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Norway sorry for Tamil Tiger stamps

Norway's foreign ministry has issued an official apology to the Sri Lankan authorities after the Norwegian postal service published stamps depicting the founder of the Tamil Tigers, a violent separatist group.

Norway sorry for Tamil Tiger stamps
Velupillai Prabhakaran (Photo: Reuters/LTTE)

The postage stamps feature a picture of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the now deceased founder of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), against a backdrop of a flag bearing the group’s official emblem.

A small quantity of the stamps was ordered by a customer who commissioned the personalized prints on the postal service’s website.

The post office meanwhile was oblivious to the political preferences of the aspiring philatelist.

“This motif initially seems entirely innocent: it’s a picture of a person and what looks like a flower. But for people who are aware of the situation in Sri Lanka it can seem offensive,” post office spokesman Jørn Michalsen told newspaper VG.

In a statement published on the website of the Norwegian embassy in Colombo, the foreign ministry said the stamps “passed the postal service’s quality and assurance control and were printed without being stopped as they should have been.”

The customer who placed the order has been barred from designing further personalized stamps, the ministry said, adding:

“In a letter to the Sri Lankan Embassy in Oslo, The Norwegian Postal Service has offered their sincere apologies for this most unfortunate oversight. The Norwegian Embassy in Colombo shares this sentiment.”

The LTTE is considered a terrorist organization by a host of countries, including India, the United States and the European Union’s 27 member states.

The Norwegian postal service has not released any pictures of the offending stamps.

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Can you rely on Sweden’s Postnord to deliver cards and presents on time?

Wednesday marks the last day you can send first class letters or parcels in Sweden and still hope they'll make it in time for Christmas Eve. But how reliable is PostNord, the company which runs Sweden's postal service?

Can you rely on Sweden's Postnord to deliver cards and presents on time?

What can you still send and hope for it to be delivered by Christmas? 

The Christmas deadline for letters and parcels outside of Sweden already passed on December 12th, as has the deadline for ordering anything online and hoping for it to arrive on time, with most e-commerce companies advising customers that anything ordered later than December 19th will not arrive in time. 

But if you’re sending first-class letters, pre-paid parcels, and small packages for delivery through the letterbox, you can still send them up until December 21st. The same goes for other parcel services such as Postnord MyPack Home, PostNord MyPack Home small, PostNord MyPack Collect, and Postpaket parcels.  

And if you’re willing to pay a bit extra, you can send express mail letters, express parcels, and first class ‘varubrev’ small parcels up until December 22nd. 

“Those dates still apply. We have written in a press statement that if you send by those dates you can be pretty sure that they will arrive in time,” Anders Porelius, head of press at PostNord, told The Local on Tuesday. 

But can you trust Postnord to deliver when they say they will? 

Not entirely.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority, Sweden’s postal regulator, ruled on December 8th that the company was failing to meet its regulatory target of delivering 95 percent of all letters within two working days, with 28 million letters delivered late between June and November. 

An investigative documentary by TV4’s Kalla Fakta (Cold Facts) programme, was sent pictures showing huge piles of late, undelivered letters in one of PostNord’s terminals, and interviewed postal workers who said that they were unable to complete their deliveries now they had been moved from daily to every other day, as they had twice as many letters to deliver on the days when they worked. 

“You get yelled at by the customers, and rightly so, you get yelled at by your bosses, and you scold yourself because you feel like you’re not able to do enough,” said Emilia Leijon, one postal worker. “We pretty much never manage to deliver a whole satchel. There’s too much post and too little time.” 

What is PostNord doing about the delays? 

The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority has given the company until January 30th to carry out an analysis into why it is not managing to meet its targets, and to draw up an action plan of how it is going to improve. 

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