All posts tagged "Mail"

While still under the leadership of Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) consulted with the leader of a little known arm of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), a memo obtained by Raw Story revealed — prompting legal and academic experts to warn of potential trouble ahead.

On March 19, Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale issued a “situational update” to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), USPS’s law enforcement arm, about a meeting with DOGE, according to the memo, which Raw Story received through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In the memo, Barksdale reiterated former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s requests for assistance from DOGE as outlined in a March 17 letter to Congress, including help with “efforts to combat counterfeit postage.” ...

CHICAGO — As a little girl in the 1980s, Khalalisa Norris aspired to become a letter carrier. She’d sit on her front porch in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood and wait for her local mailman, and eventual mail lady, each day.

In her 20s, Norris realized her dream, and ever since, she’s delivered mail on Chicago’s West Side.

But that dream became a nightmare....

The United States Government Accountability Office has released a critical report about the U.S. Postal Service, bolstering the findings of a recent Raw Story investigation that details a dramatic spike in crime against letter carriers.

The Government Accountability Office found that “serious crime” — including homicides, assaults, burglaries and robberies — nearly doubled during a six-year span, from 656 in 2017 to 1,198 in 2023. Robberies alone grew nearly sevenfold between fiscal years 2019 through 2023, according to the report.

Raw Story found that letter carrier robberies skyrocketed by 543 percent between 2019 and 2022, coinciding with the timing of a 2020 Postal Service decision that effectively benched its uniformed police force of 450 officers. The decision resulted in the officers losing their mandate to patrol the streets where letter carriers deliver the mail and these robberies often occur. They’re now relegated to protecting postal facilities, such as mail sorting centers and post offices....

Today marks Wisconsin's recall election, and polls are expected to be crowded all day. The unusual nature of the election — after all, it's not often that voters are riled up enough to draw up a petition to recall their lawmakers — has confused some about procedure, and the robocalls that some in Wisconsin are reporting receiving are certainly not helping.

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - A great-grandmother selling do-it-yourself asphyxiation kits by mail said on Thursday she was ordered from her house at gunpoint by federal agents who raided her home and seized cartons of documents, computers and sewing machines.

WASHINGTON – Five US cities launched initiatives Tuesday to let residents refuse junk mail, hoping to support the environment and cut expenses by stopping waste at its source.