Free Republic

NEW YORK (AFP) – When British climbing legend George Mallory took his iconic 1921 photo of Mount Everest's north face, the mighty, river-shaped glacier snaking under his feet seemed eternal. Decades of pollution and global warming later, modern mountaineer David Breashears has reshot the picture at the same spot -- and proved an alarming reality. Instead of the powerful, white, S-shaped sweep of ice witnessed by Mallory before he died on his conquest of Everest, the Main Rongbuk Glacier today is shrunken and withered. The frozen waves of ice pinnacles -- many .. the size of office buildings -- are...

Photo detective work could solve an enigma nearly nine decades old. But will it vindicate Hillary's historic climb or rewrite the record books? On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine left their camp less than a kilometer from the summit of Mount Everest on a mission to be the first mountaineers to ascend the world's highest peak (8,850 meters). They were never to be heard from again. Whether either man reached the summit—almost three decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's historic 1953 climb—has been an open question for nearly 86 years. Although more than half a...

LOS ANGELES (Map, News) - Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory, given a chance to make up for his errant ceremonial first pitch on Major League Baseball's opening day, delivered two more wobbly - but slightly better - pitches on ABC-TV's "Jimmy Kimmel Live." Mallory's pitch in front of a sold-out crowd Monday at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati was way off target and made him the butt of jokes among some late night comedians. He made another poor throw in his first attempt on the set of Kimmel's show Wednesday. With actor Kurt Russell as his catcher, Mallory tossed the...

ATLANTA - The Georgia Board of Education voted Thursday to uphold a local school board's decision to leave Harry Potter books on library shelves despite a mother's objections. The board members voted without discussion to back the Gwinnett County school board's decision to deny Laura Mallory's request to remove the best-selling books. Mallory, who has three children in elementary school, has worked for more than a year to ban the books from Gwinnett schools, claiming the popular fiction series is an attempt to indoctrinate children in witchcraft. "It's mainstreaming witchcraft in a subtle and deceptive manner, in a children-friendly format,"...