The US is chipping in with military training and exercises to "... to improve the country's capabilities to fight global terrorism," this from the commander of the US Pacific Command, Admiral Timothy J. Keating.

Okay.

Maybe they'll be able to put a stop to tortoise trafficking.

Although no one has yet figured out a motive, two men were caught transporting 51 ten-to thirty-pound Thai tortoises across Cambodia, apparently headed for Phnom Penh.

The pet trade? Perhaps. But I'm wondering if anyone checked their shells for drugs. Too late now, as all have been released into the wild.

A Cambodian tenor was featured on NPR's "All Things Considered".

Sethisak Khoun studied in Moscow, Berkeley and Italy and is now back to singing in Cambodia.

While on the arts, this story out of Long Beach ... an American city with a significant Cambodian population ... features a screening of Peter Chhun's film about people in Cambodia suffering from AIDS, "Life Under Red Light".

Chhun didn't make the film so much to shed light on his homeland's well-documented struggles with the disease, but to provide a cautionary tale for the Cambodian-American community.

Long Beach, which has the largest Cambodian population in the United States, also has the second highest overall rate of HIV infection in the state. There is fear the disease is taking hold in the Asian community.

"I thought this would be a good way to communicate with the people in Long Beach," Chhun said. "Because the (Cambodian) community here is so reserved, I thought maybe it's not a bad idea to have their brothers and sisters tell their stories."

And speaking of Cambodians living outside the country, it appears that former King Norodom Sihanouk, father of the present king, is demanding that brides from the country that married Taiwanese men and have since been abandoned in Taiwan be returned home.

“Taiwanese ’gentlemen’ have brought Cambodian women to be their ’spouses’,” former King Norodom Sihanouk said in his country’s newspapers. “Today, these Khmer women have been thrown into the streets by these very arrogant and contemptuous false husbands.”

According to government records, about 4,500 Cambodians are living in Taiwan on spouse visas, and it is believed that some of the marriages were in fact nothing more than ploys to acquire women for prostitution.

One more thing before we finish with Cambodia this week ...

With the situation in Guatemalan adoptions prominently in the news these days, many parents of Cambodian-born kids are comparing what is happening there now to what happened in Cambodia seven years or so back and wondering why ... oh, why? ... the suspension on Cambodian adoptions is still in place.

It's not at all a matter of, "Everyone is corrupt, so why can't we be?, but more a justifiable acknowledgment of the fact that other countries are allowed time and space, and Cambodia is not.

Vietnam is brought up often, as that country closed, then reopened, all during the almost six years Cambodia has remained closed by US directive.

Are there political considerations having nothing to do with adoption that keeps the Cambodian program closed? Do the implications that US Embassy staff was complicit in the underhanded dealings responsible for the closure and the fact that no one has been held responsible hold sway over the situation?

These are some of the questions Americans continue to ask, especially when programs in other countries come under fire.

For information/instructions on how to subscribe FREE to your favorite AdoptionBlogs, please visit this link.