In a penny-pinching move, the U.S. Mint has produced its last one-cent coin.
The final penny was minted in Philadelphia Wednesday, 232 years after the first penny rolled off the production line. The government decided to stop making new pennies because each one costs nearly 4 cents to produce. The move is expected to save about $56 million a year.
If you have a jar of pennies on your dresser, or a few stuck in your couch cushions, don't worry. They're still perfectly legal for making payments. But of the more than $1 billion worth of pennies in circulation, most never circulate. And it was costing the government a lot of money to keep making more of them.
Some restaurants and retailers are already struggling with a shortage of pennies. The phase-out may require businesses to round prices up or down to the nearest nickel, although the growing popularity of non-cash payments makes that less of a headache. Fewer than one in five payments are made with cash, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
Canada, New Zealand and Australia have also eliminated their one-cent coins.
Domestic Glance
Cleto Escobedo III, the bandleader for the "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in-house band Cleto and the Cletones, has died. He was 59.
The Supreme Court on Nov. 10 decided not to revisit its landmark ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, leaving undisturbed a decade-old decision that some conservative justices oppose but that LGBTQ+ couples have relied on to legalize their relationships and create families.
The death toll in the explosion that saw a UPS cargo plane lose an engine and burst into flames, has risen to 13, Craig Greenberg, the Louisville mayor, has confirmed as UPS released the names of the three victims on the plane.
Unionized Starbucks baristas voted to authorize an open-ended strike ahead of Starbucks’s high-traffic holiday season, announced Starbucks Workers United on Wednesday.





























