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• Arnold's heroic actions in the Revolutionary War's Battles of Saratoga are detailed in a new exhibit opening Thursday at Saratoga National Historical Park, and his capture of British-held Fort Ticonderoga at the side of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys is being re-staged later this month in a rare nighttime re-enactment.
• The Connecticut-born Arnold led American soldiers through Fort Ticonderoga's front gate in a pre-dawn raid on May 10, 1775, and he helped defeat the British at the Battles of Saratoga two years later. But most Americans know Arnold as the man who betrayed his nation by trying to turn over the American fortifications at West Point to the British, then joining the redcoats when the plot was uncovered.
• Soon after the war broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the ambitious Arnold began displaying the prickly personality traits that made him a polarizing figure years before he switched sides.
• "He was hated long before he became a traitor," said Eric Schnitzer, a park ranger at Saratoga National Historic Park in Stillwater, 20 miles north of Albany. "Some of the guys fighting with him thought he was a total and complete jerk. Other guys thought he was wonderful."
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• DORE, N.D. (AP) -- For more than three decades, Kerry and Darrell Finsaas were all that kept this blink-and-you-miss-it North Dakota community from becoming completely deserted.
• As Dore's only residents, they lived in a ghost town on the desolate northern Plains. But now the couple has neighbors -- and lots of them. The all-but-forgotten former farming village has been reborn as a hub of oil activity. And it may not be the last abandoned settlement to be resurrected from the dust.
• "We knew it was inevitable," Kerry Finsaas said of the oil boom that has enveloped the region. "We're making the best of it, but it doesn't mean we like it."
• Like many farm-dependent communities throughout the nation, Dore fell victim to changing agricultural practices and a harsh rural economy. By the early 1960s, the town on the state's far western edge, near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, was largely vacant. Most residents had either moved away or died.
• One of the final blows came in the mid-1970s, when Dore lost its ZIP code. Since then, most surviving buildings have been leveled by bulldozers, weather and time. About all that remains is an empty grain elevator standing tall over the prairie -- a

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