Postal Workers

Five men are spending nearly a quarter-million dollars and countless hours campaigning to become Orange County's 3rd District supervisor. Despite all the money and effort, it's uncertain if the Jan. 28 special election to fill the vacant seat will take place. And neither candidates nor voters will know until three days before that date -- at the earliest.

More than a year after anthrax killed two workers in the main mail-handling center of the nation's capital, U.S. Postal Service crews began fumigating the building with a toxic gas. The 17.5 million-cubic-foot Brentwood facility has been closed since October 2001, after anthrax-laced letters to two senators were determined to have been processed there and the two postal workers died. Chlorine dioxide gas was to be pumped into the building until today.

The U.S. Postal Service is purchasing 1.6 million doses of potassium iodide pills to protect its employees against thyroid cancer in the event of a nuclear explosion or meltdown. Taking a cue from the anthrax scare a year ago, the postal service is spending nearly $293,000 to give its 750,000 employees the opportunity to have two days' worth of potassium iodide tablets waiting for them at work. The cost of buying the medication breaks down to 18.

A year to the day after a deadly anthrax-laden letter was opened in the office of a U.S. senator, postal worker Terrell Worrell still wonders why authorities kept the Brentwood mail center open after work came to a complete halt on Capitol Hill. For six days after a letter containing the deadly spores appeared in the office of Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Worrell and at least 1,700 other employees kept working at the Brentwood facility, where the letter was processed.

A mail carrier who donated a kidney to one of the customers on his LaVale, Md., route has been selected as Hero of the Year by the National Assn. of Letter Carriers. Paul Wagoner, 42, of Short Gap, W. Va., will be honored at ceremonies today in Washington, the mail carriers' union said. The award is one of several given annually to mail carriers who come to the aid of people, usually in fires or crime victims.

A mail carrier was seriously injured Monday afternoon when a pit bull mauled her, biting off part of her nose in Los Angeles, authorities said. It was the second high-profile pit bull attack in a week. On Saturday, a pit bull attacked 2-year-old John Michael Macias-Drisner and his grandmother in La Habra, seriously injuring his face and scalp.

Catholic mail carriers went on strike Saturday in Londonderry over fears they could be targeted in revenge for the latest killing of a Protestant. In a related development, police released without charge five suspected Irish Republican Army dissidents who had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in Thursday's killing of David Caldwell, a Protestant who had been helping to renovate a British army facility in Londonderry. Caldwell, 51, died after picking up a booby-trapped lunch box.

A conservative group is suing the Bush administration for access to documents surrounding last fall's anthrax attacks, saying that top officials may have known that the bioterrorist assault was coming. Judicial Watch said Friday it has yet to receive documents from several agencies after filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The group says the documents will show who knew what and when they knew it.

Letter carriers in the Van Nuys postal district lead the nation in dog-bite injuries, according to the U.S. Postal Service. Between September 2000 and September of last year, letter carriers reported 85 bites in the Van Nuys district, which includes Santa Clarita and the San Fernando Valley. In the same period, postal workers in the Los Angeles district reported 42 bites. Nationwide, 3,138 were reported.

Journalism, the art and craft of catching history on the fly and pinning it down on a sheet of newsprint, reserves a special place of honor for those who practice it in cases of extreme adversity. In the annals of American newspapering, however, what happened in this seaside, upscale Florida town last autumn was unprecedented. In the inimitable style of the publications that were involved, it might be summed up in punchy headlines: "Germs Invade Supermarket Tabs!