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The ancient Cambodian capital of Angkor Wat, had a staggering 900,000 inhabitants before it was abandoned in 1431, according to a new study. An international team, led by the University of British Columbia, examined three decades of data to create a demographic model of the Medieval city. Their model revealed that the capital of the long-gone Khmer Empire housed between 700,000 and 900,000 people during its zenith in the 13th century.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The Khmer Rouge’s chief jailer, who admitted overseeing the torture and killings of as many as 16,000 Cambodians while running the regime’s most notorious prison, has died. Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, was 77 and had been serving a life prison term for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The communist Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975-79 was accused of genocide for causing the deaths of so many of their countrymen from executions, starvation and lack of medical care due to its radical policies. Only after neighboring Vietnam pushed the Khmer Rouge from...

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Nuon Chea, the chief ideologist and 'Brother Number Two' of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, whose brutal rule in the 1970s led to the deaths of some 2 million people, died on Sunday at the age of 93, a court spokesman said. A U.N.-backed court found Chea guilty of genocide and sentenced him to life in prison last year, almost four decades after the Maoist regime which oversaw Cambodia's "Killing Fields" was overthrown. Chea was among a small clique -- led by 'Brother Number One', Pol Pot -- of mostly French-educated communists who rose to lead a bloody...

In 2nd century AD Egypt, the legendary Greco-Roman scientist Claudius Ptolemy put the extent of the known world onto paper. From his home in Alexandria, he gathered reports from sailors who had made perilous journeys to India and possibly beyond. Though details were sparse, a voyager named Alexander described a distant port called Kattigara on the Sinus Magna (Great Gulf) to the east of the Golden Chersonese peninsula - widely considered to be mainland Malaysia. Halfway across the world around the same time, the bustling seaport Oc Eo was part of the flourishing Funan Kingdom, the earliest known pre-Angkorian civilisation...

In what was described as the first occasion of its kind in the country, a memorial to the Southeast Asian forces who fought as allies of the U.S. during the Vietnam War era was dedicated at Fort Snelling on Saturday. The plaque, in the cemetery's Airborne Circle, memorializes the Hmong, Laotian and Khmer special forces units that served in Cambodia and Laos. "I believe that this is probably the first time that they have been recognized specifically in a place like this," Trudell Guerue, president of the Chapter XV 173rd Airborne Brigade Association, said during the dedication ceremony. For Khoa...

Of all idiots, none is so useful as he who can masquerade as a genius. MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky recently denounced Hugo Chavez, accusing the Venezuelan strongman of making an "assault" on his nation's democracy and of cruelty with respect to a female judge he imprisoned for issuing an unwelcome ruling. The criticism made headlines, as the "renowned scholar" had long given aid and comfort to Ego-and-Mouth Chavez. In fact, when the leader denounced President Bush in an infamous 2006 U.N. address, it was Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance that he waved and used...

Fourteen Khmu Christian families in Laos are standing strong in their faith, despite the Communist government forcing them to relocate to another village and their homes and church building being destroyed, according to The Voice of the Martyrs contacts. In 2003, the families were evicted by the government and relocated to another village where they were moved again. "After these 14 families stayed at this village for a year, the Communist party members of the village found out that the head of the village loved them," VOM contacts said. "[The village leader] even allowed them to build a bamboo church...

The purpose of this statement is to provide all Member States of the United Nation with an objective description of the various aspects of the problem arising from the Khmer territories of Cochin-China (South Vietnam). In the past those territories were part of the Kingdom of Cambodia, and they are still inhabited by over half a million Khmers who remain deeply attached to their culture, religion, customs, traditions and ancestral land. When the odds became unequal in 1854, the reigning Khmer ruler, King Ang Duong, found it necessary to appeal to a Power of the Western world, namely France, for...

Japan team finds ancient Cambodian water siteTuesday, Jan. 22, 2008 SNAY VILLAGE, Cambodia (Kyodo) Japanese archaeologists said Monday they have found a man-made water channel in northwest Cambodia used for rituals as far back as the first century. The archaeologists said they discovered sacred mounds or altars at the ruins in Snay village in Banteay Meanchey Province under a two-year project that began last January. "Before, it was said that Khmer civilization started from the seventh to ninth century AD, but based on our research here, Khmer civilization went back to the first century AD," said Yoshinori Yasuda, a professor...

Sprawling Angkor Brought Down By Overpopulation, Study Suggests Susan Brown for National Geographic News August 13, 2007 Cambodia's long-lost temple complex of Angkor is the world's largest known preindustrial settlement, reveals a new radar study that found 74 new temples and more than a thousand manmade ponds at the site. But urban sprawl and its associated environmental devastation may have led to the collapse of the kingdom, which includes the renowned temple of Angkor Wat, the study suggests. Ever since the late 16th century, when Portuguese traders spied the towers of the monument poking through a dense canopy of trees,...

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Former Khmer Rouge military chief Ta Mok, one of Pol Pot's most ruthless henchmen and a key defendant in upcoming "Killing Fields" trials, died on Friday in an army hospital in the Cambodian capital. The one-legged 82-year-old, dubbed "The Butcher" for overseeing mass purges during the ultra-Maoist regime's four years in power, had been in hospital with breathing problemssince last month. He lapsed into a coma a week ago, his lawyer said. "Ta Mok passed away this morning. He was an old man and died of natural causes, given his poor health and respiratory problems," military...

Nai Oeurn had reason to celebrate. Cambodia's civil war was over, and as the 14-year-old Khmer Rouge guerrilla marched into the capital, Phnom Penh, he truly believed his country's rural poor had triumphed. Thirty years later, after the "killing fields" and the death of one-sixth of the Cambodian population, his dream has come to this: collecting cow dung for a living, earning 3,500 riel (90 U.S. cents; 70 euro cents) for a 3-foot-high (90-centimeter-high) pile that takes five days to collect.

Long-lost Khmer Rouge soldiers emerge from jungle   By Ek Madra LOUT, Cambodia (Reuters) - When Vietnamese troops overran his village in 1979, Romam Chhung Loeung, aKhmer Rouge guerrilla, had no option but to flee with friends and family into the dense jungle ofnortheast Cambodia. Twenty-five years later, the group emerged from the forest in clothes made of bark and leaves,unaware that the war was over, the Vietnamese had gone and Pol Pot was dead. In an extraordinary tale of human survival, the refugees lived on whatever scraps they could find inthe jungle, fearful of any contact with humans, who...

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<p>Twenty-five years ago this week, Vietnamese forces rolled into Cambodia, overthrowing the genocidal Khmer Rouge government and ending a four-year reign depicted fairly in the compelling 1984 film, "The Killing Fields."</p> <p>The Khmer Rouge slaughtered nearly 2 million people - as much as one-fourth of Cambodia's entire population - between 1975 and 1979. Yet not a single leader of the murderous Marxist regime that called itself Democratic Kampuchea has ever been brought to justice.</p>

To the Editor: Spectator, now for the second time in less than a year, has succeeded to quote me in a remarkably decontextualized and inflammatory manner. In Margaret Hunt Gram's report on the faculty teach-in against the war in Iraq (March 27, 2003), I am quoted as wishing for a million Mogadishus but with no indication whatsoever of the perspective that framed that remark. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that your Staff Editorial in the same issue, denouncing the teach-in for "dogmatism," situates me in particular as the premier example of an academic "launching tirades against anything and everything American."...