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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate offered a lifeline to the nearly bankrupt U.S. Postal Service on Wednesday, voting to give the struggling agency an $11 billion cash infusion while delaying controversial decisions on closing post offices and ending Saturday delivery.

If you want to mail a letter in Sugar Hill, N.H., you’d better be quick. The town’s postal unit has cut its hours to a mere 30 minutes per day, sparking outrage from the rural community’s 563 residents that has now caught the attention of the state’s two U.S. Senators. The Postal Service announced in May that instead of eliminating up to 3,700 post offices, it would instead reduce their hours of operation from 8 hours per day to between 2 and 4 hours, but only after holding community meetings.

By James Bovard -- The U.S. Postal Service announced plans this month to phase out overnight delivery of first-class mail. Postal officials are portraying the decision as a painful but necessary budget-induced departure from a long history of exemplary service. In reality, the Postal Service has been intentionally slowing down first-class mail for almost 50 years. It’s time to end the post office’s monopoly on letter delivery.

The historical high for federal prosecutions of corrupt public officials was in 1993 with 1,362 convictions total within the network of U.S. Attorney’s offices. The number lingered at or near 1,000 convictions until it peaked again in 2008 at 1,129. The number of convictions reached 1,107 in 2011, the third highest number in the last two decades.

With the rise of e-mail and the decline of letters, mail volume is falling at a staggering rate, and the postal service's survival plan isn't reassuring. Elsewhere in the world, postal services are grappling with the same dilemma — only most of them, in humbling contrast, are thriving.

Wrong on so many levels... Gordon Wozniak, a city councilman in Berkeley, Calif., has proposed an email tax to provide much-needed revenue to the ailing U.S. Postal Service. “There should be something like a bit tax,” Wozniak said. “I mean a bit tax could be a cent per-gigabit and they would still make, probably, billions of dollars a year… And there should be, also, a very tiny tax on email.” Wozniak said the bit tax could bring in revenue to help a number of sectors, beyond just the post office.

Canada Post has fired a 61-year-old employee after investigators found thousands of pieces of missing mail stacked in piles in the man's home.

Today we announced that Fr33 Aid has abandoned its IRS application for recognition of non-profit status. In this post, I answer some of the questions we expect to receive about this decision and discuss related news:
- Fr33 Aid becomes Bitcoin-based organization
- Fr33 Aid no longer dependent on traditional banks
- Fr33 Aid to give talk at Bitcoin 2013

Homeless sex offender Charles Mader was arrested in Albuquerque, New Mexico recently after failing to notify authorities that he had moved from a neighborhood dumpster bin to an abandoned house nearby.