UK rights envoy says some Iraqi detainees in a ‘black hole’ News
UK rights envoy says some Iraqi detainees in a ‘black hole’

[JURIST] UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's personal envoy on human rights has told the Observer newspaper in an interview published Sunday that some Iraqis who have been detained by Coalition forces since the start of the war in Iraq have disappeared into what she described as a "black hole" and that there is no record of where they are being held. British Labour Party MP Ann Clwyd [official profile, Guardian Unlimited profile], actually known as strong supporter of the war in Iraq, said she believes that if more attention had been paid to these detainees, abuses [JURIST news archive] that have occurred inside Iraq's Coalition-run prisons such as Abu Ghraib would have been avoided.

Clwyd told the paper that Blair has pressed the US to resolve the identification and tracking problems. The Observer has more.

THIS DAY @ LAW

UN General Assembly approves Palestine partition plan

The UN General Assembly approved UN Resolution Resolution 181 (II) on November 29, 1947, recommending that the British Mandate for Palestine be split into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone for Jerusalem. The vote in the assembly was 33 for to 13 against, with 10 abstentions. The resolution sparked a war between Palestinian Arabs and Jews in 1947 and a wider war after Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon invaded the new State of Israel in 1948. Read Resolution 181 (II).

UN divided Palestine between Arabs and Jews

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab territories, leading to the establishment of a Jewish state the following year. Read UN General Assembly Resolution 181.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara resigns during Vietnam Conflict

On November 29, 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara announced that he was resigning from his office to accept an appointment as head of the World Bank. The announcement came as the Vietnam Conflict was becoming increasingly unpopular in the United States and abroad.