However, Lao labour authorities expect the registration of Lao workers in Thailand to speed up under the employment cooperation agreement between the two countries.

Assistance centres in Thailand were expected to register and upgrade the status of 300-400 Lao workers each day by confirming their nationality, but in reality, have only been able to process 50-100 workers daily, according to a leading Lao official.

Minister of Labour and Social Welfare,  Dr Khampheng Xaysompheng told a meeting to discuss the upgrade of nationality status of Lao labour in Thailand on Tuesday that at present, an estimated 46,000 out of 71,000 Lao workers in Thailand who hold purple cards (work permits) have still not proven their identity.

He said from August last year until the end of last month 24,680 Lao nationals registered and upgraded their status. Unfortunately, many Lao workers have still not participated at numerous assistance centres in Thailand because they don’t understand the process, he said.

The Lao government has to rely on the Thai labour authority to distribute information about the issue but they have proposed to extend the agreement deadline from March until June of this year, he added.

The current employment cooperation agreement between Laos and Thailand is due to expire next month.

According to the ministry, under the cooperation agreement, Thailand opened multiple assistance centres which aim to confirm the nationality of workers so that officials are better placed to uphold their rights and ensure they do not suffer from mistreatment, under the ministry’s labour policy.

For several years, Lao workers in Thailand have not received protection under Thai law because they have not upgraded their status.

The Thai government has introduced pink cards for foreign workers without full documentation as an interim measure.

This gives workers time to apply for the necessary documents including a work permit and visa as well as a passport after confirming their nationality with their country of origin.

Lao workers account for about 10 percent of the 1.5 million casual labourers from Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar who are employed in Thailand.

Earlier this month, Geaam, who began his career as a dishwasher while he was sleeping rough in a Paris park, received his first Michelin star from the French gastronomic bible for his acclaimed new restaurant within a stone’s throw of the Arc de Triomphe.

“I never thought the Michelin would be interested in someone like me, who was self-taught, who had to sleep in the street at 19 and who began as a dishwasher,” he said.

“I thought the guide was about chefs in big fancy hotels or those trained by the great masters. But it turned out to be the opposite. It’s a wonderful surprise,” said the 43-year-old, who was born to Lebanese parents in Liberia, before they exchanged one war zone for another by returning to Beirut.

By then Geaam’s fascination with food was clear, watching cookery shows on television rather than cartoons after school.

Geaam (left) and Laurent Magnin of L’Arcane at the Michelin guide award ceremony in Paris, on Feb 5, 2018. Photo: AFP

He started cooking while doing his national service in Lebanon, and the colonel of his regiment was so impressed he made him his personal chef.

But Geaam never thought he would be able to cut the mustard in France, and only got his break when the chef of the restaurant where he was washing the dishes was rushed to hospital when he slashed his hand with a knife.

But you can cook!

“I worked during the day as a construction worker and at night delivering pizzas and washing dishes,” he said.

“One night the cook cut his hand and had to go to hospital. No one asked me, but I just took over. There were 14 tables and so I just fed the customers and at the end of the night they were delighted.” “The owner said to me, ‘But you can cook!’ and I said, ‘Yes’.”

“The reason I cook is to make people happy,” said Geaam.

Geaam poses in his restaurant Paris Alan Geaam after he received a single star from the Michelin guide. Photo: AFP

And he has certainly spread joy among restaurant critics with Michelin’s rival Gault Millau guide raving about his langoustines and chard and its dark chocolate-coloured sauce tinged with Vietnamese cardamom.

Alexander Lobrano, author of Hungry For Paris, was even more effusive, declaring this “gentle, shrewd, self-taught chef as one of quiet men of Paris gastronomy… who has a brilliant future ahead of him.”

Although Geaam delights in bringing the very best of French produce to his table, Lobrano said he also brings the “tender buds of his very personal cooking that makes references to the lost world of a little boy born to a foreign family living in tropical Africa”.

Pomegranate-lacquered foie gras

And the influence of his Lebanese roots is never far away either.

Haddock falafel with tahini served at one-Michelin-starred Alan Geaam Restaurant in Paris. Photo: Instagram/alangeaam.restaurant

One of Geaam’s favourite dishes at the moment is “an escalope of foie gras lacquered with pomegranate molasses served with a tartlette of beetroot and pomegranate.

“I ate a lot of pomegranates when I was a kid,” he said. “I made juice with them, I made lots of reductions with them, and I loved putting this very Lebanese touch with something so French as foie gras.”

Since the night Geaam got his Michelin star, his restaurant’s phone has not stopped ringing.

His said his small, tight team of highly-talented chefs – whose CVs he admits look far more impressive than his own – “really feel that something has happened in our lives”.

“You can criticise the Michelin guide but I can tell you the effect, a star massively boosts a restaurant.”

Within hours the restaurant was booked up for three weeks. “It is quite something,” he said.

Geaam, who told how his son boasted to his friends at school that his father got a Michelin star, put his success down to his own parents, who “lost everything” in Liberia only to have to struggle again in Lebanon during the civil war.

He said working with his father in his grocery shop from the age of 10 gave him a taste for business while his mother “taught me how to love people and how to cook”.///AFP

Singapore is ranked at the top in Asia and second globally in terms of road infrastructure in the country.  It is followed by Japan and Taiwan which have equally well maintained roads ranked 5 and 11 respectively.  South Korea and Malaysia ranked 14 and 20 respectively also figure in the countries with best roads in Asia.

China is ranked 39 in the world. It has good roads owing to the rising economy and growing development. China has the longest highway in the world stretching 85,000 kilo metres. Brunei and Sri Lanka rank better than other south Asian countries. The condition of Indian roads in getting better with the country ranked 51, ahead of Thailand and Pakistan at 60 and 77 respectively.

Bhutan ranked 80 needs to develop the road infrastructure by leaps and bounds. It is followed by Vietnam and Laos that have also not invested much in developing road infrastructure to make travelling easy around the country.

Cambodia ranked 93 has sporadic road development in both rural and urban areas. Philippines’ roads are less developed compared to other East Asian countries. It is followed by Mongolia at 109 and Bangladesh at 113. Nepal has the worst road​s in Asia and the ​lack of resources and hilly terrain ​is posing a major barrier for the country’s aim to improve ​road infrastructure.

Trump also promised “very strong” background checks on gun owners during the poignant “listening session,” in which he heard first-hand accounts from bereaved parents and friends, and schoolchildren who narrowly escaped with their own lives.

“A gun-free zone, to a maniac — because they are all cowards — a gun-free zone is ‘Let’s go in and let’s attack,” Trump said.

“If you had a teacher who was adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly,” Trump said, suggesting that 20 percent of a school’s teachers could be trained to carry concealed weapons.

“This would only be obviously for people who are very adept at handling a gun,” Trump added.

The televised White House meeting came as students staged street protests across the country to demand stricter gun laws following the murder of 14 teens and three teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Holding signs reading “Never Again” and “Be The Adults, Do Something,” teenaged survivors of last Wednesday’s shooting rallied outside the Florida state Capitol in Tallahassee.

“No longer can I walk the halls I walked millions of times before without fear and sadness,” Stoneman Douglas student Florence Yared told a crowd that included thousands of supporters.

“No longer can I walk the halls without imagining bloodstains and dead bodies,” the 17-year-old junior said. “All because of the damage that a single AR-15 rifle caused.”

The White House meeting was attended by Stoneman Douglas students, their parents and also the parents of victims of the Columbine, Sandy Hook and other shootings.

‘My daughter has no voice’

Andrew Pollack, whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow was among the Stoneman Douglas victims, told Trump it was far too easy for people such as the 19-year-old shooter gunman Nikolas Cruz to acquire weapons.

“I’m here because my daughter has no voice. She was murdered last week and she was taken from us, shot nine times,” he said. “We as a country failed our children. This shouldn’t happen.

“We protect airports. We protect concerts, stadiums, embassies,” Pollack said, his voice seething with rage. “I can’t get on a plane with a bottle of water, but we leave some animal to walk into a school.”

Justin Gruber, a 15-year-old Stoneman Douglas student, said “there needs to be significant change in this country because this has to never happen again.

“People should be able to feel that when they go to school they can be safe,” Gruber said.

Samuel Zeif, who lost a close friend at Stoneman Douglas last Wednesday, said it was important to “be strong for the fallen who don’t have a voice to speak anymore.”

“Let’s never let this happen again. Please,” he told the president. “And I don’t understand why I can still go in a store and buy a weapon of war.”

Urgent calls for action following the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, which left 20 children and six teachers dead, had failed to break the national deadlock on gun control.

But students have vowed to make the Parkland tragedy a turning point, with youths inspired on social media by the activism of their peers staging walkouts from high schools in Florida and elsewhere on Wednesday.

Hundreds of students descended on city hall in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and marched in other cities, including Chicago, the midwestern metropolis wracked by gun violence.

‘NRA has got to go’

In Washington, hundreds more gathered outside the White House chanting slogans against the National Rifle Association (NRA), the powerful gun lobby, and demanding action from Trump.

“Hey hey, ho ho, the NRA has got to go,” they chanted.

A girl with a megaphone read out the names of the 14 students and three teachers killed at Stoneman Douglas as the crowd held their arms up in the air.

Students are planning a march on Washington on March 24, with sister rallies planned across the country.

Trump — who received strong backing from the NRA during his White House run — has shown a new-found willingness to take at least some steps on gun control following the Parkland shooting.

The president threw his support Tuesday behind moves to ban “bump stocks” — an accessory that can turn a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic one.

Calls to ban bump stocks have been mounting since Stephen Paddock, a retired accountant, used them on several of his weapons to kill 58 concertgoers in Las Vegas in October 2017 in the deadliest mass shooting in recent US history.

But Trump’s suggestion of arming teachers drew immediate scorn from the founder of the advocacy group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

“I’m honestly gobsmacked that the President just used a forum with gun violence survivors to pimp the @NRA’s priority legislation and to suggest arming teachers,” tweeted Shannon Watts.

The US Congress has long been deadlocked on the gun debate, accomplishing nothing despite a spate of mass shootings and polls showing that Americans support stricter gun laws by a two-to-one margin.

The Thais, detained against their will, had been forced to make the deceitful calls duping respondents out of their money.

A senior police officer told reporters at Suvarnabhumi International Airport on Tuesday night the Malaysian police were currently questioning the suspects and their enslaved employees.

Among the suspects apprehended in the Malaysian capital’s Sri Petaling area, three were the subjects of outstanding Thai arrest warrants.

Pol Lt-General Thanitsak Thiraswadi, a special adviser to the Royal Thai Police, said the three are believed to be members of a phone-scam gang led by Taiwanese Zhu Yi De, who is also being sought.

Deputy Tourist Police chief Maj Gen Surachet Hakpan said the Kuala Lumpur raid followed another joint police operation against call-centre scammers in Cambodia, in which 26 Thais, six Taiwanese and five Cambodians were arrested.

Thai police want the 26 Thais extradited so it can be determined if any of them were involved involuntarily.

Police said two Thai men, ages 39 and 23 – who were rescued in Kuala Lumpur on January 26 while making calls for the gang under duress – had already returned to Thailand.

They had provided additional information for the ongoing search for guilty parties.

In a post on its Facebook page, the embassy said there were no reports of Thais having been affected by the incident.

In case of emergency, Thais could contact the Honorary Thai Consulate General office in Medan at (+62) 813 708 88785 or call the Embassy’s emergency telephone number (+62) 811 186253 around the clock.

The Indonesian authorities have issued a ban on people entering an area within a radius of seven kilometres of the volcano.

Mount Sinabung volcano erupted Monday, leaving local villages coated in debris and officials scrambling to hand out facemasks to residents.

The volcano has been rumbling since 2010 and saw a deadly eruption in 2016. It spewed a thick plume of ash after activity picked up recent days.

The Jakarta Post on Monday quoted Centre for Volcanology chief Kasbani as saying this was the biggest eruption for Sinabung this year.

There were no reports of injuries or deaths.

No one lives inside a previously announced nogo zone around the volcano.

But hundreds of houses outside the sevenkilometre danger zone were covered in volcanic ash.

Officials have distributed facemasks and urged local residents to stay indoors to avoid respiratory problems, said local disaster mitigation agency official Nata Nail Peranginangin.

“In some villages the visibility was barely five metres after the eruption – it was pitch black,” Peranginangin added.

Pressure inside the crater was threatening to spark collapses in its dome, the official said.

Sinabung roared back to life in 2010 for the first time in 400 years. After another period of inactivity, it erupted once more in 2013 and has remained highly active since.

In 2016, seven people died in one of Sinabung’s eruptions, while a 2014 eruption left 16 people dead.

Indonesia is home to around 130 volcanoes due to its position on the “Ring of Fire”, a belt of tectonic plate boundaries circling the Pacific Ocean where frequent seismic activity occurs.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the powerful heir to the Saudi throne, has been leading a drive to reform the country’s dependence on oil, including expanding the private sector and empowering women.

The Dubai-based Arab Fashion Council said on its website that fashion week would be held in Riyadh from March 26 to March 31, with a second edition already scheduled for October.

Arab Fashion Week will take place at Riyadh’s eco-friendly Apex Center, a white honeycomb-like venue designed by the late celebrated Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid.

In December, the Arab Fashion Council announced the opening of a regional office in Riyadh and named Saudi Princess Noura Bint Faisal Al-Saud as its honorary president.

“The first Arab Fashion Week in Riyadh will be more than a world-class event, it is a catalyst through which we believe the fashion sector will lead other economic sectors such as tourism, hospitality, travel, and trade,” Princess Noura said in a statement on the council’s website.

Listed as an international fashion week alongside Paris and Milan, the twice-yearly Arab Fashion Week offers exclusively see-now-buy-now collections and pre-collections.

The line-up for the Riyadh event has not been revealed yet and it remains unclear whether it will be limited to modest designs in accordance with the strict dress code observed in Saudi Arabia.

The Gulf kingdom, which has some of the world’s tightest restrictions on women, requires them to wear, by law, a loose-fitting abaya robe to shroud their bodies in public.

Earlier this month, a senior Saudi cleric said Saudi women should not be “forced to wear abayas”.

The comment was made by Sheikh Abdullah al-Mutlak, a member of the Council of Scholars — the kingdom’s highest religious body.

The government has not said whether it will change the law.

But Prince Mohammed has introduced over the past months a series of reforms in favor of women.

Read also: Top 10 trends at NY Fashion Week

In January, Saudi women were allowed for the first time ever to enter a football stadium to watch a game and the kingdom is also opening several sectors of the workplace to women.

Saudi Arabia has also announced an end to a longstanding ban on women driving, which is to take effect in June.

In the past, Arab Fashion Week have been hosted so far exclusively by Gulf fashion capital Dubai and have included runway darlings Marchesa and Tony Ward.

Dubai will continue to host its own parallel Arab Fashion Week, with the sixth edition slotted for May 9 to May 12.//AFP

While the last quarter-century has seen broad improvements in older children’s health, “we have not made similar progress in ending deaths among children less than one month old,” said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF’s executive director.

“Given that the majority of these deaths are preventable, clearly we are failing the world’s poorest babies.”

The differences are stark. A baby born in Pakistan — the country with the worst newborn mortality rate — faced a one in 22 chance of death, while a newborn in Japan had only a one in 1,111 risk of dying, the report said.

Of the 10 highest-risk countries, eight are in sub-Saharan Africa, countries where “pregnant women are much less likely to receive assistance,” due to poverty, conflict or weak institutions, according to the report.

Those eight countries are the Central African Republic (a one in 24 chance of death); Somalia, Lesotho, Guinea-Bissau and South Sudan (all with a one in 26 chance); Cote d’Ivoire (one in 27) and Mali and Chad (both with a one in 28 chance).

Each year, some 2.6 million babies do not survive through their first month.

– Preventable deaths –

The report was released in conjunction with the launch of a global campaign, called Every Child Alive, aimed at ensuring “affordable, quality health care solutions for every mother and newborn.”

More than 80 percent of newborn deaths can be prevented, the report says, “with access to well-trained midwives, along with proven solutions like clean water, disinfectants, breastfeeding within the first hour, skin-to-skin contact and good nutrition.”

But shortages of properly trained health workers and midwives are a major problem in poorer nations.

While a rich country like Norway has 18 doctors, nurses and midwives for every 10,000 people, impoverished Somalia has only one.

Every year, one million babies die the day they are born.

“We know we can save the vast majority of these babies with affordable, quality health care solutions,” Fore said.

– Rwandan success story –

In general, babies born in richer countries fare far better, but there are differences within countries. Babies born to the poorest families are 40 percent more likely to die than those born to the least poor.

Sadly typical was the story of Mary James, an 18-year-old from rural Malawi.

When her labor started, she and her sister made the long trek to a health center on foot. When her baby was delivered, he was small and terribly weak. She says an overstretched staff did its best, but by night the child was gone.

“I felt like my heart was breaking,” James told UNICEF staff. “I had a name for the child but he never opened his eyes.”

Since improvements to health care can be expensive, “it is crucial to invest the money in a smart way,” UNICEF’s global maternity and newborn program chief Willibald Zeck told AFP.

That can mean something as simple as ensuring that a pregnant woman who has walked three days to a health care facility is received with “dignity,” so she remains long enough to receive proper postnatal care.

But the dearth of expensive equipment matters. Zeck, who worked as an obstetrician/gynecologist in Tanzania, said women were often unsure how pregnant they were, and he would have to use his hands to estimate whether a fetus was premature or seriously underweight.

Still, among countries that have made dramatic improvements is low-income Rwanda, which more than halved its rate from 1990 to 2016, illustrating that “political will to invest in strong health systems… is critical,” the report said.

Education matters, too. Babies born to mothers with no education face nearly twice the risk of early death as babies whose mothers have at least a secondary education.

The United States — generally affluent, but with considerable income inequality and wide variations in access to health care — was only the 41st safest country for newborns.

The countries with the lowest newborn mortality rates, after Japan, are mostly well-off countries with strong education and health care systems: Iceland (a one in 1,000 chance of death), Singapore (one in 909), Finland (one in 833), Estonia and Slovenia (both one in 769), Cyprus (one in 714) and Belarus, Luxembourg, Norway and South Korea (all with risks of one in 667).