The Lancet Infectious Disease Journal published the study Monday. The study followed 3,800 couples in Botswana, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Each couple was sero-discordant, meaning one was infected with HIV and the other was not. The New York Times reports on the findings of the two year long study:

The study found that women using hormonal contraception became infected at a rate of 6.61 per 100 person-years, compared with 3.78 for those not using that method. Transmission of H.I.V. to men occurred at a rate of 2.61 per 100 person-years for women using hormonal contraception compared with 1.51 for those who did not.

This study is one of several which have found an increased risk of HIV transmission connected to injection hormones, such as the Pfizer brand Depo-Provera. In addition to this finding, the study also made an unexpected discovery, reported separately in the Lancet: Pregnancy may also increase HIV transmission risks. Study authors are unsure why that is, whether it is the increased rate of unprotected sexual intercourse or some activity of the virus itself triggered by increased hormones in the body as a result of pregnancy.

Scientists did say that they have been unable to identify specifically why the injection hormones or pregnancy hormones may have such effects, but they noted that studies have found there are increased levels of HIV in the vaginal fluids of women on injection hormones — but that is not correlated with similar findings of virus in the blood of the women.

Injection hormones are popular birth control method in developing countries because the injections can be given once every three months and do not require a doctor in attendance. This means women in rural locations can access the medications without traveling long distances.

Housing Works, an organization that advocates for the rights of HIV-positive people in the U.S. and abroad, reports on their blog Wednesday that USAID funded a 2004 Action for West Africa Region HIV-AIDS program that pushed HIV-specific criminal laws. The program received a grant of $35 million over five years. As part of the program’s activities, a “model” HIV-specific criminal law was created.

While the U.S. led the way in creating such laws in the late 80s, USAID says it opposes criminalization of HIV.

The advocacy group says these laws spread to at least 27 African countries since 2004. Prior to the advent of the model law framework, there were no African countries with HIV-specific laws. The spread of the laws has been called “legislation contagion” by the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.

Advocates say the laws open HIV-positive people in Africa to human rights abuses.

The template contains a number of dangerous provisions.

First, it punishes the “willful transmission” of HIV through “any means.” This phrase opens the door for wide interpretation, allowing governments to incarcerate a person practicing safer sex, regardless of whether he or she informs a partner of his or her status. The template also opens the possibility of punishment for mothers who pass HIV to their children, regardless of precautions taken to stop transmission.

Second, the model law penalizes partners who do not disclose HIV status to a “spouse or regular sexual partner” within six weeks of diagnosis. In countries where HIV-positive status can subject a person to social isolation, exile, physical abuse or even death, this provision has major implications.

Women, said Frederica Stines, Africa program officer at the International Women’s Health Coalition, will be the overwhelming victims of this criminalization creep. They are more likely to know their HIV status; more likely to be the victims of rape; more likely to be thrown out of their homes because of their status; and less likely to be able to insist on condom use. “Criminalizing is not prevention,” said Stines, who has more than a decade of experience promoting reproductive rights in Africa. “Who wants to know their status if they could be arrested?”

Many governments adapted the model law but altered it in a way that allows for even broader abuses. Togo’s law makes any sex without a condom an illegal act, regardless of HIV status. Benin’s version makes it a crime for a person who knows he or she is infected to engage in “unprotected sexual relations” without disclosing his or her status—no actual transmission of HIV is required. Burundi’s version says that the government can try a “willful” transmitter for murder.

Housing Works also ties the criminalization movement to the brutal beating death of an Ugandan leader for LGBT rights. David Kato was an activist fighting the proposed “Kill Gays” legislation in Uganda. He was found bludgeoned to death in his home last month. Many Ugandan newspapers have been publishing lists of suspected gay or lesbian people, and calling for violence against them.

As the Florida Independent, a sister publication of the Michigan Messenger, reported Wednesday, the “Kill Gays” legislation was inspired by U.S. based anti-gay evangelicals. The legislation has also been tied to the shadowy politico-Christian group The Family which counts among its members former U.S. Reps. Pete Hoekstra and Bart Stupak as well as other leading conservative lawmakers in D.C.

Ironically, while African countries like Uganda point a finger at homosexuality as the cause of the HIV epidemic in Africa, statistics show the epidemic in Africa is driven by heterosexual behavior and reuse of dirty needles.

The arguments made in the Ghailani case are a good indication of the kinds of claims that the suspected co-conspirators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks may make when their case begins in the same federal courthouse next year. The government’s response in this case similarly reveals how it’s likely to oppose any moves to dismiss the 9/11 cases.

The government’s argument in the Ghailani case can be summed up as: 1) it’s Ghailani’s own fault for being a fugitive before Sept. 11, 2001, while his co-conspirators all got prompt trials in New York; and 2) after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the need for intelligence trumped all, and the speedy trial requirement got thrown out the window.

The way the government explains is it is somewhat more artful. After 9/11, the United States was at war. So Ghailani, who’d previously been charged as a civilian criminal along with other suspects, who were tried and convicted earlier in 2001, was suddenly transformed into a war criminal. And that changed all of the rules.

Given the threat of another major terrorist attack after 9/11, “the Government had shifted dramatically toward intelligence-gathering as the primary means to prevent such an attack.” When Ghailani was captured in 2004, “the defendant was believed to have, and in fact did have, actionable intelligence about al Qaeda — by virtue of his longstanding position in al Qaeda, his assistance to known al Qaeda terrorists” and his alleged ongoing relationship with Osama bin Laden.

Of course, none of these relationships had actually been proven by the time the government captured Ghailani, since he hadn’t had any sort of trial. But the government’s argument is that because he was believed to have information about al-Qaeda, it was justified in detaining him in a CIA prison, and then at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay for another five years.

“In light of these extraordinary circumstances, the Government justifiably opted to initially treat the defendant as an intelligence asset,” the government writes.

The details of Ghailani’s imprisonment and interrogation by the CIA are all redacted in the government’s brief. But in the brief asking the court to dismiss the case, Ghailani’s lawyers argue that he was physically and psychologically abused during two years of overseas CIA imprisonment and interrogations at places where techniques “amounting to torture” had been authorized. Ghailani was also denied the right to a lawyer.

Ghailani was eventually charged in 2008 by the military commissions, but that proceeding was stalled after President Obama took office. Ghailani’s case was transferred to a civilian federal court in May.

“We respectfully submit that this case presents possibly the most unique and egregious example of a speedy trial violation in American jurisprudence to date,” Ghailani’s lawyers wrote in their brief.

The right to a speedy trial derives from the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court, however, said in a 1972 case that judges should weigh several factors in deciding whether the right had been violated, including the length of the delay and its reason, whether the defendant himself was to blame, and whether the delay would prejudice the defendant’s case.

Ghailani’s lawyers have said that their client “appears to be so damaged” by his treatment in U.S. that he may be unable to help his lawyers prepare his defense. They’ve asked the court to have an expert examine the mental state of their client.

Here is the Justice Department’s brief:

Krakauer was shocked, shocked:

The key line, of course, is “African Americans are more fundamentally rooted in the American experience.” Obama did not expand on this, and nor did Anderson Cooper ask a follow up. So did Mr. Obama mean that African Americans are more rooted in American experience than other Americans, or more rooted in American experience than the African experience?

The second one! He didn’t expand on it because he was talking about Africa. It’s hard to even imagine a more banal comment about the African diaspora. But how did Krakauer’s attempt to stir up angry right-wing comments go? Pretty well:

When the President of the United States makes such a blatantly racist comment your skin should crawl.

… what can one expect from a hopelessly elitist, hard-Leftist, white-man-done-owe-me-forty acres-and-a mule African-American mind?

He’s segregating into groups, and saying whites and Asians aren’t as rooted in America because there have been white and Asian immigrants reciently.

Obama is clearly saying that african Americans are more rooted than white people. It’s his wise Latina moment.

There’s really nothing Obama can do or say that doesn’t drive some elements of the right around the bend.

“It’s hard to separate out energy and climate change and how it connects to water and land and biodiversity and other issues,” Burke says. There are, of course, national security implications for resource use: “consumption and consequences,” even if this stuff doesn’t makes it into the President’s Daily Brief. The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 project predicts scarcity, creating “conflict on a geostrategic level,” alongside increased natural disasters as the result of climate change.

Look at the demand for materials from increased cellphone use (400 million more Indians and 670 million more Chinese people have cellphones than did in 2000): tantalum, indium, titanium dioxide, and other rare-earth elements. A ton of them are located in China, Burke says, placing the Chinese in a very commanding geostrategic position. Congo has the tantalum, also known as coltan, and it’s deeply unstable. “And we don’t know a whole lot about the global supply chain and how vulnerable it is.”

Climate change. More “cyclonic storms of intensity” like Hurricane Katrina. “It may drive conflict. It may drive migration. It will certainly drive disaster relief.” The species that die out take with them “the ecosystem we depend on. How that’s going to affect our security is an issue we have to explore.”

Burke links natural security to Afghanistan. Eighty percent of Afghanistan is agriculture-dependent. The wars, for 30 years, have degraded Afghanistan’s bio-infrastructure, “and the land is barren right now,” and such privation will render difficult any plan from the Obama administration to alleviate the stresses on the Afghan people. Restoring its natural resources is “critical to restoring security.”

“These are security issues right now,” Burke says, “and they’re bound to get worse as climate change proceeds. … We can either deal with it now and build in resilience or deal with it later and it’ll be much more difficult.”

The results of Forum for the Future’s green design competition are in, and first prize goes to the Kyoto Box, an aluminum foil-lined cardboard box that makes use of the greenhouse effect to combat, well, the greenhouse effect. Its acrylic cover lets sunlight in but prevents the heat from escaping, allowing its user to boil water without burning any wood or other fuel. The box’s inventor, Jon Bøhmer, hopes that it can catch on in Africa, where it could serve to reduce water-borne disease and cut back on emissions from combusting wood — all for the low cost of $5.

In fact, it could end up costing nothing at all. Bøhmer expects the box to be eligible for carbon credits, which polluting companies could buy to offset their emissions. If the revenue is then passed on to the users, the initial price tag would be negated.

It’s an admirable project, but since it’s not much fun to read about a cardboard box, I’ll focus my attention on a runner-up for the prize, which tackles a major global problem that’s on everyone’s mind: bovine flatulence.

Methane released by the digestive tract of cows and other grazing animals constitutes 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — more than comes from transportation. And while making more fuel-efficient cars has been tough, making more fuel-efficient cows is even tougher.

Enter Mootral. It’s a garlic-based antibiotic that can be added to an animal’s food to reduce its methane emissions (farts and burps, in layman’s terms) by up to 94 percent. It works by limiting the growth of bacteria in the animal’s digestive stomach — and it’s the bacteria that release all the offending gases. Call it Bovine Beano.

If all of the world’s farmers and herders gave Mootral to their animals, and the antibiotic worked as well on the ground as it has in the lab, a huge chunk of global emissions could potentially be wiped out.

But alas, the $75,000 prize went to the box, so Mother Earth might have to hold her breath a bit longer.

It reminds me of all the fuss over Miss Universe visiting Guantanamo Bay recently, which garnered more media attention to the U.S. prison in Cuba than any story about hapless Muslims sold for bounty to the U.S. military and imprisoned for years without charge ever did.

So despite the controversy and ridicule it inspires, I agree with Mr. Mohammed: bring on the celebrities!  Fly the beauty queens out to the Bagram prison next, and maybe those 600 men imprisoned by U.S. authorities without charge or even the right to see the evidence against them will finally get some much-needed attention.

Anti-poverty advocates like the economist Jeffrey Sachs learned this years ago, working with stars like Bono and Angelina Jolie to call attention to the plight of the world’s poorest.

As distasteful as the celebrity buzz may be — and as bizarre as it must seem in a muddy village in Malawi or on the shores of Guantanamo Bay — little else moves Americans so much as a beauty, celebrity and wealth.  And if those can every-so-often be put to good use, well, I say, “go for it.”

Susan Rice (flickr)

In April 2007, as the United States was enmeshed in two wars, a Brookings Institution scholar and Clinton-era State Dept. official testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of taking military action as a last resort to stop the genocide in Darfur.

“A collective shame” was what Susan Rice, now one of President-elect Barack Obama’s closest foreign-policy advisers, called the international community’s failure to act. Rice was hardly sanguine about what it would take to stem the genocide, nor did she exhibit a preference for taking military action.

In passionate but clear language, she instead proposed a multistep policy of robust financial sanctions against Sudan and the imposition of a no-fly zone around the afflicted western Sudanese province. But if that failed, Rice continued, a starker measure should follow.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

“The U.S. should press for a Chapter 7 U.N. resolution that issues Sudan an ultimatum,” Rice told the committee, chaired by Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), now the vice president-elect. “Accept the unconditional deployment of the U.N. force or face military consequences. The resolution would authorize enforcement by U.N. member states collectively or individually.”

As for the potential consequences and risks, Rice added, “We have to acknowledge that they can’t be eliminated. Yet we also have to acknowledge the daily cost of the status quo of a feckless policy characterized by bluster and retreat. … I would submit, Mr. Chairman, Sen. Lugar, that that cost is too high.”

Rice’s testimony could offer a window into the next four years of U.S. foreign policy. According to interviews with longtime associates, the woman who was just named to head the foreign-policy transition team for an Obama administration — and herself a likely candidate for deputy national security adviser or other top position — is a rigorous thinker and thorough pragmatist, impatient with ideology and incompetence.

Over the past year and a half, Rice has become increasingly close to Obama, owing in large part to their mutual frustration with conventional foreign-policy thinking. Unlike many seasoned foreign-policy hands, Rice’s focuses less on traditional state-to-state relationships and more on transnational threats, challenges and opportunities — befitting the emphasis of a new generation of global strategists. With Rice at the helm, former colleagues said, an Obama foreign policy would likely be bold but not dogmatic.

Rice, who turns 44 Monday, is the youngest person ever to become an assistant secretary of state, a position she attained at age 33. A protege of Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, Rice joined the Clinton administration in 1993 as an staffer on the National Security Council, after a stint at the McKinsey & Company business-consulting firm.

On the NSC, Rice earned a reputation for pragmatism, which she carried over to the State Dept. as assistant secretary for African affairs, a post she held from 1997 to 2001. But her record was not without its blemishes.

According to human-rights expert Samantha Power’s study of the U.S. reaction to genocide, “A Problem From Hell,” Rice didn’t distinguish herself in the Clinton administration’s lax response to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. As an Africa expert on the NSC, she shocked an interagency conference call by interjecting domestic politics into the discussion of the administration’s policy options.

“If we use the word ‘genocide,’” Rice allegedly asked her colleagues, “and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?” Rice later told Power — who herself became a trusted foreign-policy adviser to Obama before leaving the campaign during the Democratic primaries — that while she didn’t remember saying that, “If I said it, it was completely inappropriate.”

Her colleagues said that Rice’s willingness to subject herself to the scrutiny she expects of others is a characteristic trait. “She’s always examining not just what she thinks but why she thinks the way she does,” said Jane Holl Lute, the assistant secretary general of the United Nations for peace-building and a friend of Rice’s. “She’s one of the most honest thinkers I know.”

About Rwanda, Rice later told Power, “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required,” which might explain Rice’s passion about Darfur.

Something that also might explain it is Rice’s facility with nontraditional foreign-policy issues. Former Sen. Tim Wirth, the Clinton administration’s undersecretary of state for global affairs from 1993 to 1997, said Rice saw connectivity in the world’s problems, instead of viewing them through the traditional prism of individual state power.

“She was one of the few people to live in the foreign-policy world who understood global issues, transnational issues like human rights, climate change and terrorism,” said Wirth, who worked with Rice when she was at the NSC and who now heads the United Nations Foundation. “The foreign-policy community is largely about political relationships. That’s what drives the [typical] foreign-policy world. But the new one is transnational problems, problems that don’t have passports.”

What position Rice could receive in an Obama administration is a guessing game. She has been mentioned for everything from deputy national-security adviser to U.N. ambassador to even secretary of state — all a function of her bond with the president-elect.

The only knock against Rice is a reputation for abrasiveness. A rumor circulating in foreign-policy circles this month is that she and a top Obama defense adviser, Richard Danzig, have developed a frosty relationship, though it is hard to get Obama aides to explain the source of any turbulence.

Wirth said Rice’s sense of dedication is occasionally misunderstood as harshness. “She’s very calm, very careful, but once she determines where to go, she’s very firm about that,” said Wirth, “and that’s where that comes from — people saying she’s abrasive. She’s very firm when a decision gets made.”

Rice herself declined to comment for this article. But in February, she indicated to me that an Obama administration would need to be bold in differentiating itself from the Bush administration to restore American global standing.

“After eight years of George Bush,” Rice told me for an American Prospect cover story, “when the next president puts his or her hand on the Bible to be sworn in, the U.S. is going to get one brief second look [from the world] about whether the U.S. truly learned to change from its past mistakes, recent and historic, and whether we’re again the kind of America people look to lead in a constructive fashion, or whether we’re hopeless.”

What that means exactly is hard to say. But Rice challenged the idea that Obama’s more controversial foreign-policy proposals — setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, negotiating with foreign adversaries, bolstering the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan and renewing the hunt for Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan — were, as his critics maintained, imprudent. “I don’t see it as radical at all,” she told me in February. “I see it as rational, wise and long overdue.”

Obama-watchers have seen Rice quickly build a rapport with the president-elect, something that will aid Rice in staffing the foreign-policy team. “It indicates they’ll be very pragmatic,” Wirth said, “and focused on strengthening the international machinery, to regain America’s reputation around the world. And she’ll just be reflecting what Obama has said.”

Another colleague, John Prendergast, an Africa aide on the NSC after Rice moved to the State Dept., was similarly impressed. “She was a brilliant strategist with a big vision, who was relentless in pursuing the president’s objectives,” remembered Prendergast, who now runs the Enough Project, an anti-genocide activist group. “She had a firm command of all of the relevant issues, and a keen insight into how to move decisions through the system so that the U.S. could act in a relevant and decisive manner.”

Rice was one of the few Democratic foreign-policy luminaries to oppose the 2002 invasion of Iraq. Prendergast said he was not surprised by her position. “Susan has an uncanny ability to weigh all sides to a situation and see through rhetoric and diversion,” he said.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Center, came to know Rice when they worked on the Phoenix Initiative over the last four years, an attempt by progressive foreign-policy thinkers to craft a post-Bush grand strategy.

Slaughter’s assessment of Rice echoed Wirth’s. “She has a very holistic vision of national security,” Slaughter said, “one that includes the problems of weak and failing states and the overall imperative of standing for increased prosperity and justice for all people around the world.

“That doesn’t make her a starry-eyed one-worlder,” Slaughter continued, “although Obama may soon be giving that term a different and far stronger connotation, but it means that her experience with Africa has sensitized her to the many ways people can die violently — not just in conventional war.”

Wirth and others said Rice would be “very loyal to Obama,” to use Wirth’s words. Another former colleague, who requested anonymity, added that Rice doesn’t have an agenda separate from Obama’s.

Slaughter added that Rice’s potential ascendancy represented a milestone in gender equity for the foreign-policy community. “It is very important to women in foreign policy that Susan is not married to her job,” Slaughter said. “She has a great husband and two young kids, and she managed to balance it. After Madeleine Albright, whose kids were grown, and Condi Rice, who does not have a family, that’s a very important message to send. After all, most men in foreign policy manage to have families, too.”