Padilla trial judge refuses to suppress FBI wiretap evidence News
Padilla trial judge refuses to suppress FBI wiretap evidence

[JURIST] US District Judge Marcia Cooke [official profile] declined to exclude FBI wiretap evidence from the trial of accused terrorist supporter Jose Padilla [JURIST news archive] Friday, rejecting arguments by defense attorneys that phone conversations that mentioned Osama bin Laden were irrelevant and threatened to prejudice the jury. Padilla and co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi are charged [indictment, PDF; JURIST report] with being a part of an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist support network and conspiring to murder US nationals.

Padilla, a US citizen, was arrested in 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and subsequently detained as an "enemy combatant" [JURIST news archive] at a Navy military brig in Charleston, South Carolina. Initially accused of planning to set off a "dirty bomb" in the United States, Padilla went from enemy combatant to criminal defendant when he was finally charged in November 2005. AP 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.