EU court upholds Italian leniency on false accounting News
EU court upholds Italian leniency on false accounting

[JURIST] Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi [BBC profile] emerged victorious Tuesday after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) [official website] ruled [ECJ press release, PDF] that EU law could not overrule an Italian law partially decriminalizing false accounting crimes. The court further held that penalties under Italian law could not be increased under EU directivea. False accounting penalties were relaxed by legislation in 2001 which forced an end to a corporate corruption trial involving the newly-elected Italian leader. The court's statement made clear over objections of prosecutors that an individual government has the right to decide on criminal penalties so long as they lived up to the EU's requirement of being "effective, proportionate and dissuasive…." Berlusconi has been tried in several corruption cases but has always denied wrongdoing, blaming charges on politically motivated magistrates. Reuters 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.