Word: laotians
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...communist leadership in the capital of Vientiane. Only a handful of senior officials in Washington were privy to her information. According to CIA documents, on Nov. 14, 1980, W/1 gave her CIA handlers a startling report: about 30 U.S. pilots were working on a road gang near the central Laotian town of Nhommarath. Those same summaries reported that a spy-satellite photo confirmed that a prison camp had recently been built near the town...
After the war ended in 1975, reports kept trickling into the CIA's Bangkok station that Americans had been seen among the prisoners working on Laotian road and irrigation projects. In 1979 a Laotian informant for the DIA named Phimmachack claimed that 18 Americans had been moved to a cave north of Nhommarath. He identified one of them as Lieut. Colonel Paul W. Mercland, but no Mercland was listed as missing. There was, however, a Lieut. Colonel Paul W. Bannon who had been shot down over Laos in 1969. Pentagon intelligence analysts suspected Mercland was a garbled version...
...animals remain elusive, known mostly through their bones and skins. But a team of British and Laotian fieldworkers under contract to New York's Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) say they have taken blood samples from a live specimen of one of the creatures -- the giant muntjac -- in a menagerie owned by a Laotian military group. If they are correct, studies of the captive animal could confirm the claim made earlier this year by Vietnamese scientists and MacKinnon concerning the giant muntjac. MacKinnon analyzed a skull brought to him by Do Tuoc and Shanthini Dawson, an Indian biologist. It resembled that...
Nonetheless, the Vu Quang ox, giant muntjac and slow-running deer might have come to the attention of the world much sooner had Vietnam and Laos not been isolated by wars and trade embargoes. For many years, local hunters and even Laotian forest officials have used antlers taken from the animals as hat racks or as parts of ceremonial altars, unaware that these trophies represented species new to science. Indeed, MacKinnon found among the unsorted bones in the collection of Hanoi's Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources some skulls of the slow-running deer that had been gathering dust...
...situation on the Laotian side is somewhat better. Laos is sparsely populated, but animals large and small are relentlessly hunted by both Hmong tribesmen and Vietnamese poachers who freely cross the border. Wildlife Conservation Society biologist George Schaller has noted that all villagers over the age of 13 seem to have guns, ranging from muzzle loaders to automatic weapons left behind during the war. Alan Rabinowitz, the organizer of the WCS team, says that the area still has remarkable diversity but that all species have been radically reduced by hunting. Laotian trees are also under threat, as deforested neighboring countries...