World roundup: April 30 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, India, Sudan, and elsewhere

My apologies, but what I hoped would be a one-day interruption in our voiceovers has become a two-day interruption as I am still under the weather. Again, for those who need it Substack does have a text-to-voice option in the app. Hopefully this will be our last interruption. Thanks for your patience.

TODAY IN HISTORY

April 30, 1803: US representatives Robert Livingston and James Monroe and French representative François Barbé-Marbois sign the Louisiana Purchase Treaty in Paris. The treaty ceded France’s vast Louisiana Territory in North America to the United States, roughly doubling the young nation’s size, in return for $15 million. Livingston and Monroe intended to negotiate the purchase of the port city of New Orleans and were prepared to pay up to $10 million just for the one city. But Napoleon decided to sell the entire territory because he needed the money and because the Haitian Revolution had thrown his colonial plans for the Americas into disarray. Most of the Louisiana Territory wasn’t really Napoleon’s to sell, as it still belonged to Indigenous tribes, but in purchasing it the US bought the “right” to acquire that land by whatever means it chose.

April 30, 1975: The North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong capture Saigon, bringing the Vietnam War to a close. The North Vietnamese had begun their assault on the city the day before, when the remaining US personnel in Saigon began an evacuation known as “Operation Frequent Wind” that cleared out the US embassy and moved some 7000 US and Vietnamese nationals out of the country in the largest helicopter evacuation in history. The North Vietnamese government, which wasn’t really the “North” Vietnamese government anymore, renamed Saigon Hồ Chí Minh City, and this date is commemorated annually in Vietnam as Reunification Day.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

A second round of sectarian violence between Syrian security forces and Druze militia near Damascus overnight prompted yet another round of airstrikes from the self-appointed and not necessarily wanted “protector” of Syria’s Druze community, Israel. Following the previous night’s violence in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana, which killed at least 17 people at last count, Syrian and Druze forces clashed again in the town of Sahnaya in an incident that left at least 16 security personnel and six Druze fighters dead. The Israeli military (IDF) then stepped in, carrying out airstrikes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterized as a “warning action” against “an extremist group preparing to attack [Sahnaya’s] Druze population.” I haven’t seen any indication as to casualties but the IDF is reportedly preparing for further action should the anti-Druze violence continue.