Word: lon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps the most bitterly disputed episode of a bitterly disputed war is the decline and fall of Cambodia. In March, with Prince Sihanouk traveling in France, anti-Vietnamese riots began to erupt across Cambodia. Prime Minister Lon Nol and Deputy Prime Minister Sirik Matak ousted Sihanouk, who there upon took refuge in Peking and turned against the U.S. Kissinger 's critics argue that the U.S. engineered Sihanouk's downfall and later, by attacking the North Vietnamese sanctuaries, caused the war to engulf all of Cambodia and to ensure victory for the Communist Khmer Rouge. Kissinger maintains with much...
Kissinger and other U.S. officials declared that Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk had "acquiesced" in the U.S. bombing raids and in fact "encouraged" U.S. intervention.* Shawcross calls that "questionable." Sihanouk himself, who was overthrown by General Lon Nol just two weeks before the U.S. invasion in 1970, told Shawcross that there was nothing he could have done about either the Vietnamese bases or the U.S bombing. But Sihanouk's doomed effort to keep Cambodia neutral, Shawcross believes, was the right policy in terms of Cambodia's own interests...
...refugees from the countryside sought first to escape the intensive U.S. bombing and later the increasing terrorism of the Khmer Rouge. Where rice had formerly been exported, starvation became commonplace. Inflation soared. Yet through all the suffering, Shawcross notes, Washington continued to support the "bankrupt" and "corrupt" regime of Lon Nol because he was willing, if far from able, to go on fighting the Communists...
...tale of Stanley Rifkin and the incredible bank heist actually began in early October. According to the San Diego Union, he approached Lon Stein, a reputable diamond dealer in Los Angeles, and claimed to be representing a legitimate company named Coast Diamond Distributors. Rifkin wanted to buy millions of dollars worth of diamonds. Stein placed the order with Russalmaz, a firm founded by the Soviet Union in 1976 to sell its diamonds. On Oct. 14, Russalmaz's office in Geneva received a message from a man identified only as a Mr. Nelson of Security Pacific National Bank, confirming that Stein...
...connected only Rifkin to the bank robbery. Agents believe that they have exonerated Jeweler Lon Stein, who claims that he had nothing to do with the diamond deal in Geneva. As for the mysterious Mr. Nelson, agents are trying to learn his real identity by tracing his messages through Western Union...