Continued from the previous post ...

Here's a story that annoys and infuriates at the same time.

A 60-year-old New Zealander, jailed for raping five Cambodian girls hired to work in his Siem Reap home, didn't get to "... face my accusers and I want my accusers to be cross-examined" because the Women's Crisis Center representing the girls wasn't notified of the court date. Thankfully, the judge did not proceed without them, but postponed the appeal, saying that, " ... both parties had the right to be heard."

Well, yeah ...

This guy had lived near Angkor Wat for 10 years, and was arrested with his Cambodian wife in a crackdown on sex crimes against children. His wife was convicted of conspiracy for procuring the girls for her husband.

Something tells me she didn't have much say in the matter.

And remember Heng Pov, the former PP police chief who was hiding out in Singapore, then Malaysia? I'd almost forgotten about this guy, but the Cambodians have kept up their efforts to bring him back and punish him for the murders, kidnappings and other not-mister-nice-guy stuff he's been convicted of.

Well, they'll have a hard time now, as Finland looks like they'll be giving him a new home.

Okay ...

And if you need anymore explanation of why Cambodia is such a mess, read this article about new information that reveals that the country was bombed, " ... far more heavily during the Vietnam War than previously believed ... "

In the fall of 2000, twenty-five years after the end of the war in Indochina, Bill Clinton became the first US president since Richard Nixon to visit Vietnam. While media coverage of the trip was dominated by talk of some two thousand US soldiers still classified as missing in action, a small act of great historical importance went almost unnoticed. As a humanitarian gesture, Clinton released extensive Air Force data on all American bombings of Indochina between 1964 and 1975. Recorded using a groundbreaking ibm-designed system, the database provided extensive information on sorties conducted over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Clinton’s gift was intended to assist in the search for unexploded ordnance left behind during the carpet bombing of the region. Littering the countryside, often submerged under farmland, this ordnance remains a significant humanitarian concern. It has maimed and killed farmers, and rendered valuable land all but unusable. Development and demining organizations have put the Air Force data to good use over the past six years, but have done so without noting its full implications, which turn out to be staggering.

Here's just a tiny bit of the "staggering" implications:

the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed — not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson.

There is so much more of this in the article, and it truly is staggering.

Continued ...