The Vietnam War ended 40 years ago, but reminders are still everywhere in Laos.
There is no British Embassy in Laos and the nearest is in the Thai capital, Bangkok.
Naw Kham was captured last April in Laos and extradited to Kunming to stand trial.
The ferry at the Mekong crossing of Ban Muang in Laos operates in a pretty laissez-faire sort of way.
And so life goes on in Laos - two steps forward, one leap back.
But for some members of the ruling elite in Laos, it was clearly a step too far.
Expats in Laos say that sometimes, if you stay too long, you can never go back home.
At least 39 people have been sentenced to death in Laos since 2003.
Far larger numbers of Burmese, and those fleeing poverty and oppression in Laos and Cambodia, live illegally all over Thailand.
Set in Laos with mostly non-professional actors, it won best narrative film while its 10-year-old star was selected as best actor.
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But the government in Laos says it knows nothing of his whereabouts.
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Kaysone Phomvihane is by no means the only well-kept secret in Laos.
In Laos alone, the area under irrigation increased eightfold in the 1990s.
Earlier O'Connor had paid to build latrines for a school nearby in Laos, but this time he set his sights on a bigger project.
Extending his footprint outside Thailand, Thaksin has forged links with Singapore Telecom and Telekom Malaysia, and cooperates on telecom projects in Laos and Cambodia.
In Laos, one in 11 children die before the age of five, the majority from preventable and treatable conditions such as malaria, pneumonia and measles.
The group were arrested in Laos and brought to China in May last year, after Beijing said the attack had happened on board Chinese-flagged ships.
Over 1m people in Cambodia depend solely on fishing to make a living, while in Laos 70% of rural households supplement their income by fishing.
But aid workers in Laos query how long such a policy can be sustained, given that alternative crops often provide miserly returns from uncertain markets, not least because of Laos's appalling infrastructure.
When the decision to hold such a gathering was first announced, at the annual summit of the Association of South-East Asian Nations in Laos last month, no one seemed to know the answer.
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Observers in the region, and in Washington, think that if the Xayaburi project were to go ahead, the next dams in Laos will be built by Chinese companies, taking China deeper into South-East Asia.
Although he is not a political figure, Mr Sombath was a prominent campaigner who promoted fair land rights for small farmers, which is a sensitive issue in Laos, the BBC's Nga Pham reports from Bangkok.
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For example, the peripatetic blogger couple Claire van den Heever and Iain Manley used their Kindle to collect free travelogues, one of which led them to the grave of 19th-century French explorer Henri Mouhot outside Luang Prabang in Laos.
In January, the company said that it planned to open its 7-Eleven stores in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, with an eye on China in the longer term.
New and mostly untested leaders are in power in Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
In 1997, Laos held strictly controlled National Assembly elections.
The company is involved in two more dams, in Uganda and Laos, which are expected to receive World Bank funding, and it has helped build enormous reservoirs such as the Three Gorges Dam in China.
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