Laos, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south, and Thailand to the west. Its population was estimated to be around 6.5 million in 2012. A third (33%) of the country's population lives below the international poverty line which means living on less than U.S. $1.25 per day.

Hannah Prock, of Austria, prepares to start the luge women's singles run 1 at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Monday, February 7, 2022, in the Yanqing district of Beijing. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

Botswana's Ross Branch competes during the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge stage two on March 7, 2022. (Photo by Edoardo Bauer/AFP Photo)

“Hellfest is an annual music festival which takes place in Clisson, France in mid-June. It is held within the Val de Moine sport complex in Clisson, approximately 35 km south-east of the city of Nantes, and approximately 400 km south-west of the nation's capital Paris. Billed as an “extreme music festival”, the programme features a variety of heavy metal, hard rock, punk and hardcore acts”. – Wikipedia. Photo: HellFest 2013. (Photo by Cesar Hernandez)

Tom Wilder, 17 from Kent, dives in the mud at the Glastonbury Festival site at Worthy Farm, Pilton on June 23, 2011 in Glastonbury, England. Music fans had to brave more rain today at the five-day festival which opened yesterday. This year the festival will feature headline acts U2, Coldplay and Beyonce. The festival, which started in 1970 when several hundred hippies paid 1 GBP to watch Marc Bolan, has grown into Europe's largest music festival attracting more than 175,000 people over five days. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

宇多田ヒカル (Utada Hikaru) –One Last Kiss. Utada Hikaru is a Japanese-American singer-songwriter and producer. By the end of the 2000s, Utada was deemed “the most influential artist of the decade” in the Japanese music landscape by The Japan Times. Utada's commercial success has made her one of Japan's top-selling recording artists of all time.

File photo dated 21/04/66 of Pattie Boyd in London's West End wearing a mini skirt, as the British designer Mary Quant, widely credited with popularising the mini skirt has recalled its “feeling of freedom and liberation” 50 years after she took the fashion world by storm. Quant, who named the skirt after her favourite make of car, said she “couldn't have imagined” in 1964 that it would become a staple of women's clothing, but added: “It seemed then to be obvious, and so right”. (Photo by PA Wire)

A man takes a photo as a puff of smoke comes from Mount Agung volcano, taken from the Rendang sub-district in Karangasem Regency on Indonesia's resort island of Bali on November 23, 2017. Thousands living in the shadow of the rumbling volcano on Indonesia's resort island of Bali fled on November 22 as fears grow that it could erupt for the first time in more than 50 years. (Photo by Sonny Tumbelaka/AFP Photo)