Organizers said Sydney’s 30th gay Mardi Gras parade held March 1 was the biggest ever.

The one-mile spectacle attracted 10,000 participants, 150 floats and hundreds of thousands of spectators.

A contingent of 200 “78ers,” people who marched in the first parade in 1978, drew raucous applause. That first parade ended in a clash with police and 50 arrests.

Other contingents of note included official entries by the New South Wales Police Force and the Australian Defence Force, and a group of some 100 Christian pastors who marched to “apologize” for past treatment of LGBT people by Christian churches.

Mardi Gras pumps an estimated $45 million into the local economy.

A senior member of Parliament for Britain’s Conservative Party will be the first Tory MP to enter a same-sex civil partnership.

Alan Duncan, who has been in Parliament since 1992, will tie the knot with James Dunseath, spokesman for London’s financial futures exchange, this summer at the Westminster register office in London.

The couple met 14 months ago at a dinner party and Duncan, 50, asked Dunseath, 39, to marry him this past Valentine’s Day as the couple vacationed in Oman.

“You could not find two more conventional people to enter into a civil partnership,” Duncan told local media.

Dunseath told The Daily Telegraph: “Our friends say we are inseparable. He may be a politician but he’s great fun. We both feel it’s so right and we’re very lucky.”

Tory leader David Cameron said he was “thrilled” to learn of the couple’s engagement and plans to attend the ceremony.

In 2002, Duncan became the first Tory MP to publicly come out of the closet.

“Living in disguise as a politician in the modern world simply isn’t an option,” he said at the time. “The Tory view has always been, ‘We don’t mind, but don’t say.’ Well, that doesn’t work anymore. The only realistic way to behave these days is to be absolutely honest and upfront, however inconvenient that may be at first.”

In a new interview with the Telegraph on March 5, Duncan added: “I knew that one day I would have to say something, because I believed honesty to be the best policy. But I wanted to do it when I was sufficiently well-established as an MP for it not to be my only label thereafter. I didn’t want to be known just as ‘the gay MP Alan Duncan.’ To me, I’m an MP who happens to be gay.”

The United Kingdom’s Civil Partnership Act, which took effect in December 2005, grants registered same-sex couples all rights and obligations of marriage.

Two barebacking gay porn movies have been pulled from the British market by their maker after a BBC investigation suggested the performers may have been infected with HIV during filming.

Said the BBC: “Two of the DVDs featured footage from a weeklong shoot during which eight British models had sex with each other in multiple combinations without condoms. Four of those who took part were diagnosed as HIV-positive soon after.”

One performer told the BBC he believed the movies showed him becoming infected and that was distressing.

The BBC report claimed that 60 percent of gay porn movies now depict barebacking – anal sex without condoms.

The constitutional arm of Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice ruled March 4 that same-sex marriages cannot be constitutionally authorized even though the Constitution bans discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The court said, “If the 1999 constitutional body opted to protect monogamous matrimony between a man and a woman as the essential nucleus that gives origin to the family in the Venezuelan historic and cultural context, the extension of its [marriage’s] effects to common-law unions ... should require, at the least, that these [unions] fulfill the same essential requirements – that they are stable and monogamous unions between a man and a woman who have no marriage impediment ... and that the union is based on the free consent of the parties.”

But the tribunal added, “The court wants to emphasize that the constitutional norm does not prohibit or condemn common-law unions between persons of the same sex, which find constitutional cover in the fundamental right of free development of the personality; it simply does not grant them reinforced protection, which does not constitute a discriminatory act in regard to sexual orientation.”

Judge Carmen Zuleta de Merchán dissented from the decision, arguing that the Constitution grants implicit rights to same-sex couples, and that the other justices were influenced by ingrained social and religious prejudices.

The gay group Affirmative Union of Venezuela commented: “We see this decision as an advance with respect to the previous situation in which we had no legal existence, we were invisibilized and our human condition was negated in this society. ... We commit ourselves to continue fighting, with all legal means within our reach, to obtain what should be common sense: the overcoming of discrimination in Venezuelan society.”

Japan saw more than 1,000 new HIV cases in 2007, the first time the tally has crossed that threshold.

The Ministry of Health and Labor counted 1,048 new infections, bringing the total for all years to 9,392, according to Gay Japan News.

Ninety-three percent of the new cases were in men, and at least 70 percent involved gay sex.

“It is urgent that we should develop our support, counseling and medical care systems further ... in accordance with local needs and situations,” said Aikichi Iwamoto, chair of the ministry’s AIDS Trends Committee.

Assistance: Bill Kelley