Postal Service marks 250th anniversary with stamps honoring Ben Franklin and postal carriers
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Franklin was chosen as the first postmaster general because he had previously served in the British postal service for North America, including as co-Postmaster General from 1757 until 1774.
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A book of 20 Franklin stamps is exclusively being sold with a commemorative 32-page booklet titled 'Putting a Stamp on the American Experience.' The new Forever stamp features a redesigned, modern interpretation of an 1875 reproduction of the original 5-cent stamp released in 1847.
President George Washington was featured on the first 10-cent stamp.
The USPS has also released a commemorative sheet of 20 interconnected stamps, dubbed '250 Years of Delivering,' that portray a mail carrier making her rounds throughout a year. The stamps were illustrated by renowned cartoonist Chris Ware.
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Steiner has lauded the Postal Service for its history and recently voiced support for keeping the USPS as a self-financing, independent agency of the executive branch. Last week, in a video message to employees, Steiner said he opposed the idea of privatizing the Postal Service, contrasting with
'I do not believe the Postal Service should be privatized or that it should become an appropriated part of the federal government,' Steiner said.
He said his goal as postmaster was to meet the agency's 'financial and service performance expectations' under the current structure.
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The Hill
23 minutes ago
- The Hill
These key US allies are set to recognize Palestinian state
About three-quarters of countries in the United Nations (UN) recognize the Palestinian state, which holds a 'Permanent Observer State' status within the intergovernmental body — allowing it to be part of the proceedings, but unable to vote on resolutions. Three more countries — close U.S. allies — have joined the tally in the last week. Last week, France said that it would recognize Palestinian statehood, with President Emmanuel Macron stating the move is part of a commitment to a 'just and lasting peace' in the Middle East. France became the first nation within the Group of Seven (G7) to do so. The announcement came shortly after negotiations over a ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas broke down, with the Jewish State and the U.S. pulling their negotiators from Qatar. President Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff pinned the blame on Hamas and argued that the officials will consider 'alternative options to bring the hostages home and try to create a more stable environment for the people of Gaza.' Israel's ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, said last week that 'neither international conferences disconnected from reality nor unilateral statements at the UN will lead to peace.' Then this week, as the international outrage over the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip has continued, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the United Kingdom was ready to recognize Palestine's statehood if Israel does not manage to take action of ending the war with Hamas, a conflict that has been ongoing since the Palestinian militant group's terrorist attack on the Jewish State on Oct. 7, 2023. Starmer set the deadline for the UN's General Assembly in September, calling for an uptick in aid being delivered into the war-torn enclave and for Hamas to release the remaining hostages. 'I've always said that we will recognize a Palestinian state as a contribution to a proper peace process at the moment of maximum impact for the two-state solution, with that solution now under threat, this is the moment to act,' Starmer said. Canada became the third close U.S. ally this week to announce it would recognize the Palestinian state. Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney said Ottawa would provide recognition of the state in September at the UN's General Assembly, a decision that would entail the Palestinian Authority 'holding general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part, and to demilitarize the Palestinian state.' Trump said on Truth Social that Canada's decision would make it hard for the U.S. to reach a trade agreement with Ottawa. On Monday, the president said that the U.S. would set up 'food centers' in Gaza as food distribution in the enclave has come under intense scrutiny and deaths of Gazans from starvation. Trump also acknowledged that there is starvation among the roughly 2.1 million population in Gaza, sharing a different view from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said that no one is starving in the enclave. The White House said on Thursday that Witkoff and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee would be in Gaza on Friday to 'inspect the current distribution sites and secure a plan to deliver more food and meet with local Gazans to hear first-hand about this dire situation on the ground.'
New York Post
23 minutes ago
- New York Post
Europe's preening appeasers will recognize a fantasy — not ‘Palestine'
French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced this week that their countries would unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The first problem with that is 'Palestine' is a fictional place. There never was any such thing. And diplomatic recognition of it no more changes this reality than if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to recognize the archipelago of Islamic banlieues on the outskirts of Paris as an independent nation. But what exactly are Britain and France recognizing? Mahmoud Abbas, the dictator of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, is now 89 years old. What do Macron and Starmer think will happen when he finally dies? The best-case scenario, I suppose, is for another corrupt strongman to take over an independent 'Palestine.' Will these Western European leaders back an autocracy? What happens when a civil war breaks out? Because the prospects are quite high. Since the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority has relied heavily on Israel's security apparatus to stay in power. It would almost certainly implode without it. The French and Brits should recall that the first thing Gazans did when handed a protostate in 2005 was to destroy over 3,000 greenhouses and modern farming systems that American Jews had purchased for $14 million and handed them, gratis. The second thing they did, though, was put Hamas in charge. So, will France and Britain support open elections in this new nation? What if Hamas, or some other iteration of that organization, wins those elections? Will France and Britain recognize such a state? 'Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people,' Macron claimed during a visit to Ramallah with Abbas in 2023. This is Western elitist twaddle: The unpleasant truth is that Islamists far better represent the people than the 'moderate' Fatah party, which is propped up with billions of Western dollars and Israeli assistance. In 2006, Hamas not only won the Gaza elections, but also won a majority of the parliamentary seats in the PA, which it still holds. In 2024, Hamas and Fatah signed the Beijing Declaration, brokered by Communist China, agreeing to form an 'interim national reconciliation government.' Will the French and British 'recognize' a similar arrangement in the future? Is Macron going to send French troops into Jenin to root out Islamist militants firing Iranian- or Qatari-funded missiles into Jerusalem? Get opinions and commentary from our columnists Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters Whether the French could even win such a war, I suppose, is the better question. And what will 'Palestine' look like? Not once in the dozens of attempts to give Palestinians a state have they accepted any arrangement that didn't include 'a right to return' into Israel proper. 'Nakba' itself — Palestinians' bitter term for what they see as the 'catastrophe' of Israel's founding — was the result of a war that was launched by local Arabs and their allies who rejected a Jewish state. Even if a deal could be struck, what makes Macron and Starmer believe Palestinians can run their own nation, anyway? Palestinians in Gaza are unwilling to build the basic infrastructure necessary for themselves. despite receiving hundreds of millions in yearly aid. Every Israeli restriction on Palestinians in Gaza has been put in place to mitigate violence. When you send Gaza concrete, they build tunnels and military installations under hospitals, not schools or businesses. If you build them infrastructure, they dig up water pipes to make casements for rockets. When you allow shipments of necessities, they smuggle in explosives. When you send food, they give it to the terrorist army before the children. Unless, of course, those children have been recruited to the Islamist cause. Will France and Britain send in their citizens to administer this new state and its borders to ensure that the same doesn't happen again? Or will Israel just be forced to invade once more? Now, of course, Macron says Hamas must be 'disarmed' and that Gaza needs to be rebuilt. But the French and British recognition of 'Palestine' incentivizes the opposite. What do they think Israel has been trying to do? Is France or Britain going to disarm Hamas? Is France or Britain going to bring back the more than 50 hostages still being held and tortured in Gaza? Macron and Starmer, like so many apologists for Palestinian violence, lose nothing with this cynical moral preening meant to mollify their domestic Islamists. The real world is a lot more complicated. David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Twitter @davidharsanyi
Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Horst Mahler, 89, dies; voice of the German far left, then the far right
In 1970, he helped found the Red Army Faction, or RAF, a guerrilla group that terrorized German society for years. Three decades later, he returned to the national spotlight when he successfully defended the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany against an effort to ban it. Advertisement Mr. Mahler spent long stretches of his adult life in prison -- first for his part in a string of bank robberies by the RAF and then, in the 2000s and 2010s, for repeatedly denying the Holocaust and praising Adolf Hitler, both of which are crimes in Germany. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Many of Mr. Mahler's erstwhile comrades on the left, including Gerhard Schröder, who went on to become chancellor, and Joschka Fischer, who later became foreign minister, considered him a tragic figure, if not mentally deranged. But Mr. Mahler insisted that they were the ones who had changed, having left behind their anti-imperialist ideals to accumulate power. 'We have a political class which betrays Germany,' he told the British newspaper The Independent in 2000. 'Joschka Fischer is a traitor. Schröder is also a traitor. He is not uninformed. He knows what's at stake.' Advertisement Mr. Mahler's enemy, he insisted, had always been the global capitalist system, which he had come to believe was trying to destroy German society through immigration and privatization. He pushed his right-wing beliefs to the extreme. After defending the National Democrats in court, he renounced the party, saying that its aspirations to join the federal parliament legitimized the postwar German state -- something that he himself rejected. He claimed that the German Constitution, adopted after the fall of the Nazis, was just a place holder awaiting the rise of a Fourth Reich, a belief he shared with the ultraradical Reichsbürger movement. Horst Werner Dieter Mahler was born on Jan. 23, 1936, in Haynou (now Chojnow), in what was then German Silesia and is now part of Poland. His parents were enthusiastic Nazis. His mother, Dorothea (Nixdorf) Mahler, received the Mutterkreuz, or Mother's Cross, for raising four children according to the ideals of the Nazi regime. In 1945, with Soviet forces closing in on their town, the Mahlers moved to Rosslau, southwest of Berlin, where his father, Willy, worked as a dentist. Germany's defeat and the end of the Nazi era left Willy bereft, and he died by suicide in 1949. The Mahlers moved again, this time to West Berlin, where Horst blossomed as a student, studying law at the Free University of Berlin. After receiving his degree in 1963, he opened his own legal practice. His early work was apolitical -- mostly corporate law -- and quite successful. But as a student, he had joined a series of left-wing organizations, and as a lawyer, he began to offer his services to activists who had run afoul of the courts. Advertisement His client list, a who's who of the 1960s German left, included Rudi Dutschke, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, earning Mahler the nickname the Hippie Lawyer. In time, he became one of them. He was implicated in a 1968 arson attack on a department store in Frankfurt, for which Baader was convicted. That same year, conservative publisher Axel Springer sued Mr. Mahler, claiming that he had led a riot outside its Berlin offices, hours after a right-wing activist shot and severely wounded Dutschke. In 1970, Mr. Mahler joined journalist Ulrike Meinhof and others to break Baader out of prison. They fled to Jordan, where they trained in guerrilla warfare under the tutelage of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Calling themselves the Red Army Faction, but often known in the news media as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, they returned to Germany to launch nearly a decade of bank robberies, kidnappings, bombings and assassinations. Most of the original leaders, including Mr. Mahler, were not there to see any of it. Mahler was arrested in October 1970 and sentenced to 14 years in prison. Meinhof and Baader were captured in 1972; both died by suicide in prison, Meinhof in 1976 and Baader in 1977. In prison, Mr. Mahler renounced the RAF and rejected a deal between the group and the authorities to release him in exchange for a kidnapped German politician, Peter Lorenz. (Lorenz was later freed in exchange for other prisoners.) He also began to read the works of philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel, whose concept of the historical dialectic, he later said, had shaped his conversion to far-right nationalism. The German people, he claimed, were in conflict with 'foreign' forces, chief among them Jews, and he committed himself to the struggle. Advertisement Mr. Mahler won early release in 1980. His lawyers included other veterans of the 1960s left, including Schröder, the future chancellor, and Otto Schily, who became Schröder's interior minister. In a turn of fate, Schily would face off against Mahler in the government's effort to ban the National Democratic Party. Mr. Mahler emerged as a far-right convert in the late 1990s, denouncing immigrants and calling for Germany to leave behind its guilt over the Nazi era. He founded a group called For Our Country, which, among other things, protested plans for a national Holocaust memorial. He became a fixture in the German news media for his outlandishly offensive comments. In 2001, he praised the Sept. 11 terrorists, while simultaneously claiming that the attacks had been staged by the United States. After leaving the National Democrats, he founded a group called the Association for the Rehabilitation of Those Persecuted for Denying the Holocaust. The German government banned it in 2008. Starting in 2007, Mr. Mahler spent nearly 13 years in prison for making antisemitic statements. After being released in 2015 for health reasons -- part of his left leg was amputated because of an infection -- he fled to Hungary, where he sought asylum. The Hungarians returned him to Germany, and he finished his sentence in 2020. Mr. Mahler is survived by his wife, Elizabeth (Kujawa) Mahler, and two children from a previous marriage, Wiebke and Axel Mahler. Mr. Mahler returned to court in 2022, once again for making antisemitic statements. The trial was temporarily suspended in 2023, however, after the court determined that Mahler was too sick to appear before the judge. He died before it could resume. Advertisement This article originally appeared in
