Hard Numbers: Cocoa prices get hot, Looters find Assad’s garage, Tokyo cuts the workweek short, New York jury acquits in high-profile manslaughter case, Mangione faces murder charge
7: Giving someone a box of chocolates for the holidays? That could soon count as a luxury gift now as cocoa prices have reached their highest levels in seven months. Dry weather is expected to suppress crop yields in West Africa, one of the world’s main producers. Prices for the stuff reached $10,454 per metric ton.
2 billion: In the hours after Syrian despot Bashar Assad fled the country, ordinary Syrians ransacked his sumptuous presidential villa, making off with hundreds of thousands of dollars of luxury goods and furnishings belonging to the “butcher of Damascus” and his wife. The Assad family had an estimated worth of $2 billion in a country wracked by war and poverty. Gear heads noted with awe that Assad’s private garage reportedly contained dozens of exotic cars, including a rare gullwing Mercedes and a Ferrari F50, worth nearly $2 million.
4: The city of Tokyo has moved to a four-day workweek for municipal employees, as part of a strategy to boost the country’s record-low birth rate. The average Japanese woman will have 1.2 children, well below the “replacement” rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. That extra day off is meant to ease the burden on families with small children, and maybe to give those on the fence about having kids some extra free time to … make them
6: A jury in New York acquitted former Marine Daniel Penny of manslaughter in the death of Jordan Neely, a mentally ill subway performer, in 2023. Neely, who was Black, had been behaving erratically and threatening passengers before Penny, who is white, subdued him with a fatal chokehold for roughly six minutes. The case sparked intense debate about race, mental illness, and New York’s pandemic-driven crime surge.
5: Authorities arrested and arraigned Luigi Mangione, a person of interest in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, on Monday in Altoona, PA. The 26-year-old, who was spotted at a McDonalds, was reportedly found with a 3D-printed gun and a silencer. He has been charged with five crimes in the Keystone State: carrying a gun without a license, forgery, falsely identifying himself to authorities, tampering with records of identification, and possessing “instruments of crime.” Late Monday, authorities in the Big Apple added their charges, including second-degree murder, and Mangione is expected to be extradited to New York.