Word: posts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...with watching political battles. The 1988 presidential campaign is Shapiro's third as a journalist. He wrote about politics for the Washington Post from 1979 to 1983, covered the presidential jockeying for Newsweek from 1983 until 1986 and now does so for TIME, which he joined last March. Shapiro enjoys observing the aspirants and savors the unexpected, such as Gary Hart's departure from the race. "That's the wonderful thing about politics," says Shapiro. "You never know...
...scheme apparently began on March 27, 1986, when a CIA employee on Government business bought 95 $1 stamps at the McLean, Va., post office. The image on the stamps was an austere candlestick; the inscription read AMERICA'S LIGHT FUELED BY TRUTH AND REASON. At CIA headquarters in Langley, a clerk , noticed that an orange halo that should have surrounded the candle flame was instead printed in the lower right-hand corner. The curiosity was shown to several co-workers; one of them was a philatelist who realized that the misprints were collectors' items...
...stamps. The orange glow of the candle flame was printed first through a photo-offset process. After a random quality-control inspection, the sheet was reversed so that the candlestick and the words surrounding it were printed upside down. Of 100 erroneous stamps sent to the McLean post office, five are believed to have been sold to the public before the CIA purchase. The whereabouts of those five stamps remains unknown...
...other 300 imperfect candlesticks? According to Charles Yeager, Washington correspondent for the weekly Linn's Stamp News, those rarities are circulating somewhere in the American heartland. "If I lived in the Midwest," says Yeager, "I'd go down to my local post office and have a look...
Conspiracy theorists can have a field day with Stampscam. Was it mere coincidence that 100 rare stamps were dispatched to the McLean post office, which is used by the CIA, while the other 300 misprinted candlesticks were shipped hundreds of miles away? Was it further coincidence that of all the customers at the post office, a CIA employee happened to buy the valuable issue? Why stop there: Could it be that profits from the stamp sales were being diverted to the contras? Or was the money being used to fund "off-the- shelf" covert activities? What did the Postmaster General...