A ceremonial gong was struck nine times by the prime minister to mark the official opening of ‘Visit Laos Year 2018’.

“On this occasion, I’d like to invite all tourists from Laos and overseas to visit Laos, with joy and happiness throughout the year and forever,” Thongloun said.

The launch of ‘Visit Laos Year 2018’ coincided with the start of the annual That Luang festival which features a trade fair, a display of traditional houses, cultural performances and activities relating to traditional worship rituals at That Luang Stupa as well as cultural, religious and spiritual events.

The launch highlights included performances of songs and dances.

Minister of Information, Culture and Tourism Professor Dr Bosengkham Vongdara also delivered a speech at the event, which was attended by hundreds of people including government leaders, foreign media and invited guests from Laos and abroad.

The minister underscored the importance of the tourism industry which has expanded rapidly in countries around the world.

“In recent years, the government of the Lao PDR has likewise come to regard tourism as a priority sector for driving socio-economic development,” he said.

“Tourism brings spending on goods and services that can boost currency reserves and money flow and create more job opportunities for people in the service and production sectors, particularly agriculture and handicraft production.”

Professor Dr Bosengkham said tourism is a form of export and generates income to local and rural communities in remote regions.

But critics raised questions about how the government can best promote Laos to the rest of the world when the amount of information available is limited.

Editor-in-Chief of e-Global Travel Media, Stephen Morton, said Laos has great potential to offer experiences to international visitors, but needs to improve accessibility (visa facilitation) and ensure more information is available.

For instance, the event calendar related to festivals and activities must be readily available so that more tourists can plan on attending those events.

Improvement of infrastructure and services including road access to tourist attractions and internet speed is also critical. The government has organised Visit Laos Year on two previous occasions – once in 1999-2000 and again in 2011-12 to encourage more tourists at home and abroad to visit sites within the country.

In 2000, tourist arrivals amounted to 737,208 people and generated income of US$113,898,285.

By 2015 the figure had risen to 4,684,429 people, generating some US$725,365,681 in revenue. It is projected that tourist arrivals will reach about 6,206,423 people by 2020 and generate revenue amounting to US$993,427,000.

During ‘Visit Laos Year 2018’, the nation will seek to attract at least 5 million arrivals generating revenue of about US$900 million.

To better promote the ‘Visit Laos Year 2018’ campaign, the government approved six slogans of “Warmly Welcome to Visit Laos Year 2018”; “Laos Jewel of the Mekong”; “Laos Simply Beautiful”; “ Be the Good Host for Visit Laos Year 2018”; “Visit, Enjoy, Safety, Environmentally Friendly”; “Visit Laos, Experience the Diversity of Nature, Culture and History”.

The trade fair features more than 1,000 booths at two venues: Lao ITECC (460 booths) and That Luang Esplanade (640 booths).

He said the market share for electric cars is set to reach 20 percent in 2025.

“Developing electric cars is the best way to go. There are no better choices,” said Prasetyo at the 53rd anniversary of the University of Indonesia’s (UI) Technology School in Jakarta on Sunday.

UI’s electricity car development team deputy chairman Mohamad Adhytya said there were a number of reasons why electric cars needed to be developed, including the depletion of fossil fuel and greenhouse gas emissions.

“The benefit of using electric cars includes zero emissions, lower operating costs and cheaper energy,” Mohamad told kompas.com on Monday, adding that the electric car was also more efficient because electricity can be easily transmitted.

However, engineers also needed to anticipate a number of disadvantages, including the lengthy charging process, what to do with old batteries and the limited distance attained by electric cars.

He said it was a challenge for the experts to develop fast charging batteries and a more efficient waste recycle process. “After being continuously used, batteries should be replaced. We need technology to solve these problems.”

The government has issued Presidential Regulation No. 22/2017 on the general plan for national energy to support the development of electric cars.

More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled western Rakhine state to Bangladesh since late August when raids by militants from the minority group were met with ruthless army “clearance operations”.

The United Nations has led global condemnation, calling the crackdown a “textbook” example of ethnic cleansing.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson phoned army chief Min Aung Hlaing earlier this week to express his concerns at alleged atrocities in Rakhine state and urge a swift and safe return for the Rohingya.

But inside Myanmar support for the army has surged — an unlikely turnaround for a once feared and hated institution that ruled for 50 years and whose lawmakers lost heavily in 2015 polls.

Those elections sent Aung San Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy party into power, but the Rohingya crisis has put her government on the backfoot.

Demonstrators carried banners lauding Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing and rebuking the international community for “pressuring the Tatmadaw” — as Myanmar’s army is known.

“The Tatmadaw is essential for the country, it protects our ethnic groups, races and religion,” Nan Aye Aye Kyi, 54, told AFP as the rally snaked through Yangon to the iconic Sule Pagoda.

The Rohingya are not recognised as one of Myanmar’s patchwork of ethnic groups.

Fear of a Muslim takeover of Buddhist-majority Myanmar through Rakhine state has been kindled over decades by the army, which is now casting itself as saviour of the nation.

Kyaw Than, 64, a retired sergeant who served in the army for 41 years said the Tatmadaw “is protecting the whole country”, adding allegations of murder, rape and arson against the Rohingya were “not true”.

But international pressure is tightening.

The US is weighing targeted sanctions against key military leaders, while Pope Francis is scheduled to talk peace on a landmark visit to the country next month.

Aung San Suu Kyi has faced the sharp end of global outcry over the crisis, with fellow Nobel laureates joining a cast of world leaders in urging her to condemn the army and speak up for the Rohingya.

Suu Kyi’s supporters say the once garlanded rights champion is hamstrung, with any criticism of the still-dominant army likely to provoke a strong response.

The army has unassailable control of all security matters and has only begun to cede other law-making powers to civilian government over the last few years.

The border region has been emptied of most of its Muslim residents since late August, when Myanmar’s military launched a crackdown on Rohingya rebels that the UN says likely amounts to ethnic cleansing.

Hundreds of villages have been razed to the ground, with more than 600,000 Rohingya — a stateless group in mainly Buddhist Myanmar — fleeing across the border for sanctuary in Bangladesh.

Under intense global pressure, Myanmar has agreed to repatriate “scrutinised” refugees who can prove their residence in Rakhine.

But details of the plan remain thin, seeding concern about who will be allowed back, what they will return to and how they will manage to live in a region where anti-Rohingya hatred remains sky-high.

On Saturday state media announced the government would begin harvesting 71,000 acres of rice paddy in Maungdaw — the Rohingya-majority area hardest-hit by the violence.

The Global New Light of Myanmar report said workers would be bused in from other parts of the country to assist with the harvest.

“For the time being, we were only assigned to harvest, dry and store,” said Then Wai, head of Maungdaw town’s Agricultural Department.

Government officials could not be reached for comment about what would happen to the rice or where the proceeds would go.

‘Deeply disturbed’

Myanmar denies the charge of ethnic cleansing and defends the military campaign as a counter offensive targeting Rohingya militants who attacked police posts in late August, killing at least a dozen.

But media, rights groups and the UN have documented consistent accounts of atrocities at the hands of Myanmar security officers.

On Friday UN rights experts said they were “deeply disturbed” after speaking to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

The accounts they heard “point to a consistent, methodical pattern of actions resulting in gross human rights violations affecting hundreds of thousands of people,” said Marzuki Darusman, who chairs the fact-finding mission.

Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi — who has no control over the powerful army — recently created a committee to oversee resettlement in Rakhine, where tens of thousands of other minority groups were also internally displaced by the violence.

The construction of homes for minorities such as the Mro has begun, according to state media, while Suu Kyi’s government has enticed business tycoons to donate to the rebuilding effort.

But fear abounds that the rehabilitation will sideline the Rohingya — a group that has suffered under decades of state-backed discrimination.

Myanmar refuses to recognise the Rohingya as a distinct minority, rendering the 1.1-million strong group stateless.

The army has spread the view that they are foreign interlopers from Bangladesh, despite having lived in Myanmar for generations.

The incident comes during high tension between Myanmar and Turkey, which has lambasted the Southeast Asian nation for its treatment of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority.

Last month Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Myanmar of incubating “Buddhist terror” and carrying out a genocide against the Muslim group.

The reporters, Lau Hon Meng from Singapore and Mok Choy Lin from Malaysia, were arrested on Friday in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw while they were on assignment for Turkish state broadcaster TRT.

They are “under interrogation for flying a drone over the Hluttaw (parliament) building”, said a statement published by Myanmar’s Ministry of Information.

The pair was working with well-known Myanmar journalist Aung Naing Soe, whose house in Yangon was searched by authorities on Friday night, according to local media.

More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state since late August, running from burning villages they say were set alight by soldiers and Buddhist mobs.

Several journalists have been arrested in Myanmar this year, fuelling fears of an erosion of the press freedoms which blossomed after the end of junta rule in 2011.

Many have been charged with defamation or arrested for reporting on armed rebel groups.

Acting on the request of the Malaysian embassy in Bangkok, acting Tourist Police chief Pol Maj-General Surachet Hakpal led tourist and immigration police and Samut Prakan police to rescue Khu Wen Ching, 19, from a room on the 10th floor of a condominium on Bang Na-Trat Road KM5 at 7pm on Friday.

Police arrested a Taiwanese man, Zhao Fei Long, 29, in the room and also found seven Malaysians.

Police found bruises on several parts of Khu’s body.

Khu said she had applied for the job of customer service in Thailand and was promised 5,500 Malaysian ringgit (Bt39,000) for three months of work.

She said she entered Thailand on August 28 and found that the job did not involve customer service. She was told to deceive others to transfer money to her, which would be taken by her employer.

She said she was beaten up by the Taiwanese man after she failed to get others to transfer money. She said she was hit with an iron pipe on her hip and thigh as well as her arms. The Taiwanese man also allegedly stabbed the backs of her hands with a knife and sometimes intimidated her by pointing a knife to her throat.

Khu claimed she was beaten again on October 22 and again on Thursday so she asked another Malaysian in the room to send a message to her relatives in Malaysia. The relatives in turn sought help from the Malaysian embassy.

The Taiwanese man was found to have entered Thailand in early August. He reportedly admitted to have beaten Khu. He said he was in charge of controlling the seven Malaysian men in the room to deceive friends and relatives in Malaysia by pleading that were in need of urgent financial help. Another team in Malaysia would take charge of guiding the victims to transfer money at ATMs.

The Taiwanese man was charged with assaulting another person. The seven Malaysians were handed over to the Immigration Bureau for further action.

After regional lawmakers voted to declare a Catalan “republic”, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy moved swiftly to dissolve the rebel government and parliament, and called December 21 elections to replace them.

In an escalating standoff closely watched by secession-wary Europe, Rajoy fired pro-independence leader Carles Puigdemont and all his ministers as well as the director of the regional police, and Catalan envoys to Madrid and Brussels, to halt what he termed an “escalation of disobedience.”

Secessionist lawmakers voted 70 to 10 in the 135-member parliament Friday to declare Catalonia “a republic in the form of an independent and sovereign state”.

They take their mandate from the “Yes” result in a banned and unregulated October 1 independence referendum spurned by many more than half of Catalan electors.

Observers warned of trouble ahead, with Catalan officials and public servants likely to defy orders from caretaker envoys sent by the central government.

“Tensions are likely to rise significantly over the coming days,” suggested Teneo Intelligence, a risk analysis group.

“Demonstrators might try to prevent the police from removing Catalan ministers from their offices… This increases the risk of violent clashes,” it said in a statement.

‘Demolished democracy’

The region of some 7.5 million people accounts for about 16 percent of Spain’s population, a fifth of its economic output, and attracts more tourists than anywhere else in the country.

Catalonia´s inhabitants are fiercely protective of their language, culture and autonomy — restored after a long period of oppression during nationalist Franco´s 1936-1979 rule.

In Barcelona, separatists broke out in ecstatic shouts of: “Independence!” and popped bottles of cava, a Catalan sparkling wine, as the outcome of Friday´s vote was announced. Separatist MPs cheered and embraced before singing the Catalan anthem.

But any cause for joy was soon nipped in the bud, and shares in Spanish companies, particularly Catalan banks, dropped sharply as the crisis deepened.

“We Spaniards are living through a sad day in which a lack of reason prevailed upon the law and demolished democracy in Catalonia,” Rajoy said as he announced steps to “restore normality”.

The sweeping measures were approved by the Senate Friday under a constitutional article designed to rein in rebels among Spain’s 17 regions.

Madrid’s allies in the European Union and the United States rallied behind Madrid as they voiced alarm over developments in Spain´s worst political crisis in decades.

European Council President Donald Tusk said Madrid “remains our only interlocutor” following the independence vote.

“I hope the Spanish government favours force of argument, not argument of force,” he tweeted.

Steffen Seibert, spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said Berlin “does not recongise such a declaration of independence” by Catalonia.

Battle of wills

The issue is far from a clear-cut battle of wills between Madrid and Catalonia, however.

Polls show Catalans themselves are split, pretty much down the middle, on the issue of independence from Spain.

Dozens of opposition MPs walked out before Friday´s secret ballot in the Catalan parliament, one lamenting “a dark day” for democracy.

Later in the day, hundreds of anti-independence protesters gathered in central Barcelona, chanting “I am Spanish, Spanish!”

Waving the Spanish flag, several demanded Puigdemont be jailed for sedition, even as prosecutors announced they would file “rebellion” charges against him next week.

He risks up to 30 years in jail.

But outside the seat of the Generalitat, the Catalan government, the mood was festive, with fireworks and music.

“We are a free country,” revelled Maria Altimira, 65.

Disobedience

Catalan resentment at Madrid’s perceived interference has been building for years, compounded by the 2008 economic crisis. Many complain that the region contributes more to the central purse than it gets back.

The UN urged both sides Friday to “seek solutions within the framework of the Spanish constitution, and through established political and legal channels.”

But far-left groups have already threatened “massive civil disobedience” if Madrid usurps Catalan autonomy.

“We are likely to see more sustained unrest, possibly including strikes, as well as more serious clashes between national police and pro-independence activists,” said Federico Santi, an analyst at Eurasia Group, a US-based politics think-tank.

“The main signpost over the weekend will be whether the regional government refuses to willingly and peacefully step down.”

Call for restraint

Puigdemont appealed for calm.

“We will have to maintain the momentum of this country (Catalonia) in the coming hours,” he told lawmakers and onlookers in Barcelona after the legislature vote, and urged them to do so in the spirit of “peace, civic responsibility and dignity.”

There are deep concerns over the economic impact of the showdown, with nearly 1,700 companies already having moved their legal headquarters out of Catalonia, which has an economic output equivalent to that of Portugal.

Newly released secret records are full of intriguing details surrounding the assassination of president John F. Kennedy.

But Kennedy scholars say the thousands of documents do not appear to contain any bombshell revelations about the November 22, 1963 murder that shocked the world.

President Donald Trump ordered the release on Thursday of 2,800 classified Kennedy assassination records but held back other “sensitive” documents under pressure from the CIA and FBI.

That last-minute decision left many Kennedy historians frustrated — and provided more fuel for the thriving conspiracy industry around the shooting of the charismatic 46-year-old president in Dallas, Texas.

“I was very disappointed,” said Philip Shenon, author of “A Cruel and Shocking Act: the Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination.”

“Most of the documents that were released last night are documents we’d already seen before,” Shenon told AFP. “We just saw them in redacted form previously.”

“The really important documents, sort of the super secret documents, most of them are not part of the release,” he said.

The Warren Commission, which investigated Kennedy’s murder, determined that Lee Harvey Oswald — a former Marine Corps sharpshooter — acted alone but that conclusion has failed to quell years of speculation that others were involved.

Hundreds of books and movies such as the 1991 Oliver Stone film “JFK” have examined scores of conspiracy theories, pointing the finger at Cold War rivals the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Mafia and even Kennedy’s own vice president, Lyndon Johnson.

‘Great transparency’

While the records released on Thursday by the National Archives contain reams of new information it will be months before the rest of the files are seen — if ever.

Trump gave the CIA, FBI and other agencies six months — until April 26, 2018 — to make their case for why the remaining documents should not be made public.

In a tweet on Friday, the president said the JFK files were being “carefully released.”

“In the end there will be great transparency,” he said. “It is my hope to get just about everything to public!”

Gerald Posner, author of “Case Closed,” which determined that Oswald did indeed act alone, said the release was “frustrating” and that much of what is in the files has been known previously.

Shenon said that while there were no new revelations in the documents there were nevertheless some “interesting tidbits.”

He pointed to one record in which then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover expressed his anger with the “inexcusable” failure of Dallas police to protect Oswald despite repeated FBI warnings that his life was at risk.

Oswald was shot by a striptease club owner, Jack Ruby, on November 24, 1963 — two days after the Kennedy assassination — while being moved to a county jail.

Hoover goes on to add that the FBI had hoped to obtain a confession to “convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”

Many of the records are raw intelligence including scores of reports from FBI agents following up leads that led nowhere.

Much of what they contain is previously known, such as that the communist-obsessed CIA cooked up several outlandish plots to murder Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

One document detailed how in the early days of Kennedy’s presidency the CIA offered $150,000 to Italian-American mob boss Sam Giancana to organize the killing of Castro.

Giancana in return sought the CIA’s help to place a listening device in the room of his mistress — a Las Vegas entertainer — whom he thought was having an affair.

Seashell bomb

Other possible ideas to kill the Communist leader — said to be a keen diver — included contaminating his diving suit with disease-causing bacteria, or booby-trapping a seashell with a bomb.

The plan was scrapped when it was determined “there was no shell in the Caribbean area large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosive.”

The files also contain new — if inconclusive — details about an intriguing chapter in Oswald’s life: a trip he took to Mexico City seven weeks before he killed Kennedy and his meetings there with Cuban and Russian spies.

In his memo, Hoover referred to some of Oswald’s contacts with Cubans and Russians but dismissed them as being only about visas for him and his Russian-born wife.

While many theories over the years are linked to Oswald’s ties to Cuban or Soviet operatives, an FBI memo in 1963 indicated Kennedy’s death was source of deep mourning in the Soviet Union.

According to a source, “officials at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup.'”

The Soviets feared the killing would be used as a pretext to “stop negotiations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba, and thereafter spread the war.”

The Soviets also insisted that they had “no connection whatsoever” with Oswald, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 but returned to the United States in 1962.

Oswald, according to the Soviets, was “a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his country and everything else.”

While many of the 2,891 records released by the National Archives were raw intelligence and uncorroborated, they were almost certain to reinvigorate rampant conspiracy theories about the November 22, 1963 slaying of JFK in Dallas, Texas.

An outlandish CIA plan to recruit the mafia to kill Fidel Castro, FBI foreknowledge of the plot to murder Kennedy’s killer, and Kremlin suspicions of a homegrown rightwing conspiracy were among the highlights, even as some files were withheld for further review on national security grounds.

One document from 1975 detailed how in the early days of Kennedy’s presidency the CIA offered $150,000 to Italian-American mob boss Sam Giancana to organize the killing of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Giancana in return sought the CIA’s help to place a listening device in the room of his mistress — a Las Vegas entertainer — whom he thought was having an affair.

Other possible ideas to kill the Communist leader — said to be a keen diver —  included contaminating his diving suit with disease causing bacteria, or booby-trapping a seashell with a bomb.

The plan was scrapped when it was determined “there was no shell in the Caribbean area large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosive.”

Another document included a transcript of a November 24, 1963 conversation with then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who said his agency informed police of a threat against the life of Kennedy’s killer Lee Harvey Oswald the night before Oswald was murdered. Police, however, failed to act.

While many theories over the years have related to Oswald’s ties to Cuban or Soviet operatives, an FBI memo in 1963 indicated Kennedy’s death was source of deep mourning in the USSR.

According to a source, “officials at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup’.”

The Soviets feared the killing would be used as a pretext to “stop negotiations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba, and thereafter spread the war.”

‘Withheld files’

The Warren Commission, which investigated the shooting of the charismatic Kennedy, 46, determined that Oswald, a former Marine sharpshooter, carried out the Kennedy assassination acting alone.

The released files are vast in number and scope, covering everything from FBI directors’ memos to interviews with members of the public in Dallas who came forward trying to provide clues after that singularly unforgettable moment in US history.

Trump said in a memorandum he had agreed to hold back for further review some records relating to the killing following pushback from intelligence agencies.

“I have no choice — today — but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security,” he said.

Trump gave agencies six months — until April 26, 2018 — to make their case for why the remaining documents should not be made public.

Full and unredacted

The 2,891 records approved for release in compliance with a 1992 act of Congress are viewable on the National Archives website, in full and unredacted form.

“The president wants to ensure that there is full transparency here,” an official said, but “there does remain sensitive information in the records.”

This includes, for example, the identities of informants and “activities that were conducted with the support of foreign partner organizations, either intelligence or law enforcement,” the official said.

The Warren Commission’s formal conclusion that Oswald killed JFK has done little to quell speculation that a more sinister plot was behind the murder of the 35th US president.

Hundreds of books and movies such as the 1991 Oliver Stone film “JFK” have fed the conspiracy industry, pointing the finger at Cold War rivals the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Mafia and even Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson.

Kennedy assassination experts eagerly awaited the opportunity to look at the files but sought to tamp down expectations.

Gerald Posner, author of “Case Closed,” which determined that Oswald did indeed act alone, said people who think the files will “have the solution to the case that everybody can settle on” are going to be disappointed.

Experts agreed, however, that the documents may shed some light on an intriguing chapter in Oswald’s life — including his trip to Mexico City about seven weeks before the shooting where he is known to have met with Cuban and Soviet spies.

The CIA and FBI may be blocking the release of certain documents to hide their own failings, said Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Kennedy Half Century.”

“They had every indication that Oswald was a misfit and a sociopath,” he said.

But neither agency informed the Secret Service, which is charged with protecting the president, he said.

Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 but returned to the United States in 1962.

Two days after killing Kennedy he was fatally shot by a nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, as he was being transferred from the city jail.//AFP

The centres will operate from November 1 onward and each support 500 workers a day, Department of Employment (DOE) chief Waranon Pitiwan said on Friday.

One centre would be located in The Square Bang Yai in Nonthaburi’s Bang Bua Thong district and the other in Zeer Rangsit in Pathum Thani’s Lam Lukka district.

In their first phase of operation each of the centres will focus on processing 20,000 Myanmar workers who had already been verified as having an employer and paid fees for a certification of identity (CI) and a work permit, he said.

The 20,000 migrant workers are caught in a permit-processing backlog at the current nine centres.

Waranon urged the workers to collect queue cards for either of these two centres from the DOE provincial branch offices or the DOE Bangkok Area 1-10 offices from Friday onward.

Waranon also said that a total of 295,000 Myanmar workers had paid the fee for CI issuance through 7-11 stores. The remaining 125,000 workers should quickly do the same so that they could enter the nationality identification process before the December 31 deadline.