Activist and writer, Fred Branfman, died last week from motor neuron disease (commonly referred as ALS). Fred passed away at his home in Budapest, Hungary; with his wife, international journalist, Zsuzsa Béres and his brothers Dave, Alan, and Yaakov Branfman by his side. To those who knew him, he was simply known as Fred. To the rest of the world, he was known as the man who exposed the truth of the devastating impact on the people of Laos, from the US government’s secret bombing campaign during the Vietnam War. “…Of all of my life experiences, the most profound by far, was discovering the 5-year-long bombing of some of the poorest and kindest people on earth by the richest, most technologically sophisticated and violent. To find that this discovery, which shook me to the very core of my being, would affect every minute of my life thereafter – as, firstly, it led me to spend much of my life fighting injustice and, second and in some ways more profoundly, to embark on a lifelong quest to understand the real meaning of …