Fifty years after American s B-52 bombers dropped over 500,000 tonnes of explosives on Cambodia’s countryside, Washington wants the country to repay a $US500 million war debt. The demand has prompted fury from the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. Last year the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen called on the then-president elect Donald Trump to cancel the debt which had grown over the decades with interest. In 2010, he had also asked former president Barack Obama to convert the “dirty” debt to aid. The Sydney Morning Herald reports: Over 200 nights in 1973 alone, 257,456 tons of explosives fell in secret carpet-bombing sweeps – half as many as were dropped on Japan during the Second World War. The pilots flew at such great heights they were incapable of discriminating between a Cambodian village and their targets, North Vietnamese supply lines – nicknamed the “Ho Chi Minh Trail.” The bombs were of such massive tonnage they blew out eardrums of anyone standing within a 1-kilometre radius. War correspondent James Pringle was two kilometres away from a B-52 strike near Cambodia’s border. “It felt like the world was coming to an end,” he recalls. According to one genocide researcher, up to 500,000 Cambodians were killed, [...]