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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:windowtext"><font size="4"><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/25/50_years_after_us_launched_secret">DemocracyNow</a></font></span></b></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:windowtext">June 25, 2014 </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:windowtext"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;display:inline">(<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;display:inline"></div>Interview with Karen Coates and Jerry Redfern, co-authors of <i>Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos.</i>)</div>
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<b></b></div><font size="4"><b>50 Years After U.S. Launched Secret
War on Laos, Unexploded Bombs Still Killing Civilians</b></font><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:windowtext">Fifty years ago this month, the United
States began raining down bombs on Laos, in what would become the largest
bombing campaign in history. From June 1964 to March 1973, the United States
dropped at least two million tons of bombs on the small, landlocked Southeast
Asian country. That is the equivalent of one planeload every eight minutes, 24
hours a day, for nine years — more than was dropped on Germany and Japan during
World War II. The deadly legacy of the Vietnam War lives on today in the form
of unexploded cluster bombs, which had about a 30 percent failure rate when
they fell from American planes over large swaths of Laos. Experts estimate that
Laos is littered with as many as 80 million "bombies," or bomblets —
baseball-sized bombs found inside cluster bombs. Since the bombing stopped four
decades ago, tens of thousands of people have been injured or killed as a
result. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:windowtext"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:windowtext"></span></p>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;display:inline"><b><font><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/25/50_years_after_us_launched_secret">[more]</a></font></b></div><br><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">
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