Buenos Aires

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

Some of the biggest winds in the world blow through the stormy South Atlantic, but none stormier than the political hyperbole that's sweeping through the region lately. It's just 30 years since the Falkland Islands war that took 900 young lives and saved the government of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher while bringing down one of South America's foulest military dictatorships. All this for possession of some 770 chilly islands totaling about half the area of Los Angeles County and with about the same year-round population (3,200)

Some of the biggest winds in the world blow through the stormy South Atlantic, but none stormier than the political hyperbole that's sweeping through the region lately. It's just 30 years since the Falkland Islands war that took 900 young lives and saved the government of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher while bringing down one of South America's foulest military dictatorships. All this for possession of some 770 chilly islands totaling about half the area of Los Angeles County and with about the same year-round population (3,200)

In Argentina, soybean production is flying high. That means another banner year for farm equipment salesman Carlos Meniavere. His company, Apache, expects sales of its planters and harvesters to increase 20% this year over 2010. Local demand for his machines, costing $75,000 and up, has risen sharply. So have foreign sales. Apache's relatively low manufacturing costs have led to deals with buyers in Brazil, Venezuela, Russia and other markets. "We're going to sell 400 units this year and export to 10 countries.

A two-day international seminar on historical fascism and its political legacies will begin Thursday in Buenos Aires. Discussions and papers will explore the treatment of refugees from Nazi and Fascist persecution before and during World War II, the impact of the ideologies in Latin America and the treatment of Nazi fugitives during and after the war. Speakers will include scholars and researchers from the United States, Switzerland, Spain, South Africa, Israel, France and Canada.

A series of explosions at a military gunpowder depot today killed two workers and shook the city's waterfront area. Eleven people were injured in the blasts, police said. The first explosion at the Fabricaciones Militares waterfront depot was immediately followed by four others that shattered windows 20 blocks away and could be heard at a distance of several miles. Police said it was not immediately known what caused the blasts.

Legislators in Buenos Aires granted legal status to gay and lesbian couples, allowing benefits such as pensions and hospital visits in a move hailed as a first in Latin America. After a noisy marathon debate, the legislature voted 29 to 10 to legalize same-sex civil unions in the city of 3 million that has a reputation as one of the most progressive in deeply Roman Catholic South America.

After five weeks of power blackouts of up to six hours a day, Buenos Aires residents were told Sunday that they can again use electricity around the clock--at least until Thursday. From then on, cuts will last a maximum of three hours a day provided consumption is kept down, the energy department said.

Argentine President Carlos Menem, whose party changed the country's constitution last year so he could seek reelection, faces the possibility of a runoff after Sunday's first round of voting. A surprising poll result shows Menem, first elected in 1989, leading with 41.6% of the vote while main rival Jose Bordon, a former member of Menem's Peronist Party, holds 34.7%. Bordon, a senator, has been gaining ground at Menem's expense in the major cities.

A suspected car bomb destroyed the Israeli Embassy and wrecked a nearby school and other buildings Tuesday, killing at least six people and injuring more than 100. About 10 Israeli diplomats were missing and believed buried in the rubble. "All indications lead us to believe it's a terrorist attack," President Carlos Saul Menem said in a nationally televised news conference. He did not offer evidence.

It says so on Rodolfo Vazquez's business card: He's the owner of the world's biggest collection of Beatles memorabilia, a claim backed by none other than Guinness World Records. So how did an accountant from Argentina — which seems about a million miles away from Liverpool, England — amass a staggering 8,600 Beatles-related items? Hint: Being a self-confessed pack rat helps. "My history shows there is a virtue in collecting things, and I think schools should do more to encourage kids to do it," says Vazquez, a gregarious, heavyset guy with a ready laugh, often directed at himself and his obsession.

A cruise catering to gay travelers will sail from Buenos Aires on Dec. 12 for a four-night trip across the Plata River Estuary and on to the Atlantic seaboard, with stops at Uruguay’s Punta del Este resort town and Montevideo. Argentina’s legalization of same-sex marriage last year has catapulted Buenos Aires to the forefront of gay tourism in South America , said Jose Maria Jaroslavsky, director of the tour operator Thesys, one of the cruise's organizers. The cruise, dubbed "EGO," will take to the seas during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer on the luxury liner MSC Opera . Seven bars, four restaurants, pools, a spa, theater, casino, eight disc jockeys and themed parties will be on hand to quench hedonistic pursuits.

Intensely dramatic as well as socially conscious, "Carancho" is powerful stuff. This bleak and gritty Argentine film plays hard but fair as it investigates the personal and societal implications of a story of corruption that is ripped with a vengeance from that country's headlines. The situation in question is a plague of deadly traffic accidents that kills more than 8,000 people a year and leaves in its wake more than 120,000 injured and a boom in compensation cases. As the film's press notes put it, "behind every tragedy, there is an industry," and "Carancho" explores the emotional impact of that situation.

The game World Cup fans had yearned to see in South Africa this summer was played in Buenos Aires on Tuesday, and even though it was a friendly, it pushed the Euro 2012 qualifiers going on in Europe to the back burner. Argentina, in a performance that delighted its 55,000 supporters at River Plate's Monumental stadium, scored three times in the first 34 minutes and went on to beat world and European champion Spain, 4-1. The loss was the Spanish team's first since it won the World Cup in Johannesburg on July 11 and its worst defeat in a decade.

Argentina on Thursday became the first nation in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage, turning aside protests from the Roman Catholic Church to give gay couples the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts. The Argentine Senate approved the measure in a hard-fought 33-27 vote, with three abstentions. President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has indicated that she will sign it into law quickly. The 4:05 a.m. vote came after an exhaustive debate that dragged on for more than 14 hours.

When Brazilian soccer legend Pele called his sport "the beautiful game," he may have been talking about the lush green of the field and the poetry of bodies in controlled motion. But for me, soccer's greatest beauty is its ability to inspire fans across the world to gather, cheer and celebrate. As a big fan of soccer — really, football — I am often among those gathering, cheering and celebrating. In anticipation of the World Cup finals, beginning June 11 in South Africa, I chose five of my favorite cities whose nations are competing in the World Cup. Each city has a unique football tradition, and each is a fitting venue in which to embrace the spectacle of the World Cup. If you're not among the fortunate with tickets to the matches, consider visiting these stadiums to learn why "the beautiful game" rings true.

A curtain of smoke from burning rural fields settled over this Argentine capital Thursday, delaying flights, shutting roads and leaving residents coughing. The influx of smoke blown toward the capital by prevailing winds also reignited hard feelings between the government and the nation's powerful farming industry, which recently suspended a three-week strike against new taxes on grain exports.

Pope John Paul II ended an exhausting South American pilgrimage and began the most sacred week in the Roman Catholic calendar Sunday with a spectacular Palm Sunday Mass for a million worshipers in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires. The multitude, many of its members waving olive branches and papal flags, packed nearly a mile of the broad Avenida 9 de Julio, the city's main thoroughfare that Argentines boast is the widest boulevard in the world.

Few things are more prickly and complicated than the relationships between sons and fathers. Just ask Michael Douglas, who spent many troubled years trying to carve out any kind of satisfying kinship with Kirk Douglas, his emotionally distant father. Many political observers believe that part of the impetus for George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq came from a deep-seated desire to set himself apart from the kind of failures that marked his father's, George H.W. Bush, one-term presidency. But when it comes to difficult fathers, few men have endured the kind of emotional burden carried by Sebastian Marroquin, the son of the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, whose illicit empire was so vast that he was once estimated to be worth around $25 billion, his cartel controlling the majority of the global cocaine trade.

A judge has granted a homosexual couple permission to get married, setting a precedent that could pave the way for the Roman Catholic country to become the first in Latin America to allow same-sex marriage. The ruling in Buenos Aires, which became the region's first city to approve civil unions between same-sex couples in 2002, may increase pressure on lawmakers to debate a gay marriage bill currently deadlocked in Congress.