The authorities also warned foreign tour operators to partner with local counterparts in arranging package tour programmes in Laos; if not they will face measures.

The warning came after a report emerged that some foreign tour operators brought in tour groups including those from China and Thailand without cooperating with local tour operators, which violates the relevant regulations.

The report also suggested that some foreign tour operators did not use Lao tour guides, which also breaches the regulations, according to the report distributed at a recent meeting of the Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism.

Some foreign operators were found purchasing just two or three-day packages from local tour operators, but their stays were actually longer than the specified package.

“They [the foreign tour operators] organised tours for the rest of their stay themselves,” Deputy Director General of the Tourism Management Department, Mr Xaysombath Bounnaphon said.

Mr Xaysombath added that such extension of their stay by the foreign tour group without acknowledgement from local tour operators violated the relevant regulations.

Local tour operators called for the government’s relevant sectors to take thorough action to regulate the issue as well as some tour groups not using Lao tour guides.

The operators said if these issues remained unaddressed, Laos would benefit little from the tourism industry.

Vice President of the Lao Association of Travel Agents, Mr Saleum Khamphengvong said Laos was suffering from a shortage of tour guides capable of speaking languages including Chinese and Korean, therefore tour operators had to employ foreign tour guides.

“To some extent, it is our problem that we cannot provide tour guides capable of speaking the languages of particular countries,” he said.

Mr Xaysombath admitted that Laos has insufficient tour guides capable of speaking Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Italian.

“Although a number of Lao students have graduated from China, many of them have not worked as tour guides,” he said.

To maximise the benefits from the tourism industry, the deputy director underlined the need for Laos to draw up a long-term plan to train sufficient tour guides to provide services for foreign visitors, especially those from targeted countries which are a major source of foreign tourist arrivals.

Laos has targeted high-end tourists from many countries including Europe, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea.

To attract more high-end tourists, especially from China and maximise the benefits, Minister of Information, Culture and Tourism, Prof. Dr Bosengkham Vongdara told the National Assembly recently that Laos needs to draw up a comprehensive tourism marketing plan.

The plan would also include measures to ensure that foreign tour operators partner with local counterparts in arranging package tours in the country, while fully utilising Lao tour guides.

    Secretary-general Lim Jock Hoi, a veteran Bruneian diplomat, pointed to a tropical storm that battered the southern Philippines last month leaving at least 240 dead and tens of thousands displaced.

Also in December, a tropical cyclone pounded Indonesia’s main island of Java and killed at least 41 people, with tens of thousands forced from their homes by severe flooding and landslides.

“Our region is disaster-prone,” Lim said at his inauguration ceremony at Asean’s Secretariat in Jakarta.

“This underscores the need to strengthen Asean cooperation in disaster management and humanitarian assistance.”

The 10-member group has tended to focus much of its endeavours on regional diplomacy and economic growth.

Lim takes over from Vietnam’s Le Luong Minh who said Friday that the organisation’s main challenge is to bring it “closer to its people”.

Lim said that Asean must be “more proactive” and “improve (its) capabilities” in disaster-relief efforts.

“It is therefore incumbent upon us all to enhance the resilience of our communities through disaster risk reduction interventions, climate change adaptation strategies, as well as conservation and sustainable management of biodiversity and natural resources,” he added.

The Asean secretary-general serves a non-renewable term of five years with the post rotating among member states.//AFP

Actor Thomas Grant Gustin, 27, better known as Barry Allen a.k.a. Flash the superhero, was in Sabah recently to undergo a traditional Kadazan wedding ceremony with his fianc้e Andrea Thoma, 29, a physical therapist who is halfKadazan.

It was previously reported that the couple returned to the United States on Dec 28 after touring Sabah.

To the glee of Malaysian fans, Gustin finally shared photos of his holiday that included an island getaway and plenty of quality time with friends and family.

“I met so many people this passed (sic) week. New friends, new family and a bunch of random people that apparently watch Flash over in Malaysia,” he said.

In a series of photos, the happy couple was seen relaxing at Gaya Island Resort in Kota Kinabalu where they dined by the beach and participated in a cooking lesson.

In a separate post, they were seen visiting Thoma’s village, where they tasted roasted wild boar and shopped along Gaya Street.

Gustin and Thoma both looked blissful in a selfie shot dressed in traditional Kadazan costume.

“I will never forget this trip. I love my ‘spiritual wife’ and her family and I can’t wait to marry her for real this year,” he said. The couple plans to formally marry in the United States sometime this year.

The meeting will take place in Panmunjom, the truce village in the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula.

Tensions have been high after the North carried out multiple missile launches in 2017, including a number of ICBMs, and its sixth atomic test, by far its most powerful to date.

The tentative rapprochement comes after the North’s leader Kim Jong-Un warned in his New Year speech that he had a nuclear button on his desk, but at the same time offered Seoul an olive branch, saying Pyongyang could send a team to next month’s Winter Olympics in the South.

Seoul responded with an offer of talks between the two, and earlier this week the hotline between them was restored after being suspended for almost two years.

Late Thursday, the South’s president Moon Jae-In and his US counterpart Donald Trump agreed to delay joint military drills — which always infuriate the North — until after the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang which begin on February 9.

A unification ministry official told AFP that the North faxed a message to Seoul saying it accepted the proposal for talks on Tuesday.

Ministry spokesman Baek Tae-Hyun told journalists that the agenda would include the Pyeongchang Olympics “and the issue of improving inter-Korean relations”.

It followed HMAS Warramunga making an eight-tonne hashish haul in late December during manoeuvres in the area as part of the Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) naval partnership.

The latest seizure occurred on January 3 with support from a British Royal Navy helicopter, with crew from the frigate boarding a suspect vessel in international waters.

HMAS Warramunga commanding officer Dugald Clelland said it was a complex night operation.

“The Royal Navy helicopter was able to cue us onto a suspect vessel, which Warramunga’s boarding party searched in challenging conditions,” he said.

“The boarding party did a first-rate job locating and seizing more than three-and-a-half tonnes of illicit narcotics.”

Officials did not say where in the Arabian sea the drugs were seized, where the smuggling vessel was believed to have come from or give its likely destination.

The HMAS Warramunga is part of the Combined Maritime Forces naval partnership in which 32 nations patrol 6.5 million square kilometres (2.5 million square miles) of international waters.

Their focus is on ensuring the free flow of legitimate commerce, but also to crack down on terrorist activity in the Middle East and Indian Ocean regions.

With the mountains packed with skiers for the school holidays, major resort Val d’Isere closed its runs for the day because of heavy snowfall, while Chamonix said it was shutting many of its lifts as a precautionary measure.

“The objective is to keep everyone safe,” said David Ponson, ski chief in the Alpine Savoie region, as many pistes were shut for a second day.

At the other extreme, nearly 400 firefighters on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica were battling blazes fanned by Eleanor’s strong gusts of wind, with three people injured in a fire overnight.

Three hundred goats were killed in the blaze at Chiatra-Canale di Verde near the island’s east coast and 10 homes burnt — five of them completely destroyed, local authorities said.

The prefecture added that the intensity of the blazes was “exceptional in the middle of winter.” Troops from the local airbase have been deployed to help fight the flames.

Eleanor, the fourth winter storm to hit Europe since December, swept into the continent on Wednesday after battering Britain and Ireland.

It has left at least five people dead, including a 21-year-old skier hit by a falling tree in France and a couple in their 60s swept away on Spain’s northern Basque coast by a huge wave.

On Thursday in the French Alps, firefighters said a woman in her 90s died of a heart attack in Crets-en-Belledonne after floods sent a torrent of mud and water into her home.

And a farmer in Savoie was found dead under a snowslide.

Meanwhile a French volunteer firefighter was reported missing after rushing to help when a car plunged into an overflowing river in the Alpine village of Le Moutaret.

At Lenk in central Switzerland, eight people were hurt when a violent gust of wind overturned a railway carriage.

Damage worth millions

In the Netherlands, Eleanor has dealt about 10 million euros ($12 million) of damage to buildings and cars, the Dutch insurers’ union estimated, cited by public television.

The whole of Spain’s northern coast remained on “orange” alert — the second highest on a four-point scale — because of the risk from strong winds and large waves.

More than 40 towns in southwestern Spain have meanwhile brought forward their annual Epiphany feast parades — celebrating the coming of the three wise men with gifts for Jesus — to Thursday because of heavy rain forecast for Friday.

The worst of the storm appeared to have passed by Thursday, though much of eastern France was still on “orange” alert for heavy winds, floods and avalanches.

“The intensity of the rain and melting snow bring a risk of floods via overflowing streams and mudslides,” warned forecaster Cecile Coleou.

Power had been restored to homes in France by Thursday evening, except for around 2,000 residences in Corsica, French electricity companies said.

Germany lowered its alert for violent winds Wednesday evening, but high tides were worrying several states, including in the Moselle Valley where heavy downpours have halted boat traffic.

The Rhine river was set to surge to seven metres (23 feet) on Thursday and was still rising, the Bild newspaper reported. River traffic will be suspended if it hits 8.3 metres.

The storm had snarled air traffic on Wednesday, briefly shutting the Strasbourg and Basel-Mulhouse airports and delaying departures from Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

It also played havoc with road and rail transport, leaving branches, electrical lines and other debris strewn across tracks and highways.

Four people were reported killed in the southeastern states of North and South Carolina, where icy roads sent vehicles skittering.

A cold wave gripping a large section of the United States had already been blamed for a dozen earlier deaths.

Thousands of flights were cancelled and schools were closed in many localities as snow piled up and blizzard conditions began taking hold in the northeast.

Temperatures were so low in northern New York that Niagara Falls — the giant waterfalls straddling the US-Canadian border — froze.

Relief in the form of warmer temperatures was not expected until next week, according to the National Weather Service, and the snow was not expected to taper off until late Friday as the storm moves northeastward into Canada.

‘Bombogenesis’

Weather forecasters dubbed the event a “bomb cyclone” — their nickname for a phenomenon known as “bombogenesis,” in which a weather system experiences a sharp drop in atmospheric pressure and intensifies rapidly, unleashing hurricane-force winds.

Americans along the East Coast faced potential power outages in bitterly cold sub-freezing temperatures — so far, some 24,000 customers in Virginia, 9,000 in Massachusetts, and thousands more in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida already affected.

The southeast was the first to feel the storm’s icy lash — Florida saw its first snow in nearly three decades.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper lamented the deaths of three people in his state, including two killed when their pickup truck slid off a bridge and landed on its roof in a creek bed.

Roads were closed in northern Florida and southeastern Georgia, where Governor Nathan Deal declared a state of emergency in coastal areas.

‘Very dangerous’

With up to a foot (30.5 centimeters) of snow expected in parts of New York, accompanied by powerful wind gusts, schools were closed. More than a foot of the white stuff was expected in Boston.

Mayor Bill de Blasio urged New Yorkers to stay off the roads and take the storm “very seriously.”

The storm could bring “very dangerous conditions,” he warned Wednesday.

Wind gusts of up to 55 miles (88.5 kilometers) per hour were expected through Friday on Long Island and southeastern Connecticut, with wind chills as low as minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 29 Celsius), increasing the risk of frostbite and hypothermia from prolonged exposure.

“Very anomalous and potent winter storm system currently developing as it moves northward towards New England bringing multiple hazards: moderate to heavy snow, low visibility, strong to damaging winds, coastal flooding, and hazardous seas,” the National Weather Service said.

“Anticipate travel and economic impacts today and tonight with accumulating snow and white-out conditions. Expect downed trees and power lines resulting in scattered to widespread outages.”

Travel disruptions

Airlines have scrapped more than 3,700 flights into and out of the United States so far due to the storm, and delayed 1,400 others, according to flight tracker FlightAware.

Nearly 75 percent of flights out of Boston and New Jersey’s Newark airports were cancelled due to the adverse weather conditions, though only about a quarter of flights to and from New York’s main John F. Kennedy airport were scrapped.

Air France announced it was cancelling all flights Thursday and Friday from Paris to New York and Boston.

Winter storm warnings were in effect from the Mid-Atlantic region northward through New England.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency.

“Virginians living in the impacted areas should stay off the roadways to allow local and state road crews and first responders to do their jobs safely and efficiently,” he said.

“With continued frigid temperatures expected to last for several more days, road conditions will remain treacherous beyond the expected end of the snowfall today,” he added.

National rail line Amtrak cancelled service between Washington and Newport News, Virginia.

In Washington, despite only a dusting of snow, federal agencies opened two hours late, many schools were closed and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the chamber would hold no further votes this week, shortening what was already a short workweek due to the New Year’s holiday.

Senators had only returned to the upper chamber Wednesday, and they face a series of critical votes in the coming weeks, including on funding to prevent a government shutdown and spending cuts.

The announcement came just hours after US President Donald Trump said high-level talks set for next week between North and South Korea were “a good thing”.

Tensions have spiralled in recent months after North Korea held multiple missile launches and its sixth and most powerful nuclear test — purportedly of a hydrogen bomb.

Trump has also traded personal insults with his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-Un, rattling regional allies.

But the last few days have witnessed a rare softening of tone on both sides of the demilitarised zone after Kim offered an olive branch to Seoul during a New Year’s speech, saying he was willing to send a team to next month’s Winter Olympics in the South.

The tentative rapprochement took a further step Thursday after South Korean president Moon Jae-In spoke to Trump by telephone with both agreeing to suspend joint military drills, a regular source of Pyongyang’s ire.

“The two leaders agreed to de-conflict the Olympics and our military exercises so that United States and Republic of Korea forces can focus on ensuring the security of the Games,” the White House said in a statement.

Moon’s office said the South Korean president told Trump that delaying the exercises would help ensure the success of the Winter Olympics — being hosted by the South next month in Pyeongchang — “in case the North does not make any more provocations”.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis later said the delay was for practical, rather than political, reasons.

“We have at times changed the timelines on these (drills) for any number of reasons, so for us, this is the normal give and take that we have,” he said, noting that the Olympics are South Korea’s biggest event in terms of international tourism.

He added that the drills, known as Foal Eagle, would be conducted sometime after the Paralympics, which end on March 18.

– New Year rapprochement –

After a year that saw tensions on the Korean peninsula spike to their worst levels in years, 2018 has begun on a tentatively warmer note with Seoul responding positively to Kim’s New Year speech.

On Wednesday the two Koreas restored a cross-border hotline that had been shut down since 2016.

They also agreed to hold high-level talks next week — the first since 2015 — which will focus on “matters of mutual interest”, including the North’s participation in the Winter Olympics.

Mattis said the talks were the result of international pressure, pointing to successive United Nations Security Council votes against the North.

But North Korea’s young leader has shrugged off a raft of new sanctions and heightened rhetoric from Washington as his regime drives forward with its weapons programmes, which it says are meant to defend against US aggression.

While Trump called the talks a “good thing” in a tweet on Thursday, his ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, struck a much more cautious tone earlier in the week.

“We won’t take any of the talks seriously if they don’t do something to ban all nuclear weapons in North Korea,” she said Tuesday.

A State Department spokeswoman also warned that Pyongyang’s olive branch may be an attempt to “drive a wedge of some sort” between Washington and Seoul.

The White House statement announcing the suspension of drills said both Trump and Moon “agreed to continue the campaign of maximum pressure against North Korea and to not repeat mistakes of the past”.

Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear tests has seen the isolated state slapped with painful new sanctions that even its key ally China have backed.

But South Korea and Washington’s regular joint military drills have also been criticised by some as adding to regional tensions, particularly by Beijing and Moscow who have both called for them to be suspended.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov on Thursday said he “welcomed” the halting of drills during the Olympics.

News agency RIA Novosti quoted him as saying that Moscow “observes with satisfaction” that their calls to halt the manoeuvres have been “taken into account”.

Kim’s New Year address also included a warning to the US that he has a “nuclear button” on his table, prompting a furious response from Trump via Twitter that Washington’s nuclear button was “much bigger and more powerful”.

The tweet generated responses both on Twitter and from analysts largely of scorn and alarm. Mattis declined to address the president’s tweet.

“My job as the secretary of defence is to make certain that we have forces ready to defend this country,” Mattis said.

Ricky Tonacia, 34, and Jack Dennard, 26, were questioned by police after flouting a highly publicised danger zone up to 10 kilometres (six miles) from the volcano.

Mount Agung has been periodically spewing molten clouds of ash and smoke for months, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people living nearby — and drawing some foreign thrill seekers eager to climb its peak.

Authorities were alerted to the men’s expedition after a nearby military post observed torch light on the volcano around 3:00 am local time Thursday (2000 GMT Wednesday), authorities said.

The pair and two Balinese men who drove into the exclusion zone to pick them up were detained several hours later as they attempted to descend the mountain.

“We took them to the Selat Police post for questioning,”  Captain Wayan Mustika from the Karangasem military post told AFP.

“They said the hotel where they were staying told them the volcano is safe.

“We released them at 11:25 am because there was no criminal offence,” he added.

Mustika added that a Russian man was briefly taken into custody after he was caught trying to climb Agung last week.

The volcano’s alert level remains at maximum, but the 10-kilometre radius danger zone was reduced to six kilometres by Indonesia’s volcanology centre on Thursday afternoon.

“Mount Agung is still in the eruptive phase and could impact settlements,” the centre said in a statement.

Agung rumbled to life in September, forcing the evacuation of 140,000 people living nearby.

Activity decreased in late October and many returned to their homes, but the volcano has again been belching towering columns of thick grey smoke and ash for the past six weeks.

A spike in activity in late November sparked travel chaos, forcing hundreds of flights to and from the tropical holiday island to be cancelled and severely impacting its tourist-dependent economy.//AFP

Indonesian Anti Narcotic Police Unit display 1.3 tons of cannabis after they raided six suspected narcotics dealers in West Jakarta on New Year’s eve.

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