US Senate panel backs FDA tobacco regulation bill News
US Senate panel backs FDA tobacco regulation bill

[JURIST] The US Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee [official website] approved a bill Wednesday to allow the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) [official website] to regulate tobacco. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act [S 625 materials], introduced by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and approved 13-8 by the committee, would require the FDA to limit tobacco advertising, enforce warning labels, and determine which tobacco products could be marketed as "reduced risk."

Last week, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Mark McClellan said that the FDA does not have the resources [JURIST report] to handle the responsibility of tobacco regulation. The FDA first began to regulate the tobacco industry in 1996, but the US Supreme Court ruled in FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. [text] that Congress had not provided the FDA with authority to regulate tobacco products. AP 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.