Italian fertility referendum fails by large margin News
Italian fertility referendum fails by large margin

[JURIST] A referendum [JURIST report] to liberalize Italy's assisted-fertility laws has failed due to low voter turnout. The two-day referendum [official site, in Italian] needed over 50 percent turnout for its results to count, but only 18.7 percent voted Sunday and early figures reported by the Italian Interior Ministry after the polls closed at 3 PM Rome time Monday suggested a final turnout of only 26% [Interior Ministry figures], far short of what was required for any result to be binding. The Catholic Church had urged people to boycott the referendum in support of current laws [Telegraph report], which ban sperm and egg cell donation and embryo research. AP has more.

THIS DAY @ LAW

Bank of England granted political independence

On May 6, 1997, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown announced that the Bank of England would be granted political independence for the first time in the three-hundred year history of the Bank. This policy was statutized in the subsequent Bank of England Act of 1998 gave the Bank independent control of British monetary policy effective June 1, 1998. Read the Bank of England Act of 1998.

Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers from US

On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States and prohibiting courts from bestowing US citizenship on Chinese. Connecticut Senator Joseph Hawley spoke out against the Act in these words: Let the proposed statue be read 100 years hence, dug out of the dust of ages and forgotten as it will be except for a line of sneer by some historian, and ask the young man not well read in the history of this country what was the reason for excluding these men and he would not be able to find it in the law. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its successors were abolished in 1943 at the insistence of President Franklin Roosevelt.