Nation Digest: AIDS conference to return to U.S.

HEALTH

AIDS conference to return to the U.S.

The biennial International AIDS Conference will return to the United States in 2012 for the first time in 22 years, now that U.S. restrictions on visits by foreigners with HIV are to be lifted.

The six-day meeting, which in recent years has drawn about 25,000 people, will be held in Washington in July 2012. The International AIDS Society made the decision, announced Monday at a White House event on the eve of World AIDS Day.

"We are absolutely delighted," Robin Gorna, the society's executive director, said of Congress's repeal, to take effect Jan. 4, of travel restrictions on HIV-positive foreigners. "It has been a matter of great distress to many of us that we have not been able to hold the conference in the United States because of discriminatory laws."

The organizers of the conference do not ask attendees about their health status. In recent meetings, Gorna estimated, "a couple of thousand, at least," have been infected with the virus.

-- David Brown

MILITARY

Murder and rape convictions appealed

A former soldier who raped a 14-year-old girl and killed her and three family members in Iraq in 2006 challenged his convictions Monday, saying he was wrongly tried in a civilian court and should have faced a military trial.

In an appeal filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, based in Cincinnati, attorneys for Steven Dale Green are seeking to have the law that was used to prosecute him -- the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- overturned. The law allows the government to try former soldiers, their spouses and contractors in civilian courts for crimes that happened overseas.

Green, 24, is serving a life sentence without parole. The four other soldiers charged in the plot faced military trials, known as courts-martial.

-- Associated Press

WEATHER

Hurricane season was a quiet one

The 2009 hurricane season ends today, and for the first time in three years no hurricanes hit the United States -- making 2009 the quietest season in 12 years.

The calmer season comes thanks to El Niño, the disruption of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Pacific that affects water temperatures in the Caribbean.

"El Niño produced strong wind shear across the Caribbean Sea and western tropical Atlantic, which resulted in fewer and shorter-lived storms compared to some recent very active seasons," said Gerry Bell, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which tracks and names the storms.

Tropical systems Claudette and Ida delivered tropical-storm-force winds to the United States but did not make landfall as hurricanes. The numbers released Monday mesh with NOAA's predictions made earlier this year.

-- Ed O'Keefe