This day in history

Vietnamese troops seize the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, forcing Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge forces to retreat into the jungle. In the early 1970s, North Vietnam supported the Khmer Rouge in its guerrilla war against the U.S.-backed Cambodian government, but as the Vietnam War came to an end, relations deteriorated between Pol Pot and communist Vietnam. In April 1975, Pol Pot captured Phnom Penh, and two weeks later Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese.
 
Efforts by Vietnam to expand its influence in Indochina were opposed by Pol Pot's regime, and border skirmishes between Vietnam and Cambodia escalated into full-scale combat by 1978. Meanwhile, Pol Pot's brutal agrarian revolution resulted in the deaths of as many as 2 million Cambodians. After three years of terror, Vietnamese forces invaded in December 1978, and in January installed a puppet regime led by Cambodian communists who had fled Pol Pot’s regime. 
 
Pol Pot continued to rule over the banished Khmer Rouge for two more decades. He died of natural causes in 1998.
 

Disgraced former Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken is released from jail after serving less than half of his 18 month sentence. Aitken was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice after his collapsed libel case against the Guardian Newspaper and Granada Television.
 

President Harry Truman announces that the United States of America has developed a Hydrogen Bomb.
 

Benito Mussolini and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval sign the Italian-French agreements.
 

Travelling in an air balloon, Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries become the first ever people to cross the English Channel by air. 
 

Boris Godenov becomes Russian Tsar.