Senate seeks ways to save ailing USPS

Senate seeks ways to save ailing USPS

WASHINGTON

With big postal cuts looming, the Senate is deciding whether to stabilize the ailing U.S. Postal Service with a short-term cash infusion while delaying most decisions on closing post offices and ending Saturday mail delivery by requiring further review.

The mail agency, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, says it needs to begin closing thousands of low-revenue post offices and mail-processing centers this year as part of a billion-dollar cost-cutting effort to become profitable again by 2015. But local communities are fretting about the economic impact and tens of thousands of layoffs, drawing the concerns of lawmakers in an election year.

Study: Optimism good for the heart

WASHINGTON

Be happy — it seems to be good for your heart.

Scientists long have known that Type A personalities and people who are chronically angry, anxious or depressed have a higher risk of heart attacks.

Now a Harvard review of the flip side of that psychology concludes that being upbeat and optimistic just may help protect against heart disease.

Lead researcher Julia Boehm of the Harvard School of Public Health reviewed dozens of studies examining a positive outlook — as determined by various psychological measurements — on heart health. Optimism in particular seems key, as a number of studies found the most optimistic people had half the risk of a first heart attack when compared with the least optimistic, Boehm said.

World powers cling to Syria cease-fire

BEIRUT

Artillery shatters homes in opposition areas. Regime tanks roll though city centers. Civilians dig graves for dozens of corpses, scrawling their names on headstones with black markers.

Six days on, this is the cease-fire in Syria.

But U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon and others stand by the U.N.-negotiated truce, saying the violence is sporadic and that President Bashar Assad’s regime has lessened its assaults. Even with dozens reported dead over the past two days, the world powers struggling to stop Syria’s bloodshed are reluctant to declare the cease-fire dead.

Warren Buffett has prostate cancer

OMAHA, Neb.

Warren Buffett is telling shareholders in an open letter he has been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer.

The 81-year-old billionaire investor and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. says in the letter, released Tuesday, that his condition is “not remotely life-threatening” or debilitating.

Buffett’s letter says he and his doctors have decided on a two-month treatment plan to begin in mid-July.

Buffett says he was diagnosed last Wednesday and has received tests including a CAT scan, a bone scan and an MRI.

He says he feels “great — as if I were in my normal excellent health.”

New species found in New Mexico cave

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.

Scientists have discovered a new shrimplike species in a gypsum cave in southeastern New Mexico, only a few dozen miles from the famous caves at Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

The species of amphipod was unknown before being discovered about a month ago in the Burton Flats area east of Carlsbad, said Jim Goodbar, the Bureau of Land Management’s senior cave specialist. The agency announced the discovery Tuesday.

Associated Press