On this day in ...... 1975, early in the morning at a football field in Phnom Penh, 30 U.S. Marine Corps helicopters airlifted 276 persons, among them 159 Cambodians and a number of foreign journalists, to ships in the Gulf of Thailand, as the United States "admitted defeat in Cambodia and removed its remaining embassy personnel." The BBC wrote, "The American withdrawal is an inglorious end to five years of involvement in Cambodia's civil war." Within a week of the withdrawal, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces had taken over Phnom Penh, an event that began a Reign of Terror for which, as we've often posted, there is still no accountability.
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... 1960, in its final judgment in Right of Passage over Indian Territory (Portugal v. India), issued in the Peace Palace at The Hague, Netherlands (below), the International Court of Justice concluded
that in 1954 Portugal enjoyed a right of "private persons, civil officials and goods in general" to pass over the territory of India in order to reach Portuguese enclaves in the region, but that, given "tension in the surrounding Indian district" in mid-1954, India's refusal to grant passage was justified.
