Gitmo hunger strikes decreasing, US military says News
Gitmo hunger strikes decreasing, US military says

[JURIST] The US military said Thursday that the number of detainees participating in hunger strikes at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] had reached its lowest point since October 2005, but offered no reasons for the dropoff. The number of hunger strikes has dropped from as many as 131 to only 22 prisoners with 17 of those receiving nourishment via feeding tubes, although lawyers for the detainees, who won a court order [JURIST report] in October mandating that they be notified by the Defense Department before their clients could be force-fed, insist that the US is undercounting the strikers. The US military has denied allegations that it forced feeding tubes into prisoners' nostrils without using anesthesia or lubricant, and claimed that most of the strikers voluntarily submit to the insertion of feeding tubes. Detainees are participating in the hunger strikes, which began [JURIST report] in August 2005 and spiked in December [JURIST report], to protest their indefinite captivity in the US military prison camp. Reuters has more.

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.