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End of the penny grows near

(NYT) — The Treasury Department is winding down the production of pennies, after ordering a last batch of the blanks used to print the coins this month.

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The end of penny production, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, comes a few months after President Donald Trump ordered the Treasury Department to stop producing them as a cost-saving measure, pointing out that pennies have long been more expensive to manufacture than they are worth.

Pennies, which are made up of 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper plating, cost about 3.69 cents to make, according to Treasury Department statistics, which show the price of production skyrocketed over the last decade. Ten years ago, it cost 1.3 cents to manufacture each penny. In the 2024 fiscal year alone, the cost of production rose by over 20%.

The U.S. Mint will keep manufacturing pennies until its supply of blanks runs out, a Treasury spokesperson said Thursday. The Mint has estimated that ceasing production of the penny will save the taxpayers an annual $56 million in reduced material costs.

The Treasury forecasts that there will be additional savings once the facilities used to produce pennies are converted for other purposes.

The penny had been falling out of favor for years, and as it became less popular, the Mint scaled down its production. Penny production has fallen fairly steadily in the past decade, from over 9.36 billion coins made in 2015 to just over 3.22 billion last year.

There are still about 114 billion pennies in circulation, according to the Treasury. But eventually, once production ceases, there will not be enough of them in circulation to facilitate day-to-day transactions, meaning businesses that deal in cash may have to round prices to the nearest nickel.

Venezuelan man is arrested after posing as a student in Ohio

(NYT) — A 24-year-old Venezuelan man suspected of using forged documents to claim to be a teenager and enroll as a student at an Ohio high school was arrested Monday, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Anthony Emmanuel Labrador-Sierra was charged with forgery and later detained by the police in Perrysburg, Ohio, which said that he had been living in the United States illegally since March 24, 2020.

Labrador-Sierra enrolled in January 2024 at Perrysburg High School in the city, which is about 10 miles southwest of Toledo, presenting himself as a 16-year-old student “experiencing homelessness or without a legal guardian,” according to a statement from the school district.

The court system granted guardianship of Labrador-Sierra to a local family based on documents he had provided, the school district said.

More than a year later, on May 14, his guardians, who have not been publicly identified, alerted school officials that they believed Labrador-Sierra was not a teenager but a 24-year-old adult. The district asked the guardians to keep him from returning to school during an investigation into the discrepancy, school officials said.

The next day, school administrators met with Labrador-Sierra to discuss the concerns. According to the district’s statement, he denied the allegations and maintained that the documents he had provided, including a birth certificate showing him as now 17, were valid.

It was unclear if Labrador-Sierra had pleaded in the case and if he had any legal representation. He was being held at the local jail in Wood County, Ohio, the police said.