The Headlines - A Profile of the C.E.O. Killing Suspect, and Tech Giants Give to Trump Fund

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Plus, a mystery in New Jersey’s skies.   Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. On Today’s Episode:Months Before C.E.O.’s Killing, the Suspect Went Silent. Where Was He?, by Mike Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Shawn Hubler and Jacey FortinThe Fall of al-Assad Quickly Infuses Europe’s Debate Over Asylum, by Christopher F. SchuetzeAmazon Plans $1 Million Donation to Trump’s Inaugural Fund, by Karen Weise and Maggie HabermanAre Those Drones Over New Jersey? Despite Sightings, U.S. Is Skeptical., by Alyce McFadden

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, December 13th. Here's what we're covering. The Times has been on the ground gathering details from California to New York, Hawaii to Maryland, even Japan, to try and piece together the path of Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO. The rough outline of Mangione's life has been widely shared.

Valedictorian at a prep school in Baltimore, computer science grad at Penn. But my colleagues have been narrowing in on the last two years, when things seemed to shift for him. He quit his job at a tech company in early 2023, calling it mind-numbingly boring. He spent a lot of time trying to get relief from a back injury, posting about unbearable pain. It was so bad, he told one friend that it kept him from dating. Eventually, he got back surgery.

That seemed to help. By early this year, he was off trying to find peace on a trip through Asia, with stops in Thailand and Japan. In a voice message, he told a friend, I want some time to zen out. Manjone recorded that on April 27th. It was apparently one of the last communications he had with friends and family before he seemed to cut ties. Where in the world are you? one friend texted. No response.

In May, his Reddit account shows one final post in a forum dedicated to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Overall, my colleagues say that Manjone's online footprint showed that he had a growing impatience with living in a quote, capitalist society. It's unclear where he spent the summer or fall. His family called up old friends asking if anyone knew where he was. By November 18th, they filed a missing persons report. Just a few days after that, police say Manjone got on a bus that was winding its way from Atlanta and headed to New York City. The Times' full look at what we know about Manjoun is at nytimes.com.

The dramatic overnight fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has reignited a heated debate about immigration in Europe. What should happen to the Syrians who fled Assad's regime and have settled across the continent? Over the past decade, more than a million people left Syria for Europe, and many filed asylum claims to try and avoid being sent back. Within hours of the Assad regime falling, you quickly had Britain, Germany, Greece, Italy, Sweden saying they were pausing

asylum processing. Christopher Schutze is a Times reporter based in Berlin. The main argument is that most asylum seekers, they will write on their application specifically that they're in danger because of the Assad regime. The Assad regime is no longer in place. So it's difficult to actually legally give somebody asylum if the reason that they're claiming asylum is no longer valid. But what was happening at the same time

is you had many politicians, both from the far right and conservative politicians, who had for years denigrated and made one of their big issues, migration, seemingly rejoiced at the fact that so many people could go back home. Christopher says some legal experts think courts would block any effort to send Syrians back if there's still significant violence in the country. But he says that so many politicians talking about it so openly

is already making some Syrians uneasy. What you hear Syrians saying in Germany, I've spoken with several, is we made our lives here. We spent a lot of time and effort, A, getting here, but B, learning the German language, integrating. Why should we go back? This week, America's tech giants have pulled out their checkbooks for Donald Trump. Metta, Facebook's parent company, said it's donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund. Yesterday, Amazon said it also plans a million-dollar donation to the fund, which helps pay for celebrations around Inauguration Day.

Trump's committee says that seven-figure gifts to their fund come with perks for the donors, like tickets to the ceremony at the Capitol and a quote, elegant and intimate dinner with the president-elect. But donors and corporations often pour big money into inaugural funds in order to get on the good side of an incoming administration. There are no legal limits on how much a person or a company can give to them. Both Amazon's and Metta's founders, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, have had rocky histories with Trump and seem to be trying to shore up their relationships before he

takes office. Zuckerberg, in particular, has tangled with the president-elect. Facebook and Instagram banned Trump from their platforms after January 6, and Trump accused Metta of silencing conservative voices. Now Zuckerberg is working to head off any potential blowback when Trump returns to power. A few weeks ago, he flew to Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with Trump at his hotel there. And finally, there's one. See how low they are? Since the middle of last month, people across New Jersey and parts of New York City have

been reporting mysterious flying objects in the night sky. This is a video of the Morris County drones with characteristic triangle lights underneath. Dozens of drone sightings have been reported, including 50 in just one night last weekend, sparking alarm among residents and concern from lawmakers. I'll ask an open-ended question. What is going on in New Jersey? On Capitol Hill this week, members of Congress pressed the FBI for answers about what exactly the objects are. The Bureau says it's been actively investigating the sightings.

Meanwhile, efforts by state and local police to track the flying whatever they are, with helicopters and drones of their own, have gone nowhere so far. But yesterday, from a podium at the White House, National Security Advisor John Kirby tried to put a lid on the fears. We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat. He said that federal authorities had used what he called sophisticated electronic detection technologies

to look into the sightings and found no evidence that the flying objects were drones at all. To the contrary, upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully. One possible theory for what could be behind the sudden rush of sightings are actually manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully. One possible theory for what could be behind the sudden rush of sightings is that the viral UFO mystery could have just prompted more people to start looking up. Joshua Tan, a professor of physics and astronomy, told the Times, quote, there are other things

in the sky that have been in the sky at night for a long time. Planes, helicopters, stars, planets, things that are very bright that people don't necessarily know that they're looking at. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, how ultra-processed foods took over the American diet. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. The show is made by Robert Jemison, Jessica Metzger, Jan Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumford, with help from Isabella Anderson.

Original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Jake Lucas, Zoe Murphy, and Paula Schumann. The headlines will be back on Monday.