The daily business briefing: May 10, 2016

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1. Gap shares plummet after sales drop, again
2. Judge dismisses Sumner Redstone competency suit
3. Oracle and Google face off in second copyright trial
4. Top 25 hedge fund managers make nearly $13 billion despite market turmoil
5. Ex-Facebook employees say they suppressed trending conservative news

By Harold Maass, The Week US

published 10 May 2016

1. Gap shares plummet after sales drop, again

Struggling retailer Gap reported its fifth straight quarterly sales decline on Monday, sending its shares tumbling by 12 percent in extended trading. The company's latest slump was caused by weak demand for its Banana Republic and Old Navy brands in the face of competition from such retailers as H&M and Forever 21. "This has been a disastrous quarter for Gap and one during which all of its main engines stalled and went into reverse," said Neil Saunders, chief executive of research firm Conlumino.

A Los Angeles judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit challenging 92-year-old Viacom and CBS Corp. controlling shareholder Sumner Redstone's mental competence. The case was started by Redstone's former ex-girlfriend, Manuela Herzer, after he removed her from his healthcare directive. The ailing billionaire swayed the judge with videotaped testimony shown Friday in which Redstone explained that he did not want Herzer in charge of his care. "This testimony does in fact completely alter the case," Judge David J. Cowan said in his ruling.

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A jury was selected Monday for the second Oracle v. Google trial on copyrights and the Android mobile operating system. Opening statements are scheduled for Tuesday. Oracle filed a lawsuit in 2010 accusing Google of breaking copyright law by using declaring code in 37 Java APIs. That trial, dubbed the "World Series" of intellectual property, ended in a stalemate. The second trial in the $9.3 billion lawsuit is expected to take a month.

The 25 best-paid hedge fund managers collectively took home $12.94 billion last year, according to an annual ranking published on Tuesday by Institutional Investor's Alpha magazine. Their windfalls far exceeded the paychecks of top executives at major banks — JPMorgan Chase's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made $27 million in 2015, for example. The big paydays came despite market swings that hurt many investors so badly that billionaire manager Daniel S. Loeb described the situation as a "hedge fund killing field."

Former Facebook employees who curated news on the site say the "trending" news section was routinely manipulated, and conservative news stories were often suppressed. One ex-worker told Gizmodo that stories about CPAC, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics were kept off the "trending" section even though they were actually trending among the site's users. Facebook executives denied the company's workers censored conservative news.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.