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This week’s hardest job: finding jurors who can be impartial about Donald Trump

Planet Business: Taylor Swift’s record-shifting week, Rishi Sunak’s leftover lectern and Big Tech’s fears for a recession

Selection box: Prospective jurors in the tax fraud trial of the Trump Organization were quizzed at the New York Supreme Court this week by prosecutor Joshua Steinglass and lawyers for the company. Photograph: Yuki Iwamura/AFP via Getty Images

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Laura Slattery
Sat Oct 29 2022 - 06:15

Image of the week: Jury’s in

It’s a short taxi ride from Trump Tower in midtown New York to lower Manhattan where lawyers — including assistant district attorney Joshua Steinglass, pictured here — have assembled along with their horror-movie box files for the criminal fraud and tax evasion trial of the Trump Organization, Donald Trump’s family business. The first, week-long task was jury selection.

Finding 12 people who would be certain under oath and extended quizzing that they could be fair and impartial to the former president was not exactly straightforward, however. “I can’t deny that I really, really don’t like Trump. Yes, I hate him,” said one prospective juror, who was duly dismissed.

“I think Mr Trump has no morals,” another said. Although he believed he could be fair in the tax and fraud case because it concerned matters that were “trivial” compared to the rest of man’s CV, his description of Trump as a “criminal” guaranteed his services were no longer required. Other sample assertions included “I hate Trump” and “he’s guilty in my mind whatever the case is”.

Anybody spend 2016-2021 in a coma?

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In numbers: Midnights mania

1 million

In its first four days of release, Taylor Swift amassed more than this number of traditional album sales — physical purchases and digital downloads — for Midnights, her new record, in the US alone. It also amassed the single largest week for US vinyl sales since 1991.

5

Years since there has been a faster-selling record in the US for traditional album sales, with 2017 notably being the year that music industry streaming revenues overtook sales. The last bigger traditional sales tally was for Reputation by ... Taylor Swift.

13

Sleepless nights that form the thematic concept for Midnights, which was available on pre-order through Swift’s mega-webstore and released on multiple formats, including four separate CD and vinyl editions with alternative covers. That sound you hear is “ker-ching!”

Getting to know: Sunak’s lectern

New UK prime minister Rishi Sunak might have kept some familiar faces in his cabinet but one prized asset of predecessor Liz Truss has been promptly ditched: her twisty wooden “Jenga” lectern, which came to symbolise the financial instability created by her mini-budget and the ensuing topsy-turvy political vibe.

Sunak’s anti-Jenga stance has prompted more in-depth analysis of prime ministerial lecterns that anyone ever knew they wanted, or needed — Theresa May’s was slender and “feminine”, Boris Johnson’s was given extra girth, and so on — and also a fresh line in investigative journalism. The Daily Telegraph reported that Sunak’s lectern, debuted on Downing Street on Tuesday, was in fact a “leftover” one from the Truss reign, as there hasn’t been enough time to design and build a new one. It’s maybe not a priority just right now?

The list: Tech slowdown

A slew of mixed third-quarter corporate earnings has seen Big Tech, among them some of Ireland’s largest employers, acknowledge that the global economy is perhaps not in the best of shape at the moment. So what have they been saying?

1. Response imminent: Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent Alphabet, this week referred to the impact of a “challenging macro climate” and ominously said Alphabet would be “responsive to the economic environment”.

2. Advertising caution: Snapchat owner Snap had earlier warned that advertisers “across many industries” were cutting their marketing budgets as a result of inflationary pressures and the rising cost of capital.

3. Blue mood: Amid a “more complicated” macro-backdrop, Microsoft’s chief financial officer Amy Hood has offered a subdued sales growth forecast for the company’s cloud computing services business, Azure.

4. Tough talk: Electric vehicle maker Tesla is “recession resilient”, according to its chief executive, some guy called Elon Musk.

5. Doing more with less: Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg suggested back in July that the social media and would-be metaverse company would have to “get more done with fewer resources”. Thumbs down.

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