA).

The Bhubaneswar Smart City Plan, the APA said in its citation, “redefines the concept of ‘smart cities’ and outlines a citizen-driven vision for the future by using technology to help residents gain better access to city services, and improve the overall quality of life”. The goal of the Bhubaneswar plan was “to engage residents in discussions to identify which groups had access to technology and city services and which groups did not, and how to close that gap”, it added.

As Dr Sharma said during the Le Monde conference held here last month: “Don’t start with a vision and work your way down to people. Start with people, and get them to draw up a vision.”

I must admit that, as a Singaporean, I had not expected to learn much about smart cities from India, where basic infrastructure in terms of clean water and uninterrupted power can be in short supply, even in big cities. But in this case, I was happy to be proven wrong.

I think the approach advocated by Dr Sharma is all the more relevant when one considers that the true measure of a smart city is not how technologically advanced it is, but how inclusive and sustainable it is in its practices. A good way to ensure inclusion and sustainability is to involve a city’s residents from the start, since they are the ones who will be living in the smart city and using its services. It is therefore necessary not just to engage a city’s residents in the drawing up of a vision, but also to understand how they actually live, as well as what they need and consider important.

Indeed, Professor Saskia Sassen of Columbia University, who was the keynote speaker at the conference, warned against an over-reliance on technology. A sociologist who coined the term “global city”, her insight relates to a city’s heritage. She observed that many buildings in a city are built to last. However, if, in a bid to ride the smart-city wave, owners kit old buildings out in the latest technology, that might just shorten these buildings’ lifespan by rendering them obsolete once the technology needs updating.

These insights are worth reflecting on as Singapore pushes ahead with efforts to make this city both smarter and more liveable.

More than 200 objects including dinosaur fossils are on exhibit. Some of the items are being displayed in Japan for the first time.

Visitors can view a 38-meter-long, 14-meter-tall reconstructed full-body Ruyangosaurus skeleton, the largest dinosaur ever to be exhibited in Japan, as well as genuine fossils and other objects. The exhibition, sponsored by The Yomiuri Shimbun and another organization, runs through Sept. 3.

The often-foul mouthed Duterte made the joke in a speech to Filipino diplomats in his southern home town of Davao as he defended his bloody war on crime which has left thousands dead since he took office last year.

“What I don’t like are kids (being raped.) You can mess with, maybe Miss Universe. Maybe I will even congratulate you for having the balls to rape somebody when you know you are going to die,” for your crime, he said, implying the rapist would be lynched.

It was the latest in a series of off-colour jokes by Duterte who openly boasts of having mistresses and often makes sexual remarks about women.

Speaking in his rambling style, the president also boasted to the diplomats that he faked tuberculosis to escape mandatory military training in college.

But he also reiterated his vow to continue his bloody war on drugs despite accusations that thousands of suspects had been killed by police and vigilantes since he took office.

“Human rights? That is bullshit to me,” he said, recalling how he called then-US president Barack Obama “a son of a whore” after Washington criticised the wave of killings.

Police say at least 3,200 people were slain in their anti-drug operations but rights groups charge that thousands more have been killed by vigilante groups.