Lawyers picked through jury questionnaires for the Martha Stewart trial Tuesday, facing up to the tricky task of predicting how potential panelists might lean. While the questionnaire filled out Tuesday by hundreds of potential jurors is being kept secret, legal experts said Stewart’s defense team likely used it to look for jurors who are financially sophisticated and hold high-paying jobs. Those jurors could be more likely to believe Stewart’s account that she had a pre-existing order to sell her ImClone Systems stock when it fell to $60 a share in 2001 – the key to her defense, the experts said. Stewart is accused of lying to the government, and deceiving her own shareholders, about the circumstances of the sale. She avoided $45,673 in losses on the shares by selling before the bad news was made public.
Orders to U.S. factories, after posting two months of solid increases, fell by 1.4 percent in November, the biggest decline in seven months. But analysts viewed the drop as a temporary blip in what has been an improving picture for American manufacturers.
Georgia investigators began rounding up 80 suspects accused in a scam in which the identities and credit histories of dead people were stolen and then used to buy cars. One of those charged as a major figure in the scam, Kwezeta Butler, would troll newspaper obituaries, then contact an Internet background search company to obtain the Social Security numbers, birth dates and credit histories of the deceased, investigators said. Butler sold fake IDs with the names of the deceased for $500 to $600 to people with bad credit, who then used the stolen identities to buy cars, investigators said.
The U.S. Postal Service handled a record 3.4 billion cards and letters in the weeks leading up to Christmas, the agency said Tuesday. The pieces of mail were postmarked from Dec. 1 to Dec. 24 and represented an increase of 78 million from last year. Many mailers waited until the last minute, officials said, with a deluge of mail on Monday, Dec. 22. The peak mailing day, however, was Monday, Dec. 15, when more than 850 million items were mailed. Peak delivery day came two days later. Holiday mail included more than 24 million pounds of material sent to the Persian Gulf and other military locations worldwide, topping last year’s military holiday volumes by 11 million pounds.
From Herald news services
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