UK Foreign Secretary denies withholding rendition information News
UK Foreign Secretary denies withholding rendition information

[JURIST] British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw [official website] denied Friday that he withheld any information from Parliament concerning Britain's involvement in secret CIA rendition flights [JURIST news archive] and also said that there had not been any flights through Britain since the September 11 attacks. Straw's statement to legislators came in response to a leaked memo [PDF text; JURIST report] Thursday suggesting that there had been more requests for rendition flights from the US than the four 1998 requests that British legislators were already aware of. The memo, dated in December 2005 and reported in Thursday's edition of the New Statesman magazine, was originally passed from Straw's Foreign and Commonwealth Office [official website] to the Prime Minister's office [official website] and examined the legality of rendition and extraordinary rendition flights, as well as strategies to address allegations from human rights groups that the CIA operated secret rendition flights across Europe. AP has more. BBC News has local coverage.

THIS DAY @ LAW

Thomas Becket, former Chancellor of England, murdered by Henry II's knights

On December 29, 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket, former Chancellor of England, was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by knights acting in the name of Henry II.

Becket and Henry had been entangled in a power struggle over, among other things, criminal jurisdiction over clergy. Read a contemporary account of the murder of Thomas Becket.

Texas attains US statehood

On December 29, 1845, Texas became the twenty-eighth state to join the United States of America when US President James K. Polk signed the Ordinance of Annexation. Texas had a complicated path to statehood because it had formerly been part of Mexico and then an independent republic. The US Congress passed the Annexation of the Republic of Texas Joint Resolution on March 1, 1845. Voters in Texas then approved the Ordinance of Annexation in October, before it was approved by the US Congress and signed into law by President Polk on this day in 1845. The US Supreme Court later ruled in Texas v. White that, despite its unique path to statehood, Texas did not have the right to secede from the union.