Word: laos
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...fifth and latest Dr. Siri mystery, Curse of the Pogo Stick, is set in 1976, shortly after the communist takeover of Laos, and revolution is still very much in the air. The doctor, a former Pathet Lao guerilla who happens to have studied medicine in Paris, has been pressed, with much grumbling, into service as a coroner. Politics rudely intrudes when a body arrives in his morgue booby-trapped with a live grenade. Dr. Siri soon finds himself untangling a mystery involving Hmong insurgents, a possible demonic possession, and a plot by a female terrorist known as the Lizard...
...Many experimental musicians started with rock, before slowly abandoning it for the freedom and creative space that is experimental music," says Lao Yang, the owner of Sugar Jar, a tiny record shop in Beijing that serves as the epicenter of this burgeoning avant-garde. Michael Ohlsson, a Shanghai-based music promoter, speculates that musicians are being drawn to the experimental scene because the music being produced is a purist's form and often has no lyrics. As such, it is far less likely to offend officialdom than, say, punk, which tends to be much more verbose, socially engaged and populist...
...better part of five decades, former Laotian President Nouhak Phoumsavanh held the second highest position in what is now Laos' ruling communist organization, the Lao People's Revolutionary Party. He first became involved with the group in 1945, when Laos was still under French rule, and later represented a Laotian communist organization at the 1954 conference in Geneva that ultimately resulted in independence for his homeland. Toward the end of his long tenure in government, he succeeded President Kaysone Phomvihan when he died in 1992. Nouhak, who was President through 1998, died...
...More than 250 miles (400 km) downriver, China Inc. is also reshaping Laos' riverside capital, Vientiane. The landlocked nation has been shunned by many international investors as one of the world's last remaining hard-line socialist regimes. But what others consider a pariah state, China sees as an ideological soul mate and business partner. The biggest thoroughfare in Vientiane, as well as the capital's main park and the National Cultural Hall, were all built with money given to the city by the Beijing government. More than 3,000 Chinese laborers are also busy constructing a national stadium...
...Among those charged with conspiracy to kill, kidnap and maim, among other accusations, was General Vang Pao, a member of the Hmong minority whose guerrilla forces had been funded by the CIA during the Vietnam War to fight the Viet Cong-aligned communists of the Pathet Lao. Along with an estimated 200,000 Laotian Hmong, Vang Pao fled to the U.S. after America withdrew from Indochina in 1975 and communist forces took over Laos and Vietnam. Now, the 77-year-old ex-CIA operative, along with nine other Laotian-born Americans and a former U.S. Army ranger who served...