Maryland Supreme Court preserves Medicaid benefits to immigrants News
Maryland Supreme Court preserves Medicaid benefits to immigrants

[JURIST] The Maryland Court of Appeals [official website] unanimously upheld a preliminary injunction [opinion, PDF] this week barring the state from discontinuing Medicaid [official website; JURIST news archive] benefits to approximately 3,000 legal immigrant recipients, all of whom migrated to Maryland within the past five years. The ruling means that Medicaid benefits to those beneficiaries will be maintained while judges weigh the substantive question of whether termination of benefits violates the equal protection clause of the Maryland constitution [official website].

Benefits to immigrants have been controversial in Maryland since at least 2005, when Gov. Robert Ehrlich [official website] first sought to cut Medicaid coverage from low-income immigrant expectant women and children in an effort to reduce the state budget by $7 million. Immigrant advocates argue the cuts were cruel and discriminatory, and note that the cutbacks are part of a larger US trend to cut back or tightly control social benefits for immigrants [PDF], including those in the country legally. 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.