JAKARTA – Indonesian women are defying a government ban on travelling to the Middle East to work as maids, convinced there are better prospects in the Gulf than at home despite high-profile cases of abuse, a survey on Thursday showed.

Indonesia announced in May last year a permanent ban on sending women to the Middle East as domestic workers following reports of widespread abuse and the execution of two Indonesian maids in Saudi Arabia, which angered Jakarta.

However, a survey by advocacy group Migrant Care found that hundreds of Indonesian women are still leaving for jobs in the wealthier Middle East.

A total of 1,020 women interviewed between March 2015 and May 2016 at Jakarta’s main airport said they were travelling abroad for the first time to seek jobs as maids.

About 90 percent of them were bound for Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, the poll showed. The rest were going to Malaysia, which is not affected by the ban. “This is a very high number. The moratorium exists only on paper,” said Migrant Care’s executive director Anis Hidayah on the sidelines of a forum held to mark International Domestic Workers’ Day. “In Indonesia, we have limited job opportunities. Going abroad is one alternative, especially for women, because wages are so low here,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Indonesia’s moratorium, which followed a temporary suspension, only affects new domestic helpers. Maids who are already in the Middle East were allowed to stay.

Andri Hadi, a senior official at the foreign ministry, said the authorities would act to stop women from flouting the ban. “We are aware (of this) and we will take some strong policies to stop this practice,” said Hadi, the ministry’s director-general for consular and protocol affairs, which oversees the protection of migrant workers overseas. “On the ground we have to strengthen the enforcement of our law, because this is illegal and against the law,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Indonesia is a major source of maids for many countries around the world, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan.

Officials estimate there are some 2.3 million registered Indonesian domestic workers abroad, with the same number of undocumented workers.

SYDNEY – Vietnamese abattoir workers have been filmed using sledgehammers to bludgeon Australian cattle, activists said Thursday, prompting some exporters to stop supplying livestock to some slaughterhouses in the southeast Asian nation.

Undercover investigators working for Animals Australia filmed footage last month of one worker clubbing a cow over the head five times with a sledgehammer before it fell to the ground beside the bodies of two other cows.

The man then hit it another four times before it finally died.

The activist group said it visited 13 slaughterhouses in North and Central Vietnam, home to a multimillion dollar industry and one of Australia’s biggest live cattle export markets, in what it said was “their most dangerous operation ever”.

“Only two met Australian requirements for approved abattoirs,” campaign director Lyn White told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which aired the footage on national television Thursday.

“I thought I’d seen it all, and I haven’t,” she said.

Animals Australia said ear tags were removed from cattle so they could not be linked back to exporters and that the killings took place in “filthy, unhygienic conditions”.

It is the second time the group has exposed alleged abuses in Vietnamese abattoirs, claiming thousands of Australian cattle have been slaughtered in facilities not approved by Canberra, as required by export controls.

White said Animal Australia chose not to publicly release video it shot last year, but instead supplied it to the Australian Livestock Exporters Council (ALEC).

She claims the industry body promised a response within six weeks, but nothing happened which was why she went public.

ALEC chairman Simon Crean said the procedures that were filmed were “inexcusable”.

“No animal should have to go through the fear or the pain,” Crean told broadcaster ABC. “We’ve determined that… we should stop the supply of animals to all of the facilities that are under investigation.” ALEC added in a statement it had suspended abattoirs in Vietnam’s Bai Do region and a feedlot in Haiphong from receiving Australian livestock.

It said it would also review management and oversight of cattle control and traceability to determine how some could end up in non-approved facilities.

The Department of Agriculture and Water Resources ordered a probe and said the animals depicted in the footage were likely exported from the nation.

“Exporters were immediately informed of the complaint so that urgent action could be taken to protect the welfare of cattle currently in Vietnam,” it said in a statement.

Australia’s live cattle export trade has been under the spotlight before, notably in 2013 when shipments to Egypt were suspended for months after abattoir footage showed “horrific” mistreatment of cows.

Trade to Indonesia was also temporary halted in 2011 on cruelty concerns.

Overall, the government estimates the live export trade is worth about US$800 million a year to Australia and employs thousands of people.

HONG KONG – A Hong Kong bookseller known for selling titles critical of Beijing told Thursday how he was blindfolded and kept in a tiny cell by Chinese authorities after going missing eight months ago.

Lam Wing-kee is one of five booksellers who published salacious titles about leading Chinese politicians and disappeared at the end of last year in a case that exacerbated fears Beijing was tightening its grip on Hong Kong.

Lam is the first bookseller to speak openly about what happened and said the case had “violated the rights of Hong Kong people”.

He was supposed to return to the mainland Thursday after being released on bail Tuesday, he told reporters.

However, he has decided not to return and instead to speak out about his case.

“I dare not go back,” he said.

The condition of his bail was to bring back records of customers who had received books from the Causeway Bay Bookstore that he managed.

Lam said he did not want to comply for fear that it would be seen as “selling out” the readers.

Lam struggled to contain his emotions as he gave a detailed description of his detention and how he was forced to sign a document giving up his right to a lawyer or to speak to his family.

He said he was arrested after crossing the border from Hong Kong into the southern mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen in October.

Lam told how he was blindfolded and taken by train to the city of Ningbo, where he was kept in a 200-square-feet room for five months under guard. He was then moved to an apartment.

Earlier this year he gave a confession on Chinese state television over trading books into China that were banned there.

But he told reporters Thursday that he had been forced to do that.

“I acted in front of the camera, I needed to. There was a director. I had to recite the script,” he said.

The other four booksellers are still detained in China.

All but one have been allowed to return to Hong Kong on bail but have swiftly gone back over the border, apart from Lam.

The case of bookseller Lee Bo caused the greatest outcry as he was the only one to disappear from Hong Kong, leading to accusations that mainland law enforcement agents were operating illegally in the city.

Lee has insisted he is a free man just helping the authorities with their investigation.

But Lam said Lee had told him he had been brought to the mainland against his will.

The men all worked for the Mighty Current publishing house, which produced books about political intrigue and love affairs at the highest levels of Chinese politics.

Hong Kong was returned to China by Britain in 1997 and enjoys far greater liberties than in mainland China, but there are fears these are being eroded.

NEW DELHI – India is calling for volunteers to hold workshops for children, a minister said Thursday, as state-run schools around the country struggle with absentee teachers.

Launching the initiative, education minister Smriti Irani said people from varying professions could teach classes on creative writing, art, story telling and public speaking.

“It is the best example of participative citizenry,” Irani said in New Delhi as she launched a website where volunteers can register and connect with schools in their area.

“The world over, community engagement has led to better quality education…I am hopeful by December every school in the country will be connected to this programme,” she said.

Volunteers can connect to the pilot programme through an app on their smartphones.

Irani said the initiative, initially offered in 2,200 schools nationwide, was aimed at supplementing formal education.

But it comes as the government grapples with teacher shortages in schools due to extended absences or under-recruitment.

Access to education has improved significantly in recent years with thousands of new government-run schools in rural and remote areas for India’s tens of millions of young people.

But experts say standards of teaching in many schools is below par, leading to poor reading and writing levels among students.

A survey by academics and the World Bank in 2010 found more than 20 percent of state primary school teachers were absent at any one time.

Many children in fifth year cannot read a second-year book in their own language, an annual survey by Indian education research group Pratham has consistently showed.