2005: The Year in Review, Part 5 – Issues

News stories divide into events and issues. Events get short, intense coverage, and then fade. Issues don’t fade because the questions they contain are usually hard to answer. As Steve Delaney reports in this section of our year-in-review, one issue in particular turned up again and again.

Danby quarry provides marble for large-scale projects

When a chunk of marble fell off the U.S. Supreme Court Building last month, it was widely reported that the stone was from Vermont. What the news accounts didn’t say was how much Vermont Marble is in the nation’s capital: The Jefferson Memorial, the Senate office building, parts of the white house and the Pentagon.

Spying

Commentator Madeleine Kunin thinks that the recent revelations about secret domestic surveillance of Americans are alarming – and at the same time – very “deja-vu”.