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...European Difference Europe's political landscape has not always been so welcoming. Thirty years ago, as Sigurdardottir began her political career, "Iceland was extremely homophobic," says Baldur Thorhallsson, a political scientist at the University of Iceland. Education changed that. Over the last 30 years Samtokin '78, a Reykjavik-based gay-rights organization, worked with the national media to produce news programs that gave gay men and women a human face, and acquainted the public with the prejudice gays encounter. Activists visited high schools to create gay role models and counter stereotypes. By 1996 the country had legalized gay civil unions...
...from the climate in most of the U.S., where - despite the recent election of Annise Parker, a gay woman, as mayor of Houston, America's fourth largest city - honesty can still end a gay politician's career. Openly gay politicians such as San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk began winning seats in U.S. cities with large gay populations in the 1970s. Progress has since slowed, says David Rayside, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He believes that the relative strength of incumbency in the U.S. creates a barrier to the corridors of power, as does "the strength...
Last Spring, as Arthur Marquis started brushing up on the French he'd learned in junior high, the 61-year-old retired lawyer and Long Beach, Calif., resident had trouble discerning where one mellifluous word ended and the next began. So he decided to exercise his auditory skills in much the same way a bodybuilder might zero in on a particular muscle group. His weapon of choice: Posit Science's Brain Fitness software, which promised to hone his hearing, as well as his memory, for $395. (Yes, you heard that right: $395.) After completing the program's 40 hour-long...
...late '60s. In 1970, U.S. Customs sent nearly 1,800 men and women to the U.S. Army's Fort Belvoir for "sky marshal" training. But as the attacks continued unabated, critics slammed the program as ineffective. When airport security measures improved (X-ray screenings of U.S. passengers' bags began in the early '70s), the marshal program deteriorated. After the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 to Beirut by Hizballah--in which an American passenger was killed--President Reagan expanded the program, swelling the number of marshals to nearly...
...began a street ministry in April 2006 and recruited some 60 volunteers to distribute food, blankets and Bibles to the dozens of women and girls selling sex within a 10-block radius of the stadium. They also preached to clients and traffickers. Fights were commonplace. Lombard allowed his volunteers to carry firearms, and several wound up in the intensive-care unit of the local hospital. Lombard acknowledges that most of the prostitutes were not enslaved. Still, in a controversial move, he purchased bus tickets home for more than two dozen women as a way to "escape the streets." With...