The UN Postal Administration issued a new set of stamps with the theme, "One Heart, One World". The designs are based on works of art featured at the "International Exhibition of the Heart" which opened at the UN Headquarters last year.

I think I may have blogged about this already over on The Other Side, but it deserves mention here as well. When Royal Mail isn't settling lawsuits, they're doing some interesting things with stamps, like printing them on thermographic paper. The new heat-sensitive stamps depict scenes under foul weather conditions which, with a rub of a finger, transform bleak gray skies to sunny blue ones.

Here's a juicy tidbit for the Going Postal files.

Royal Mail paid a photographer who had sued them because they used his images, but denied his contribution. John Hedgecoe, who took silhouette photographs of the Queen used in the creation of an image copied an estimated 150 billion times, sued over statements that cast doubt on his contribution.

Obviously, this isn't very funny, but the title of this blog is Going Postal, after all.

A postal worker in Kearny, NJ, slashed 3 people at a mail processing facility yesterday before being killed by police. An official for the US Postal Inspection Service said that the Ethiopian immigrant had a dispute with a person at the plant and that that likely triggered the attack.

OK, kind of a good news, bad news thing here.

Good news: The Disabled American Veterans will begin to use stamps again on its return envelopes for fund raising. The practice had been terminated in 1992 because of higher costs. This past Fall, the nonprofit agency tested 25,000 packages with stamped return envelopes and 25,000 without stamps. The return rate of the stamped envelopes was 8% versus 5% for the unstamped envelopes.

Bad news: It's still junk mail.

I think we've finally found the solution to the USPS' problems. We should be following the Communication Authority of Thailand's example. The Thais pay 2 baht to mail a letter. It costs almost 4 baht to deliver that letter. The government subsidizes the rest of that extra 2-baht cost that's needed to get the mail delivered. Perfect, huh?

Well, of course, the Thais are privatizing their mail system, and the subsidies are going away. Guess they've got postal woes, too.

Oh, baby! Chalk me up for a sheet of these! Switzerland just announced that it will issue a chocolate-scented stamp. The ninety-centime stamp goes on sale next month to celebrate the centenary of the Swiss chocolate producer's federation, Chocosuisse. Link courtesy of Fark.