Laos

Twenty years ago, Asia Transpacific Journeys started a tour to Vietnam , Laos and Cambodia under the unifying theme Passage to Indochina. The trip has become the company's most popular small-group tour. "We pioneered this combination of activities when these countries were just opening their borders," Marilyn Downing Staff, founder and president of Asia Transpacific, says in a statement. The Passage to Indochina trip takes 17 days to explore the region.

WASHINGTON - Nearly four decades after the Vietnam War ended, an effort is underway in Congress to open up national cemeteries to Hmong soldiers who fought in the CIA-backed secret war in Laos.  Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has introduced legislation to give 6,900 former Hmong fighters living in the United States the right to be buried in national cemeteries. The effort comes after the military denied permission for Gen. Vang Pao, a Hmong leader who died in California in 2011 , to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery because he and the soldiers who fought under him and helped the U.S. did not directly serve in the American military.  He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.

Martin Voet and his partner, Thea Cohen, traveled to Southeast Asia last fall with a group of UC Berkeley alumni. In northern Laos, he spotted this boy sitting with an elderly monk at a temple along the banks of the Mekong River. The contrast between the monk's expressive, weathered face and the young boy's calm look caught Voet's attention. The Mission Viejo resident used a Nikon D7000. View past photos we've featured . To upload your own, visit our reader travel photo gallery . When you upload your photo, tell us where it was taken and when.

Behind the wheel of her car, Ng Shui Meng last saw her husband in the jeep behind her, following her home for dinner on a Saturday night, she told human rights groups. She lost sight of him somewhere near a police outpost. She came home. He did not. The sudden disappearance of Lao activist Sombath Somphone, 60, has stirred fears for his fate. A grainy video of the Vientiane street where Sombath was last seen shows him being stopped and ultimately taken away, fueling suspicions that the government seized him. But while Laos is the sort of country where something like that might happen, human rights groups say, it is unclear why it would happen to Sombath.

Behind the wheel of her car, Ng Shui Meng last saw her husband in the jeep behind her, following her home for dinner on a Saturday night, she told human rights groups. She lost sight of him somewhere near a police outpost. She came home. He did not. The sudden disappearance of Lao activist Sombath Somphone, 60, has stirred fears for his fate. A grainy video of the Vientiane street where Sombath was last seen shows him being stopped and ultimately taken away, fueling suspicions that the government seized him. But while Laos is the sort of country where something like that might happen, human rights groups say, it is unclear why it would happen to Sombath.

"Air America" is an addlebrained aerial comedy that sets out to malign the reputations of the former pilots, and crews, of the real Air America, a CIA proprietary cargo hauling airline that flew missions, often under combat conditions, in Laos during the protracted Indochina conflict. Cockburn's article charges, by dredging up a book written 18 years ago, that Air America was involved in transporting opium out of Laos for distribution in the United States. Moreover, he claims to be the sole keeper of the "truth" brave enough to expose Air America's purported involvement in drug-running to the public.

Re "U.S. Fliers Believed Held by Laos at Vietnam War's End," Jan. 2: Laos was subjected to four years (1965-69) of intensive bombing by American warplanes while representatives of the U.S. government officially denied that it was happening. That policy of denial has constituted one of the difficulties in finding those American crew members who managed to survive the destruction of their aircraft, or even to acquire reliable information about them. (If the U.S. was not bombing Laos, how could there be American airmen there?

BILL CASEY wound up in Laos because it was on his way to Cambodia, part of a four-month journey through Asia in late 2005. "I was just hypnotized by the people on motorbikes -- three, four, five or even six people sometimes," said Casey, a video engineer from Hermosa Beach. He captured this trio on its dangerous journey with his Nikon D70 in Vientiane, the capital city.

A long-whiskered rodent with stubby legs and a tail covered with dense hair has turned out be a previously unknown species that represents a new family of wildlife, the Wildlife Conservation Society said Wednesday. The kha-nyou, as local people call it, was seen by scientists in a market in central Laos. Based on morphological differences in the skull and bone structure, coupled with DNA analysis, researchers estimated the animal diverged from other rodents millions of years ago.

Almost 28 years after the Communist Party overthrew the monarchy, the government of Laos on Sunday unveiled a statue of a 14th century king in an unusual recognition of achievements by one of the country's past rulers. The government also announced plans to honor 12 more kings.

LAOS Slide show Pierre Odier will discuss the remote ethnic villages of northwestern Laos and the Taialue, Kamu Lue, Akah, Hmong and Black Tai peoples. When, where : 7:30 p.m. Monday at Distant Lands, 20 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena. Admission, info: Free. RSVP to (626) 449-3220. CLIMBING Presentation Isabel Suppe will discuss her book "Starry Night," which tells the tale of her survival in the Bolivian Andes after falling 1,100 feet off an ice face.

Twenty years ago, Asia Transpacific Journeys started a tour to Vietnam , Laos and Cambodia under the unifying theme Passage to Indochina. The trip has become the company's most popular small-group tour. "We pioneered this combination of activities when these countries were just opening their borders," Marilyn Downing Staff, founder and president of Asia Transpacific, says in a statement. The Passage to Indochina trip takes 17 days to explore the region.

Martin Voet and his partner, Thea Cohen, traveled to Southeast Asia last fall with a group of UC Berkeley alumni. In northern Laos, he spotted this boy sitting with an elderly monk at a temple along the banks of the Mekong River. The contrast between the monk's expressive, weathered face and the young boy's calm look caught Voet's attention. The Mission Viejo resident used a Nikon D7000. View past photos we've featured . To upload your own, visit our reader travel photo gallery . When you upload your photo, tell us where it was taken and when.

When Yon Meakchan isn't converting publications into electronic form for customers such as Stanford University, he pedals his bicycle 10 miles south from his office to the rural edges of this city of 2 million people to help his family, pulling weeds in rice paddies, tending to banana trees and wading into a murky river to bathe oxen. "Poor people work very hard," said Yon, the eldest of eight children who grew up in a bamboo and thatched-roof house. "If they want to buy nice clothes or a motorbike, they can't.

The novel "The Night Circus" (Doubleday: 387 pp., $26.95) is receiving a good deal of attention, and it's rightly deserved - even though some comparisons of Erin Morgenstern's fable to other popular books seem sky-high and unfair (to her). Does anyone's book, for instance, really deserve the pressure of being called the next Harry Potter? Can anyone live up to that? In the vaguest of terms, there's a similarity to Rowling's saga. Morgenstern's novel also centers on two dueling magicians, one of whom is difficult to pin down by name.

They promised a funeral fit for a king. There were to be dignitaries; a long red carpet; thousands of pigs, cows, chickens and ducks to be sacrificed for feasting. It had to be a funeral that crossed cultures and time, peace and war. For this was both goodbye to one man and to the founding era of a people. So thousands of mourners ? including the exiled prince of Laos, widows of Hmong soldiers who died in a "secret" war and families who battled an East Coast blizzard to make it in time ?

More than 700,000 people in the southern rice bowl provinces of Laos face severe food shortages because of late rains and a poor harvest, a western aid official said last week.

A joint U.S.-Laotian search team excavating the site of a 1972 American military plane crash in southern Laos has found remains believed to be those of missing U.S. servicemen, an American military officer said in Bangkok, Thailand. The discovery was made soon after the excavation work began Monday about 24 miles northeast of Pakse in southern Laos, the officer said. U.S.

When French photographer Henri Huet died at age 43 in a helicopter crash over Laos in 1971, he left behind a collection of images showing not only the horrors of the Vietnam War but also the compassion and humanity shared by its combatants.  On Feb. 9 La Maison Europeenne de la Photographie , a center for contemporary photographic art in Paris, will open a major exhibition of Huet’s work, which was featured in news reports around the world through Associated Press. The show, marking the 40th anniversary of the photographer's death, runs through April 3. Son of a French engineer and Vietnamese mother, Huet was born in Vietnam , raised in France and trained as an artist.

The five young men, friends since high school, are here to meet girls. So they carry tennis balls. In the age of Facebook, the ancient Hmong courtship ritual of pov pob ? looking for true love by tossing balls with potential mates at Hmong New Year ? is making a comeback. The tradition had been losing ground to the likes of friending and picking a match off a computer screen. Indeed, a standard question year after year for contestants in the Miss Hmong International Contest, roughly translated from Hmong, was, "Why would young people abandon the blessings of the New Year and their traditions for Internet dating?