By ALEXANDRA OLSON and CLAIRE SAVAGE

NEW YORK (AP) — The federal agency for protecting workers’ civil rights revealed Wednesday that it is investigating sportswear giant Nike for allegedly discriminating against white employees through its diversity policies.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission disclosed the investigation in a motion filed in Missouri federal court demanding that Nike fully comply with a subpoena for information.

The EEOC sought the company’s criteria for selecting employees for layoffs, how it tracks and uses worker race and ethnicity data, and information about programs which allegedly provided race-restricted mentoring, leadership, or career development opportunities, according to court documents.

In a statement, Nike said the company has worked to cooperate with the EEOC and the subpoena “feels like a surprising and unusual escalation.”

“We have shared thousands of pages of information and detailed written responses to the EEOC’s inquiry and are in the process of providing additional information,” Nike said in a statement sent to The Associated Press.”

EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas has moved swiftly to target diversity and inclusion policies that she has long criticized as potentially discriminatory, tightly aligning the agency with one of President Donald Trump’s top priorities.

Nike appears to be the highest profile company the EEOC has targeted with a publicly confirmed, formal anti-DEI investigation. In November, the EEOC issued a similar subpoena against financial services provider Northwestern Mutual.

“When there are compelling indications, including corporate admissions in extensive public materials, that an employer’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related programs may violate federal prohibitions against race discrimination or other forms of unlawful discrimination, the EEOC will take all necessary steps — including subpoena actions — to ensure the opportunity to fully and comprehensively investigate,” Lucas said in a statement.

FILE – Andrea Lucas, nominee to be a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, testifies during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing, June 18, 2025, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)

The disclosure comes two months after Lucas posted a social media call-out urging white men to come forward if they have experienced race or sex discrimination at work. The post urged eligible workers to reach out to the agency “as soon as possible” and referred users to the agency’s fact sheet on DEI-related discrimination.

The investigation against Nike, however, does not stem from any worker complaint against the company. Rather, Lucas filed her own complaint in May 2024 through a more rarely used tool known as a commissioner’s charge, according to the court documents. Her charge came just months after America First Legal, a conservative legal group founded by top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, sent the EEOC a letter outlining complaints against Nike and urging the agency to file a commissioner’s charge.

America First Legal has flooded the EEOC with similar letters in recent years urging investigations into the DEI practices of major U.S. companies. It is unclear how many other companies the EEOC may be targeting through such commissioner’s charges. The EEOC is prohibited from revealing any charge — by workers or commissioners — unless it results in fines, settlements, legal action or other such public actions.

Lucas’ charge, according to court filings, was based on Nike’s publicly shared information about its commitment to diversity, including statements from executives and proxy statements. The charge, for example, cited Nike’s publicly stated goal in 2021 of achieving 35% representation of racial and ethnic minorities in its corporate workforce by 2025.

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Many U.S. companies made similar commitments in the wake of the widespread 2020 racial justice protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. Companies have said such commitments are not quotas but rather goals they hoped to achieve through methods such as widening recruitment efforts and rooting out any bias during hiring process.

Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, employers are prohibited from using race as a criteria for hiring or other employment decisions. Lucas has long warned that many companies risk crossing that line through DEI efforts that would pressure managers to make race-based decisions.

In its statement, Nike said it follows “all applicable laws, including those that prohibit discrimination. We believe our programs and practices are consistent with those obligations and take these matters seriously.”

The Associated Press’ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

The St. Paul City Council is urging state leaders to put a temporary halt to energy and gas shutoffs during Operation Metro Surge, the ongoing occupation of the Twin Cities by federal agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The council voted on Wednesday in support of a resolution asking Gov. Tim Walz and state officials to direct the state’s Public Utility Commission to enact an energy and gas shutoff moratorium “to keep Minnesota families safe and protect them from ICE.”

They noted the 55106 zip code, which covers much of St. Paul’s East Side, had the highest rate of utility shut-offs in all of Xcel Energy’s customer area even before Operation Metro Surge began.

“The federal government’s campaign of discriminatory mass deportation has inflicted terror nationwide, and the Trump administration’s fixation on Minnesota has cruelly targeted our community with harassment, intimidation, and violence,” reads the council resolution.

“Many residents are unable to move freely due to the threat of harassment, violence, and abduction, forcing them to shelter-in place and impacting their ability to work and provide for their families,” it goes on to say.

Council members acknowledged that some cold weather protections already exist in Minnesota under the Cold Weather Rule, but they said those protections — which expire April 30 — kick in after a resident proactively contacts their utility to negotiate a payment plan or enroll in an energy assistance program.

They also noted that Xcel Energy provides customer assistance in English and Spanish on their support line, leaving payment plans virtually inaccessible to residents with other language barriers. The council resolution calls on Xcel Energy to add bill payment assistance in Hmong, Karen and Somali.

Most state and federal assistance programs are only open to U.S. citizens who share Social Security information, “which could potentially be exploited by ICE if they subpoenaed that information,” reads the council resolution.

The resolution, which was sponsored by Council Members Nelsie Yang and HwaJeong Kim, was included on the council’s consent agenda, where items are voted on en masse.

The council had previously voted Jan. 21 to ask the governor and state leaders for a temporary eviction moratorium, with the goal of protecting workers impacted by Operation Metro Surge from losing their housing.

The governor enacted an emergency moratorium on residential evictions in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission coordinated a similar moratorium on disconnections for state-regulated utilities.

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By BERNARD CONDON and MATT O’BRIEN

NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk vowed this week to upend another industry just as he did with cars and rockets — and once again he’s taking on long odds.

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The world’s richest man said he wants to put as many as a million satellites into orbit to form vast, solar-powered data centers in space — a move to allow expanded use of artificial intelligence and chatbots without triggering blackouts and sending utility bills soaring.

To finance that effort, Musk combined SpaceX with his AI business on Monday and plans a big initial public offering of the combined company.

“Space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk wrote on SpaceX’s website Monday, adding about his solar ambitions, “It’s always sunny in space!”

But scientists and industry experts say even Musk — who outsmarted Detroit to turn Tesla into the world’s most valuable automaker — faces formidable technical, financial and environmental obstacles.

Here’s a look:

Feeling the heat

Capturing the sun’s energy from space to run chatbots and other AI tools would ease pressure on power grids and cut demand for sprawling computing warehouses that are consuming farms and forests and vast amounts of water to cool.

But space presents its own set of problems.

Data centers generate enormous heat. Space seems to offer a solution because it is cold. But it is also a vacuum, trapping heat inside objects in the same way that a Thermos keeps coffee hot using double walls with no air between them.

“An uncooled computer chip in space would overheat and melt much faster than one on Earth,” said Josep Jornet, a computer and electrical engineering professor at Northeastern University.

One fix is to build giant radiator panels that glow in infrared light to push the heat “out into the dark void,” says Jornet, noting that the technology has worked on a small scale, including on the International Space Station. But for Musk’s data centers, he says, it would require an array of “massive, fragile structures that have never been built before.”

Musk is undaunted.

“You can mark my words,” Musk said in a preview of a Cheeky Pint podcast episode airing Thursday. “In 36 months, but probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space. And then it will get ridiculously better to be in space.”

Floating debris

Then there is space junk.

A single malfunctioning satellite breaking down or losing orbit could trigger a cascade of collisions, potentially disrupting emergency communications, weather forecasting and other services.

FILE – A SpaceX logo is displayed on a building, May 26, 2020, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File)

Musk noted in a recent regulatory filing that he has had only one “low-velocity debris generating event” in seven years running Starlink, his satellite communications network. Starlink has operated about 10,000 satellites — but that’s a fraction of the million or so he now plans to put in space.

“We could reach a tipping point where the chance of collision is going to be too great,” said University at Buffalo’s John Crassidis, a former NASA engineer. “And these objects are going fast — 17,500 miles per hour. There could be very violent collisions.”

No repair crews

Even without collisions, satellites fail, chips degrade, parts break.

Special GPU graphics chips used by AI companies, for instance, can become damaged and need to be replaced.

“On Earth, what you would do is send someone down to the data center,” said Baiju Bhatt, CEO of Aetherflux, a space-based solar energy company. “You replace the server, you replace the GPU, you’d do some surgery on that thing and you’d slide it back in.”

But no such repair crew exists in orbit, and those GPUs in space could get damaged due to their exposure to high-energy particles from the sun.

Bhatt says one workaround is to overprovision the satellite with extra chips to replace the ones that fail. But that’s an expensive proposition given they are likely to cost tens of thousands of dollars each, and current Starlink satellites only have a lifespan of about five years.

Competition — and leverage

Musk is not alone trying to solve these problems.

A company in Redmond, Washington, called Starcloud, launched a satellite in November carrying a single Nvidia-made AI computer chip to test out how it would fare in space. Google is exploring orbital data centers in a venture it calls Project Suncatcher. And Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin announced plans in January for a constellation of more than 5,000 satellites to start launching late next year, though its focus has been more on communications than AI.

Still, Musk has an edge: He’s got rockets.

Starcloud had to use one of his Falcon rockets to put its chip in space last year. Aetherflux plans to send a set of chips it calls a Galactic Brain to space on a SpaceX rocket later this year. And Google may also need to turn to Musk to get its first two planned prototype satellites off the ground by early next year.

Pierre Lionnet, a research director at the trade association Eurospace, says Musk routinely charges rivals far more than he charges himself —- as much as $20,000 per kilo of payload versus $2,000 internally.

He said Musk’s announcements this week signal that he plans to use that advantage to win this new space race.

“When he says we are going to put these data centers in space, it’s a way of telling the others we will keep these low launch costs for myself,” said Lionnet. “It’s a kind of powerplay.”

GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — Green Bay general manager Brian Gutekunst remains optimistic about the Packers’ long-term outlook as they head into the offseason after a gut-wrenching playoff loss to the Chicago Bears.

But he acknowledges they must do a much better job of finishing games.

Gutekunst spoke to reporters Wednesday for the first time since the Packers signed him as well as coach Matt LaFleur and executive vice president/director of football operations Russ Ball to multiyear contract extensions last week. The move by new Packers team president/CEO Ed Policy keeps the Packers’ football leadership triad intact despite a string of disappointing postseason defeats.

“In every season, there’s successes, and there’s failures and there’s disappointments,” Gutekunst said. “I was proud of our team in a lot of areas this year, but finishing games is certainly something that we got to concentrate on as we head into 2026.”

The Packers (9-8-1) dropped their final five games, including a 31-27 wild-card loss to the Bears in which they blew a 21-3 halftime lead and allowed 25 fourth-quarter points.

Green Bay hasn’t reached the Super Bowl since the 2010 team — assembled by GM Ted Thompson, coached by Mike McCarthy and quarterbacked by four-time NFL MVP Aaron Rodgers — won it all. And the team has won only one playoff game since ending the 2020 season with an NFC championship game loss to Tom Brady and the eventual Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

The final loss to the Bears came after the Packers went 9-3-1 to start the season and had a four-point lead entering the fourth quarter of a 34-26 loss to the Denver Broncos on Dec. 14.

The Packers had won four in a row at that point, but they watched No. 1 wide receiver Christian Watson leave the stadium in an ambulance after suffering a chest injury, then lost All-Pro edge rusher Micah Parsons to a torn ACL in his left knee later in the game.

While Watson returned the following week, Parsons was lost for the season, just as the team had lost emerging star tight end Tucker Kraft to an ACL tear in his right knee in a Nov. 2 loss to the Carolina Panthers.

“We were 9-3-1, and I didn’t think we had played particularly great football during the season. I thought we had moments, but I thought we had an opportunity to round into form there in the second half of the season,” Gutekunst said. “And obviously it didn’t work out that way.”

And now, the Packers face a challenging offseason full of potential change. Not only did they lose defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley, who left to become the Miami Dolphins head coach, but they have a number of starters and key contributors from their 2022 draft class set to hit free agency in March.

Those players who could leave include left tackle Rasheed Walker, middle linebacker Quay Walker, center/guard Sean Rhyan and wide receiver Romeo Doubs. Prized backup quarterback Malik Willis, who played well in place of an injured Jordan Love, also is a free agent and could land a starting opportunity elsewhere.

“We have one goal here, and we never run from it. We’re here to win championships,” Gutekunst said. “And I think this team is capable of that.

“(The) 2026 (team) will be a different team, but the expectations won’t change. Again, I thought there’s some really good things during the (2025) season. There also were some major disappointments. But I really do like the guys we have in that locker room, the guys that are coming back, and we’ll continue to add to that. And we’re all excited to get at it.”

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AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/NFL