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"For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret "too loathsome to mention" paradoxically held enormous, terrifying power. Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, from FDR through Clinton is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of "the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States," award-winning journalist and author James Kirchick illuminates how the idea of homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration, impacting everything from the creation of America's earliest civilian intelligence agency to the rise and fall of McCarthyism, the struggle for African American civil rights, and the conservative movement. Celebrating the men and women who courageously decided that the source of their private shame could instead be galvanized for public pride, Kirchick offers a reinterpretation of American history told from the perspective of the citizens who lived in its shadows. Sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history"--

"Once the world's bastion of liberal, democratic values, Europe is now having to confront demons it thought it had laid to rest. The old pathologies of anti-Semitism, populist nationalism, and territorial aggression are threatening to tear the European postwar consensus apart. In riveting dispatches from this unfolding tragedy, James Kirchick shows us the shallow disingenuousness of the leaders who pushed for "Brexit;" examines how a vast migrant wave is exacerbating tensions between Europeans and their Muslim minorities; explores the rising anti-Semitism that causes Jewish schools and synagogues in France and Germany to resemble armed bunkers; and describes how Russian imperial ambitions are destabilizing nations from Estonia to Ukraine. With a new American president threatening to abandon his country's traditional role as upholder of the liberal world order and guarantor of the continent's security, Europe may be alone in dealing with these unprecedented challenges. Based on extensive firsthand reporting, this book is a provocative, disturbing look at a continent in unexpected crisis."--Jacket

On August 18, security officers at London's Heathrow Airport detained a Brazilian named David Miranda. They did so under the UK's Terrorism Act, which allows authorities to hold an individual for up to nine hours if they believe him to be in possession of information which he knows or believes might be of material assistance to terrorists. Miranda is the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who, has broken a series of stories about programs conducted by the National Security Agency, all based upon leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Many other journalists and activists were quick to accept the line that Miranda had been targeted merely by dint of his relationship to Greenwald. Amnesty International released this statement that there is simply no basis for believing that David Michael Miranda presents any threat whatsoever to the UK government. The only possible intent behind this detention was to harass him and his partner, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, for his role in analyzing the data released by Edward Snowden. Adapted from the source document.

On Jul 19, 2005, authorities in the Iranian city of Mashhad publicly lynched two teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, for the alleged crime of raping a 13-year-old boy. The story of Asgari and Marhoni soon became a signifier for the plight of homosexuals in Iran. Popular accounts cast the boys as a gay Islamic version of Romeo and Juliet, their love doomed from the outset. Among the more prominent gay activists to draw attention to the case was Peter Tatchell. For more than four decades, Tatchell has been one of the most outspoken and controversial figures in British public life. Tatchell, citing an underground Iranian opposition group, issued a press release entitled "Iran executes gay teenagers." Like others, Tatchell was quick to label the sexual orientation of the murdered boys, but he was working under the known fact that they had been victims of a regime with murderously homophobic laws on its books and a capricious judicial system in which to mete them out. Adapted from the source document.

To work as a journalist in Belarus takes courage and ingenuity. James Kirchick looks at the climate for alternative media in the aftermath of the elections

Last April, in Prague, President Barack Obama met his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, to sign the Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. Known colloquially as New START, the treaty is the latest in a series of agreements between the United States and Russia aimed at reducing the countries' nuclear stockpiles, a process that has been pursued by Democratic and Republican presidents for decades. New START has been hailed by the White House and its supporters as the most significant of Obama's foreign-policy achievements, which says something about the administration's record thus far. Adapted from the source document.

A country of just four million people, Lebanon has enchanted, infuriated, rewarded, and bedeviled the legions of outsiders who have intervened in its affairs. In part because of its diverse religious composition (the country boasts no fewer than seventeen officially recognized sectarian groups), Lebanon has attracted the attentions of powers not just in the Levant, as the region around the Eastern Mediterranean is known, but around the world. The American experience in Lebanon has mostly been tragic. In 1983, the United States retreated from the country after 241 of its soldiers, part of a multinational peacekeeping force, were killed in a truck bombing perpetrated by Hezbollah, the Shiite terrorist group founded by the Iranian Revolutionary' Guards Corps. The attack was a devastating blow to Ronald Reagan, a president who bestrode the world with a message of resolve against tyrants and terrorists alike. But even for this most tough-minded of American leaders, Lebanon proved too treacherous. Adapted from the source document.

In 2003, the Swiss-born Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan debated Nicolas Sarkozy, then France's interior minister, on a television program called "One Hundred Minutes to Convince." At issue was the condition of women in immigrant Muslim communities in Europe. Sarkozy wanted to know if Ramadan shared the view of his brother, Hani (himself a scholar of Islam of some repute), who held that female adulterers should be stoned to death, as prescribed in the Koran. Ramadan replied that he favored a "moratorium" on the practice. Vehemently challenged by the zealous future French president, Ramadan elaborated, 'we absolutely end the application of all of those penalties in order to have a true debate.' As Paul Berman, one of the most perceptive chroniclers and interpreters of postwar intellectual currents writes in his new tour de force, The Flight of the Intellectuals, this moment was a failed opportunity of tragic proportions. Six million people watched the debate that evening, presumably many of them Muslims adhering to a strict interpretation of their holy book. And at a moment when "the very people who might have benefited from hearing a prestigious and articulate public figure speak with absolute clarity about violence against women" were listening, one of the world's leading, supposedly reform-minded Islamic thinkers "was not up to it.". Adapted from the source document.