Word: postal
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...murders started in September 1982, when the parents of Mary Kellerman gave the 12-year-old a painkiller when she woke up complaining of a cold. She died hours later. Postal worker Adam Janus died in another Chicago suburb later that morning. Janus' brother and his brother's wife, complaining of headaches while mourning Adam, died too. In a few days the death toll grew - the only link being that each victim had taken Extra-Strength Tylenol. (See the top 10 unsolved crimes...
...Kursk region, southeast of Lyudinovo. She wants to borrow 30,000 rubles--just over $1,000. The woman taking her call fills in the details on a screen. Experienced workers can process a request and grant preapproval in under six minutes, but Kumyiny can't remember her postal code, which slows everything down. Watching over the process is deputy operations director Viktoriya Selezneva, who says the economic crisis has yet to arrive. "The volume of calls hasn't decreased for us," she says. And should callers have worries, the staff has been given a reassuring script to deal with them...
...agency's bleak outlook means the Postal Service will take more drastic steps. Some are primarily intended to attract more customers. Starting Jan. 18, for instance, online discounts and other savings plans begun in May 2008 will expand to make Postal Service prices more competitive - a move that could be showcased in a spring advertising campaign that will promote Priority Mail...
...Although the Postal Service is a government agency, it lost taxpayer funding in 1982, which means that it now has to operate within the black like any private company. Even before last year's financial loss was announced, the Postal Service - knowing that bad tidings were on the way - had scrambled to find $2 billion in savings. In 2008 the agency cut 50 million work hours and phased out many of its 23,000 automated stamp vending machines, which have become expensive to repair and update. Clearly, the savings weren't enough. And 2009 doesn't look much better...
...Other changes, however, could be more painful. The Postal Service has frozen officers' and executives' pay and cut back on travel. Unlike competitors FedEx and UPS, the agency is hoping to avoid shedding jobs. Still, since September, 156,000 employees at the nation's largest employer - from executives on down - have been offered voluntary early retirement. About 5% are expected to accept: a first wave of 3,685 workers effectively retired on Dec. 31, while about 4,000 more will exit in February. Several thousand more departures are expected in March. The retirees will not be replaced. These reductions...