President Barack Obama plans to visit Laos next year to attend a regional economic summit, making him the first U.S. president to visit that country, an advisor said Wednesday.

Obama will make history when he attends an ASEAN conference in the poor but economically growing country, which was massively bombed by the United States during the Vietnam War, National Security aide Ben Rhodes said.

A body has been found in the search for a missing British national in Laos, an official said Wednesday, after reports of a tourist boat sinking during a cruise on the Mekong River.

The BBC has reported that 37-year-old Johanna Powell, a picture editor for the broadcaster's hub in Wales, was reported missing Saturday after the boat capsized during a holiday in which she was celebrating a friend's 40th birthday.

A man suspected of selling heroin disguised as cocaine that killed three British tourists in Amsterdam has turned himself in, police said on Tuesday.

The 42-year-old walked into a police station early on Saturday morning, a statement said, while Dutch media reported that he surrendered after CCTV images were released of him selling the drug to Danish tourists.

A Lao military plane crashed on Saturday killing five senior officials on board including the defense minister of the secretive communist country, Thai authorities said.

The group was believed to be traveling to an official ceremony in the northeastern province of Xiangkhouang on an air force jet manufactured by Ukraine's Antonov.

Search teams have pulled six more bodies of air crash victims from the Mekong River in Laos, the national carrier said Sunday, taking the number of corpses recovered to 38.

In the nation's worst known air disaster, all passengers and crew on the Lao Airlines turboprop ATR-72 died after the plane plunged into the river in bad weather on Wednesday near Pakse airport in Champasak province.

Laos said Friday at least 17 bodies had been recovered after a plane plummeted into the Mekong River killing all on board in the country's worst known air disaster.

Forty-nine passengers and crew, more than half of them foreigners from nearly a dozen countries, were on board the Lao Airlines turboprop ATR-72 when it went down in stormy weather on Wednesday.

A Lao Airlines plane carrying 44 people, including French and Thai citizens, from the capital Vientiane to the southern town of Pakse crashed killing all on board on Wednesday, officials said.

At least seven French citizens and five Thais were among those killed when the plane carrying 39 passengers and five crew went down around eight kilometers (five miles) from the airport in Champasak province in southern Laos, officials said.

Thousands of monkeys are being held in overcrowded and barren farms in Laos and sold for international laboratory research, according to a report from a British animal protection group.

Laos has exported nearly 35,000 long-tailed macaques since 2004 as part of a fast-growing trade in the species for research, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) said in a statement released Monday.

In a hilltribe settlement in the forest of northern Laos, an old man sits on the ground weaving a basket while another villager hangs out her washing to dry.

It is a scene of everyday life for the Akha communities living in the Nam Ha Protected Area, where elephants, gibbons and leopards roam among giant bamboo near villages perched on the banks of a tributary of the Mekong river.