View the Official Trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s newest film, “Tetro,” starring Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich, Maribel Verdu, Klaus Maria Brandauer and Carmen Maura. “Tetro” opens June 11, 2009.

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BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Thousands marched in Argentina’s Gay Pride parade on Saturday, celebrating the country’s status as the first in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage and vowing to campaign for new rights for transgender people. More than 500 same-sex couples have been married since President Cristina Fernandez signed the law on July 21, said Esteban Paulo, President of the Argentine Lesbians, Gay, Bi, and Transgender Federation. The gay marriage law has been a boon for tourism, said Pablo De Luca, founder of the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce in Buenos Aires. He estimates that 100,000 more gays and lesbians have visited Argentina as a result of the law. “It’s the same kind of increase that happened in South Africa, Canada, and Madrid after they legalized gay marriage,” De Luca said. “We want to travel to a country where we don’t feel like we have to hide our sexuality.” Gay and lesbian couples still face discrimination — some civil servants have been unwilling to sign their marriage licenses, and the judicial system has been slow to approve adoptions by same-sex couples even though the law now grants them all the rights heterosexual married couples enjoy. Argentina’s dominant Roman Catholic Church remains opposed. The theme of Saturday’s parade was “let’s go for more” — specifically, a “gender identity” law to enable individuals to change their gender on birth certificates and identity cards. Uruguay passed such a law in 2009, but transgender Argentines have no such recourse and often have trouble when dealing with the government using documents that no longer match their expressed gender. The proposed law has been stuck in Argentina’s senate since 2007, but some are more optimistic now that gay marriage has passed. “The gay marriage law helped open the doors to discuss LGBT issues in Argentina,” said Socialist Deputy Roy Cortina. “And that’s going to be beneficial for the gender identity law.” Follow Yahoo! News on Twitter , become a fan on Facebook

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Women cover their faces as a health worker fumigates a slum to prevent malaria in Mumbai December 15, 2009. Credit: Reuters/Arko Datta By Kate Kelland LONDON | Fri Oct 29, 2010 7:12am EDT LONDON (Reuters) – Eliminating malaria can be achieved only with repeated investment over the long term and will require a major shift in policy and funding now focused on control of the disease, experts said on Friday. In one of a series of studies in the Lancet medical journal about the prospect of trying to eradicate the often deadly infectious ailment, scientists said that for many countries, eradicating malaria will not be a quick win. Like immunization, it would require long-term investment over and over to make sure the disease does not come back, even after the intense activity of wiping it out is over. “Successful elimination will need a fundamental shift in the perception of malaria investment from a so-called quick win to a routine expenditure,” said Oliver Sabot of the Clinton Health Access Initiative in the United States, who led one study. According to the World Health Organization, about 3.3 billion people — half of the world’s population — are at risk of malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes. There are about 250 million malaria cases and almost a million malaria deaths each year, and people living in the world’s poorest regions are most vulnerable. SHRINKING THE MALARIA MAP In a commentary on the findings of the papers, Lancet editors Richard Horton and Pamela Das said they showed that countries should not set their sights on malaria elimination without careful analysis of the costs and implications. Focusing on trying to eradicate the disease when that goal is too far off could lead to dangerous swings in funding and political commitment, they said, and may jeopardize the success of efforts to control malaria. “The quest for elimination must not distract existing good malaria control work,” they wrote. “If existing control efforts were indeed scaled up, by 2015, 1.14 million children’s lives could be saved in sub-Saharan Africa alone.” In another paper, scientists said that the most practical way forward in fighting the disease was to continue shrinking the “malaria map” of countries where it is endemic. During the first half of the 20th century, 178 countries had endemic malaria, the scientists found. Since 1945, 79 have eliminated malaria, including Britain and the United States in 1952, Australia in 1970 and, most recently, Morocco in 2005 and Turkmenistan in 2010. But 99 countries still have endemic malaria, and of these 32 are moving from controlled low-endemic malaria to elimination, while 67 are controlling the disease short-term, the study found. The 32 countries seeking to wipe out malaria have more than 2 billion people and include China, Argentina, Iraq, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey and North Korea. (Editing by Mark Heinrich )

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