Serb court convicts 14 Serbs for Vukovar war crimes News
Serb court convicts 14 Serbs for Vukovar war crimes

[JURIST] A special high-security war crimes court sitting in Belgrade Monday convicted 14 former members of Serb militias for killing some 200 Croatian POWs and wounded at a pig farm near Vukovar [BBC backgrounder] in 1991 at the end of a three-month siege there. Sentences ranging from five to 20 years were handed down. Two accused were acquitted. Convictions were expected after one of the defendants confessed to the killings [JURIST report] in court last month. The Vukovar case, which opened in March 2004 [JURIST report] has been widely seen as a test of Serbia's domestic war crimes process. Three leaders of the massacre are currently being tried [JURIST report] in The Hague by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. BBC News 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.