Across Assam in India, sometimes in plain sight and sometimes hidden in the wilderness, archaeologists have found more sites to add to a long-standing mystery. Similar sites have also been found in Laos and Indonesia.

Rescuers searched in difficult conditions on Wednesday for dozens of people feared dead and hundreds missing after a dam collapsed in a remote part of land-locked Laos, one of Asia's poorest countries, a government official said. State media showed pictures of villagers, some with young children, stranded on the roofs of submerged houses. Others showed villagers trying to board wooden boats to safety in Attapeu province, the southernmost part of the country.

Harrowing footage has emerged of a dam that failed in the Xaysomboun Province of Laos, sending construction workers running for their lives. According to government news agency KPL, the Nam Ao Hydropower Project was currently under construction when it broke on Sept. 11, flooding lower lying farmlands.

The US dropped 270 million bombs on Laos during the Vietnam war. More than 40 years later, the devices are still killing people. By Rosita Boland.

Half a century ago, an American commando vanished in the jungles of Laos. In 2008, he reappeared in Vietnam, reportedly alive and well. But nothing was what it seemed.

The definitive account of the secret war in the tiny Southeast Asian nation of Laos, which lasted almost two decades and forever changed the CIA’s controversial role in foreign policy. 

For two years after the accident, Yei Yang refused to leave his home. "I couldn't farm, I couldn't go to see friends, as they might be afraid of me," Yang tells CNN. "I didn't want to live." Yang was just 22 and burning rubbish near his village in the province of Xieng Khoung in north-eastern Laos, when a bomb blast tore off one of his eyelids, his top lip and an ear, mutilated one of his arms, and left him with severe scarring from the waist up.

Acknowledging the dark aftershocks of the Vietnam War, President Barack Obama paid tribute Wednesday to survivors maimed by some 80 million unexploded bombs America dropped on Laos decades ago and pledged U.S. help to finally clean them up. Touring a rehabilitation center in Vientiane, Obama said the U.S. had a "profound moral and humanitarian obligation" to work to prevent more bloodshed from the remnants of the U.S. bombardment.