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SCOTUS seems poised to limit Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court seemed open to curbing the use of the Civil Rights era law to allow states to consider race in drawing electoral maps during a second round of oral arguments yesterday in a case over the creation of Louisiana’s second majority-Black electoral district. The court’s conservative majority questioned whether using race as a factor in determining Congressional districts, which the law permits to remedy the suppression of Black voters, should have an end point in time. If the court finds that it should, the change could help Republicans win more seats in Congress. But despite current redistricting battles, it might not impact the midterm election cycle since a ruling is unlikely to come before this summer.
Judge temporarily blocks firing federal employees during shutdown. A federal judge in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order barring the Trump administration from firing government employees as the government shutdown drags on. In a case brought by two labor unions, the judge said the firings are illegal, and the administration had used the shutdown “to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them anymore and that they can impose the structures that they like on the government situation that they don’t like.” The decision came soon after President Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, said the administration planned to eliminate more than 10,000 roles.
BlackRock and tech giants to buy data center company for $40 billion. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but there was a major deal announced yesterday in the AI space. A consortium of investors that includes BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, Nvidia, Microsoft, and xAI, among others, is buying Aligned Data Centers. Aligned, currently owned by Macquarie Asset Management, designs and operates data centers in North and South America. The deal, expected to close next year, comes amid a race to build more data centers as AI models hoover up computing power.—AR
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