A reminder about Vietnam...

My boyfriend and I spent a month visiting Vietnam in 2003, and we traveled with a doctor who was extremely critical of the regime. He had to make payoffs to the local communist party bosses...and he had lots of horror stories about life in Vietnam.

Here's a news snippet from Vietnam.

A business manager in Hanoi, Pham Hong Son, has spent 42 months in a Vietnamese prison. His crime: downloading an essay titled "What is Democracy?" from a U.S. State Department Web site, translating it and sending it to friends and senior Communist Party officials.

Mr. Son, 36, who worked for a pharmaceutical company, was convicted of espionage in Vietnam after a closed, one-day trial in June 2003. He was sentenced to 13 years, later reduced to five.