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The Supreme Court is allowing a multibillion-dollar class action investors’ lawsuit to proceed against Facebook parent Meta, stemming from the privacy scandal involving the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm.

The justices heard arguments in November in Meta’s bid to shut down the lawsuit. On Friday, they decided that they were wrong to take up the case in the first place.

The high court dismissed the company’s appeal, leaving in place an appellate ruling allowing the case to go forward.

Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users’ personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump ’s first successful Republican presidential campaign in 2016.

Inadequacy of the disclosures led to two significant price drops in the price of the company’s shares in 2018, after the public learned about the extent of the privacy scandal, the investors say.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company was disappointed by the court’s action. “The plaintiff’s claims are baseless and we will continue to defend ourselves as this case is considered by the District Court,” Stone said in an emailed statement.

Meta already has paid a $5.1 billion fine and reached a $725 million privacy settlement with users. Cambridge Analytica had ties to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon. It had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign.

The lawsuit is one of two high court cases involving class-action lawsuits against tech companies. The justices also are wrestling with whether to shut down a class action against Nvidia. Investors say the company misled them about its dependence on selling computer chips for the mining of volatile cryptocurrency.


Democrats sued Kansas officials on Monday over a Republican redistricting law that costs the state’s only Democrat in Congress some of the territory in her Kansas City-area district that she carries by wide margins in elections.

A team of attorneys led by Democratic attorney Marc Elias’ firm filed the lawsuit in Wyandotte County District Court in the Kansas City area. Elias has been involved in lawsuits in multiple states, including Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio, and he promised that the new Kansas map would be challenged when the GOP-controlled Legislature on Wednesday overrode Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of it.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of five voters and a Kansas voting-rights group, Loud Light. The defendants are the elections commissioner for Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, the state’s top elections official.

Kansas is part of a broader national battle over redrawing congressional districts. Republicans hope to recapture a U.S. House majority in this year’s elections, and both parties are watching states’ redistricting efforts because they could help either pick up or defend individual seats.

The Kansas redistricting law removes the northern part of Kansas City, Kansas, from the 3rd District that U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids represents and puts it in the neighboring 2nd District, which includes the state capital of Topeka but also rural communities across eastern Kansas. Kansas City is among Republican-leaning Kansas’ few Democratic strongholds.

Elias has said the GOP map for Kansas is “blatantly unconstitutional.” Democrats argued that it amounts to partisan gerrymandering aimed at costing Davids’ her seat, while diluting the clout of Black and Hispanic voters by cutting their numbers in her district. They also have argued that the map is unacceptable because it fails to keep the core of the state’s side of the Kansas City area in a single district.


The Supreme Court is siding with Republicans to prevent Wisconsin from counting mailed ballots that are received after Election Day.

In a 5-3 order, the justices on Monday refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after the Nov. 3 election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold.

The three liberal justices dissented from the order that the court issued just before the Senate started voting on Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination.

Chief Justice John Roberts last week joined the liberals to preserve a Pennsylvania state court order extending the absentee ballot deadline but voted the other way in the Wisconsin case, which has moved through federal courts.

“Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin,” Roberts wrote.

Democrats argued that the flood of absentee ballots and other challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic makes it necessary to extend the period in which ballots can be counted. Wisconsin is one of the nation’s hot spots for COVID-19, with hospitals treating a record high number of patients with the disease.

Republicans opposed the extension, saying that voters have plenty of opportunities to cast their ballots by the close of polls on Election Day and that the rules should not be changed so close to the election.

Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler responded to the ruling by pledging Democrats would be “dialing up a huge voter education campaign” to prod roughly 360,000 people who hadn’t yet returned absentee ballots to hand-deliver them by 8 p.m. on Election Day, or to vote in person.

State Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt praised the ruling.

“Absentee voting in Wisconsin is extremely easy and hundreds of thousands of people have done it already — last-minute attempts to change election laws only cause more voter confusion and erode the integrity of our elections,” he said in a statement.

The justices often say nothing, or very little, about the reasons for their votes in these emergency cases, but on Monday, four justices wrote opinions totaling 35 pages to lay out their competing rationales.


Medical marijuana producers in New Mexico can claim a tax deduction for prescription medication, a move that could affect prices for thousands of enrolled patients, according to a state Court of Appeals ruling.

The 11-page ruling means lawmakers must soon set aside funding to cover the tax claims, which could carry a multimillion-dollar price tag for the state Taxation and Revenue Department.

The agency has reviewed the ruling and is weighing legal options, tax department officials said. The department has until Feb. 27 to appeal the ruling.

Medical marijuana providers paid about $24 million in gross receipt taxes during an almost three-year period, officials said. Those taxes are paid by providers but usually passed on to patients, who could see a drop in prices for medical cannabis products because of the ruling, department officials said.

Tax claims could range from several hundred thousand dollars to several million dollars depending on the producer, officials said.

In the ruling, the Court of Appeals determined medical marijuana meets the definition of a prescription drug under the state’s tax code because physicians are required to certify that patients have a qualifying condition before they can enroll in the program.



A civil rights group says JPMorgan Chase has agreed to pay $5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by male employees who say they were denied additional paid parental leave between 2011 and 2017.

The settlement was announced Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union and the national law firm Outten & Golden.

Chase employee Derek Rotondo filed an equal opportunity claim in 2017 when he tried to get 14 additional paid weeks after his son was born. He was told by Chase that while mothers are eligible for 16 weeks as primary caregivers, non-primary caregivers were only eligible for two weeks.

Chase adopted a gender neutral policy after Rotondo made his claim.

A Chase spokesman welcomed the agreement and thanked Rotondo for raising the issue.


The U.S. solicitor general's office has recommended that the U.S. Supreme Court not hear the appeal of two convicted defendants in the "Bridgegate" case, nudging the four-year legal saga of New Jersey's most famous traffic jam toward a conclusion.

"Further review is not warranted," the brief filed late Wednesday said. The Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to hear the case by the end of its term next month.

Bridget Kelly and Bill Baroni want the court to hear the appeal of their 2016 convictions for causing gridlock near the George Washington Bridge to punish a mayor for not endorsing their boss, former Republican Gov. Chris Christie.

Christie wasn't charged, but the revelations from the scandal and conflicting accounts of when he knew about the plot combined to sabotage his 2016 presidential aspirations.

Kelly, Christie's former deputy chief of staff at the time of the 2013 lane realignments in the town of Fort Lee, and Baroni, deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, had their sentences reduced this spring after a federal appeals court tossed some convictions last fall. Kelly petitioned the Supreme Court to consider the rest of the convictions, and Baroni joined in the appeal.

They argued that while their actions may have been ethically questionable, they weren't illegal because neither derived personal benefit, and the Port Authority, which operated the bridge, wasn't deprived of tangible benefits as a result of the scheme.


The Supreme Court has agreed to review the settlement of a class action lawsuit involving Google, where the settlement agreement largely directed money to organizations rather than search engine users.

The court agreed Monday to take the case. The lawsuit involves Google users who sued saying Google violated privacy rights by disclosing to websites the search terms users entered to get there.

Google agreed to an $8.5 million settlement. Attorneys were awarded about $2 million. Most of the remaining money was allocated to six groups that agreed to use the money to promote privacy protection on the internet. The groups included AARP, Carnegie Mellon University and centers associated with Harvard, the Illinois Institute of Technology and Stanford.



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