Three conservative regions of Spain defended bullfighting on Friday and pledged legislation to enshrine it as a pillar of their cultural heritage, as another area of the country considers banning the sport.

Spain's National Court has halted a probe into alleged Chinese abuses in Tibet, the first case to be ditched under a new law curbing Madrid's jurisdiction over crimes committed abroad.

Spanish telecoms company Telefonica SA said Friday its fourth quarter net profit rose 22 percent as an increase in customer numbers in Latin America helped boost revenue.

Spain on Wednesday approved a sweeping new law that eases restrictions on abortion, declaring the practice a woman's right and doing away with the threat of imprisonment, in part of a drive toward liberal policies that has angered conservatives and the Catholic Church.

Spain's Christmas lottery showered hundreds of thousand of euros (dollars) in prize money on the country's capital Tuesday.

The Internet can be a powerful medium for politicians to get their message across but it is also a vital means for civilians to have a say in what politicians do, participants in a political conference say.

Francisco Ayala, a novelist, sociologist and one of Spain's leading scholars, died Tuesday at age 103 after outliving the dictatorship that led him to flee into exile.

Relatives of men believed to have been executed and buried along with the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca said Thursday they are delighted that work has begun to exhume the civil-war era grave.

A plastic surgeon in Spain was convicted of negligence in the death of Nigeria's former first lady and was given a suspended sentence of a year in jail, a court said Tuesday.

Berlin, reunited as one city after decades of division during the Cold War, won Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias prize on Thursday for its contribution to promoting peace and harmony.

A suspected member of the armed Basque group ETA was deported from Mexico on Thursday and arrested in Spain, where he is wanted for allegedly killing five Spanish police officers and a pregnant wife of one of the officers.

A forest fire on the Canary Island of La Palma was brought under control Tuesday and another that raged for two weeks in Spain's northern Catalonia region has been extinguished, an emergency official said.

Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica said Thursday its second quarter net profit fell 6 percent from a year earlier due to higher taxes and lower revenues in recession-stricken Spain and Europe, offsetting a strong performance from the company's Latin American division.

Spain's Santander, the euro zone's largest bank, said Wednesday that net profit fell 4 percent in the second quarter as an increase in revenues was wiped out by a surge in bad loans amid the economic crisis.

Spain's foreign minister made a historic border crossing to the disputed British colony of Gibraltar on Tuesday, the first by a Spanish Cabinet minister since the Rock was ceded almost 300 years ago.

It's no secret that overfishing has driven many tuna species including the iconic blue fin to the brink of extinction.

Two American engineers who were instrumental in developing e-mail and mobile phones on Wednesday won one of Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias awards for revolutionizing the way people communicate.

Pablo Soto's story may be every computer whiz kid's dream — or nightmare. After leaving school at 16 to support his family, he managed to eke out a living doing what he loves most: designing computer programs.

A nearly 100-year-old Mexican university was awarded Spain's Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities on Wednesday in recognition of its role in providing Latin America with outstanding intellectuals and scientists.

Muslims still face substantial discrimination in Europe, especially at work, and many fail to report racist incidents because of a lack of trust in authorities, a European Union human rights agency said Thursday.

Recording companies went to court Tuesday claiming euro13 million ($17.5 million) from a Spaniard they accuse of profiting from computer programs he designed to allow free music downloads over the Internet.

Air pollution has long been a fact of life in Spanish cities, but scientists now say it is not just smog that chokes people as they walk to work or stroll through the park. A new study has found the air in Madrid and Barcelona is also laced with at least five drugs — most prominently cocaine.

A Spanish court convicted four men on Tuesday of terrorism offenses in connection with recruiting suicide attackers for Iraq, but acquitted 10 others for lack of evidence.

Spain said Monday it plans to make the contraceptive morning-after pill available over the counter in pharmacies without prescription within three months.

Spain's prime minister shook up his government Tuesday by appointing six new Cabinet ministers, including a new economy minister to deal with the country's worsening financial crisis.

Spain will withdraw its hundreds of troops from the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Kosovo in the next few months, an official said Thursday.

Spanish government plans to ease restrictions on abortion have triggered a new dispute with the Roman Catholic Church, with the clergy launching a campaign suggesting animals are better protected than unborn babies.

Spain's north African enclave of Melilla will remove the country's last public statue of the late dictator Gen. Francisco Franco by the end of the month, an official said Monday.

The families of victims of the Madrid train bombings laid flowers Wednesday to mark the fifth anniversary of Europe's worst Islamic terror attack, which killed 191 people and injured 1,800.

An Iranian woman living in Spain said Wednesday she welcomed a Tehran court ruling that awards her eye-for-an-eye justice against a suitor who blinded her with acid.

A Spanish official says 17 people were slightly injured when a cable of a ski chairlift snapped in the southern Sierra Nevada ski resort.

Spain's National Court says prominent Judge Baltasar Garzon has been released from a Madrid city hospital where he was admitted following an anxiety attack.

A rickety boat carrying illegal migrants from Morocco capsized in rough seas just off Spain's Canary Islands and 19 of them drowned, an official and witnesses said Monday. At least three were missing.

Spanish police arrested 13 people Tuesday on suspicion of links to organized crime and terrorism groups.

The armed Basque separatist group ETA claimed responsibility Wednesday for the recent slaying of a businessman and warned of attacks on the region's high-speed rail project.

A chance discovery of a medieval clay oven has revealed that Moorish architects used powdered animal bones to protect the walls of fortresses close to the Alhambra Palace in southern Spain.

Spain's anti-corruption prosecutor has opened a probe into the alleged investment fraud run by U.S. financier Bernard Madoff to determine if any persons or organizations in Spain were cooperating in the scheme, an official said Wednesday.

Spain's Prado Museum has teamed up with Google Earth for a project that allows people to zoom in on the gallery's main works — even on details not immediately discernible to the human eye.

An unusually heavy snowfall coated downtown Madrid in white on Friday, shutting down the city's airport but providing rare opportunities for snowball fights while intrepid golfers drove their balls into the storm.

Economic woes eased for thousands in Spain on Monday as the Christmas lottery — billed among the world's richest — dished out some euro2.32 billion ($3.23 billion) in prizes.

The future director of Madrid's Teatro Real said Thursday he would work to make it one of the world's great opera houses and win more people over to the art.

A gas explosion ripped through an apartment building in northeastern Spain before dawn Wednesday, injuring at least 28 people, authorities said.

Spanish police on Thursday arrested 13 men accused of harboring Islamic extremists, including several suspects in the Madrid terror bombings of 2004, and helping them flee the country, the Interior Ministry said.

A powerful car bomb exploded Monday in northern Spain, killing an army officer and wounding six other people in the third attack in 24 hours by suspected members of the Basque separatist group ETA.

Federico Garcia Lorca's family won't oppose a petition to open a mass grave where his body is believed to have been dumped after Franco supporters allegedly executed the poet and playwright at the outbreak of Spain's Civil War, a relative said Thursday.