The USPS Fairness Act, an earlier version of which cleared the House last February, would “repeal the requirement that the United States Postal Service prepay future retirement benefits,” a rollback supported by the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union (APWU) and other organizations representing mail carriers.

“The bipartisan USPS Fairness Act is one of the first steps toward returning the Postal Service to solid financial footing, and I urge Congress to quickly pass this critical legislation,” said APWU president Mark Dimondstein.

Approved by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by former President George W. Bush in 2006, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act “required the Postal Service to create a $72 billion fund that would pay for its employees’ retirement health benefits for more than 50 years into the future,” NBC News explained Tuesday.

“This is not required [of] any other federal agency,” NBC noted.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the lead House sponsor of the USPS Fairness Act, said in a statement Monday that “the unreasonable prefunding mandate has threatened the survival of the USPS and placed at risk vital services for the millions who rely on it.”

Wood is made of two basic ingredients: cellulose, which are tiny fibres, and lignin, which bonds those fibres together to give it strength.

Early attempts to make transparent wood involved removing the lignin, but this involved hazardous chemicals, high temperatures and a lot of time, making the product expensive and somewhat brittle. The new technique is so cheap and easy it could literally be done in a backyard.

Mere days before Donald Trump’s helicopter shrank into the skies, we got a promising early indication that telecom companies’ hog-wild joyride under Trump’s FCC is coming to an end. Last week, Charter Communications, the company behind Spectrum, withdrew its petition to impose data caps: basically its attempt to restrict customers’ internet usage in order to force them to spend more money. The FCC announced yesterday that Charter had withdrawn its petition, which it filed in June, just a few months into the pandemic.

In a statement emailed to Gizmodo, Charter explained that the timing had only to do with the pandemic. “In light of the ongoing severity of the global pandemic and its effects on our customers, we want to offer them the assurance that they will continue to benefit from unlimited access to broadband and the accompanying financial certainty it provides during these trying times,” it said, “and therefore have withdrawn our petition.”

This is a heel-turn from Charter’s previous position that the pandemic should have no bearing on a decision to allow it to impose data caps, namely because Charter has waived fees and increased pay for front line workers. An FCC filing literally included the header: “Charter Has Provided Substantial Assistance to Subscribers During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Which Provides No Justification for Continuing the Conditions.”

It’s all but certain that Charter would’ve had a better shot at getting data caps under Chairman Pai, who summed himself up early in his term as Chairman with a casual crack about himself as a “Verizon puppet” and then he lived up to the legend.

“When we launched Spotify in 2008, our mission was to reward artists when customers listened to music, and today, we finally reached three figures in artist payouts,” said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, posing with a giant check for a $0.00000029 payout to Dua Lipa for her song “Break My Heart” that propelled the world’s musicians past a collective $100 in earnings.