Free Republic

A United States Postal Service worker has been arrested and charged with disposing of more than 1,000 pieces of election mail, including ballots and political campaign mailers. USPS employee Ottis McCoy, stationed in Orlando, Florida, was charged with discarding more than 1,000 pieces of mail instead of delivering them to their addresses, McCoy is charged with stealing, taking, or abstracting mail and faces a fine of up to $250,000 and a maximum of five years in prison. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service inspector Charles Johnsten observed surveillance footage showing McCoy “throwing large quantities of U.S. Mail into [a] wooded lot,”...

A special set of stamps have been issued to mark the 60th anniversary of British rock band The Who. The Royal Mail revealed details of 12 stamps which feature images of some of the rock band's most popular album covers and group shots from their live performances. The album covers are My Generation from 1965; Tommy from 1969; Who's Next from 1971; Quadrophenia from 1973; Who Are You from 1978; Face Dances from 1981; Endless Wire from 2006; and Who from 2019. Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Keith Moon formed The Who in 1964. A miniatures sheet features...

The union’s Georgia president, whose name appears at the bottom of the letter, claims it was sent without his permission: ‘I had no idea they were sending out a letter with my name.’If former President Donald Trump wins November’s election, he would pose an “existential threat” — at least according to a letter apparently from the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), obtained by The Federalist.“If Donald Trump wins the upcoming election, it could prove an existential threat to our union and our contract,” the letter reads. “Your vote matters: consider how the consequences could affect you, your job, and...

On January 12, 2024, Judge Kathryn Kimball ruled the federal ban on possession of firearms in post offices is unconstitutional because it violates the Second Amendment. The United States indicted Emmanuel Ayala, a postal worker, for possessing a firearm in a Federal facility in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 930(a). Ayala argues that statute is unconstitutional as applied to him because the historical record does not support a law banning firearms in post offices. See N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). Relying on dicta from earlier cases, the United States responds that the Second...

A postal carrier who federal prosecutors said was caught on camera stealing cash, lottery tickets, gift cards and other items from the mail in western New York has avoided a prison sentence. After community members in Rochester complained to the U.S. Postal Service that “their mail had been tampered with,” surveillance cameras were installed in the employee’s delivery vehicles and recorded her from January 2022 to November 2023, according to court documents. On 38 separate occasions, the mail carrier was seen rifling through nearly 90 pieces of mail she was meant to deliver along her route, court documents said. After...

On Monday, a 63-year-old female mail carrier was robbed at gunpoint by two thugs while delivering mail in Dublin, California. Surveillance video of the incident shows the carrier, who has worked for the U.S. Postal Service for 33 years, delivering mail in a quiet residential neighborhood around 4:30 p.m. when suddenly a masked man emerges behind her. A second masked individual follows closely behind. Suddenly, a masked man comes up behind the mail carrier, followed by a second person who is also masked and the two masked men pull a gun. KTVC reports: “Somebody came up behind me and ‘boom,’...

A weekend spring storm that drenched the San Francisco Bay area and closed Northern California mountain highways also set a single-day snowfall record for the season on Sunday in the Sierra Nevada. The wet weather system had mostly moved out of the state by Sunday morning, but officials warned that roads would remain slick after around two feet (60 centimeters) of snow fell in some areas of the Sierra. “Did anyone have the snowiest day of the 2023/2024 season being in May on their winter bingo card?” the University of California, Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab asked on the social...

A paid a visit to the local Post Office today. At the counter, I was told that the branch had no postage stamps available for purchase. None, nada, zero. How is this possible?

In January of 2023, a Florida federal district Court restored the right to keep and bear arms on United States Postal Service (USPS) property. The court ruled a statute banning the possession of guns on USPS property, dating from 1972, was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. Currently, the ruling only applies to the individual case in Florida. The USPS has issued a statement aimed at employees, stating the USPS policy has not changed. From the USPS: A recent Florida district court decision is being misreported or may be misinterpreted as holding that the Postal Service’s ban on carrying firearms —...

In Florida, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle has ruled that the federal law prohibiting people from possessing firearms inside post offices is unconstitutional. The ruling is based on the 2022 Supreme Court ruling New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen recognized a person’s right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense.The case concerned Emmanuel Ayala, a U.S. Postal Service truck driver, who had a concealed weapons permit and held a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun in a fanny pack for self-defense. When police tried to stop him, he ran and struggled with officers. While dismissing the...

Afederal judge has declared that a law banning Americans from possessing guns in postal offices is unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Florida ruled Friday that a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 2022 made the postal office gun ban illegal. As part of the decision, she dismissed part of an indictment charging postal worker Emmanuel Ayala with illegally possessing a gun in a federal building. She said the criminal charge violated Ayala’s 2nd Amendment rights. [link to judge's opinion included in article]

Renowned economist Dawie Roodt said Eskom’s generation and distribution divisions are slowly dying, similar to South African Airways (SAA) and the South African Post Office (SAPO). Roodt made these comments during a Firstpathway Partners webinar on how the United States has emerged as a secure sanctuary for many South Africans. “Only the transmission part will remain, and the rest of Eskom will just slowly die and come to an end,” he said. Roodt previously explained that Eskom is completely bankrupt. “It has been operationally and financially run into the ground. It does not work anymore,” he said. Eskom currently owes...

Authorities are offering a reward as they search for a suspect who attacked and robbed a U.S. Postal Service worker at a post office location in San Francisco on Tuesday. According to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the incident took place at the Pine Street post office located at 1400 Pine Street. Officers said the suspect punched an employee and ran off with postal keys. Surveillance video shows the suspected robber running down the street, holding what is believed to be the keys. The suspect is shown wearing a hood and a face mask.

A federal jury convicted a Salt Lake City woman and former postal worker Wednesday for delaying and destroying immigration mail. During her time working the night shift as an express mail clerk at the USPS Processing and Delivery Center in Salt Lake City, Diana K. Molyneux was responsible for sorting and processing express and priority mail. After immigration mail from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services went missing in the fall of 2017, Molyneux's coworkers reported to supervisors that they found the mail in places it wasn't supposed to be, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release....

The US Postal Service is buying 9,250 Ford E-Transit battery-electric vehicles and 14,000 EV charging stations from three different suppliers as part of its plans to electrify a large portion of its mail delivery fleet. In an announcement post on Tuesday, the agency said it hasn’t finalized plans for where the vehicles and infrastructure will be deployed but intends to “begin building out its charging infrastructure across a minimum of 75 locations within the next 12 months.” USPS will order 9,250 Ford E-Transit EVs and 14,000 EV chargers (Image: Ford) The chargers will help power a growing number of EVs....

US Postal Service to purchase charging stations from Blink Charging Co., Siemens Industry Inc., and Rexel USA Energy Solutions in contracts totaling $260 million. The U.S. Postal Service is buying 9,250 Ford Motor Co. electric vans and 14,000 charging stations, taking the first step towards the promised electrification of its mail truck fleet. To meet an "urgent need for vehicles," the Postal Service will also purchase 9,250 gas-powered vans from Fiat Chrysler in North America, which is now part of Amsterdam-based Stellantis. The contracts awarded to Fiat Chrysler and Ford together will total just over $1 billion. The purchase comes...

A letter mailed in 1916 arrived at its intended address in London more than 100 years later. Photo courtesy of the Norwood Society/Twitter Feb. 20 (UPI) -- A London man who received a letter addressed to a former resident of his home was shocked to discover it had been mailed more than a century earlier in 1916. Finlay Glen said the letter arrived a couple years ago at his address on Hamlet Road in south London, but it was addressed to an unfamiliar name and bore an extremely old stamp and postmark. "We noticed that the year on it was...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear an appeal by an evangelical Christian former mail carrier in Pennsylvania who accused the U.S. Postal Service of religious bias after being reprimanded for refusing to deliver packages on Sundays. The justices took up Gerald Groff's case after lower courts dismissed his claim that the Postal Service violated federal anti-discrimination law by refusing to exempt him from working on Sundays, when he observes the Sabbath... ...Groff sued the Postal Service in 2019. The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year threw out the case, finding that exempting Groff caused...

The United States Postal Service has been monitoring protesters around the country for anti-gun and ant-Biden activity, according to newly unearthed intelligence assessments. Postal inspectors tracked the activities of gun rights activists in Virginia and far-right groups making their way to Washington, D.C. to protest President Biden's election, according to documents obtained by the Cato Institute. Cato obtained heavily redacted records through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that laid out postal inspectors' spying from September 2020 to April 2021, including their covert social media surveillance through a program called Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP).

The more our elections rely on the Postal Service, the more interference we can expect.Starbucks recently asked the National Labor Relations Board to suspend all pending and ongoing votes to unionize at its U.S. stores due to concerns stemming from mail-in ballots. The franchise’s objections once again raise questions about the credibility of election systems that rely on mail-in ballots. As with coffee companies, how much more with the American electoral process? With hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign material and increasing numbers of ballots in the mail, postal efficiency and honesty are becoming increasingly vital to free and...