A nephew by marriage of Spain’s Queen Sofia was on Friday charged with corruption by a judge in Spain’s Canary Islands.

Carlos Morales, an architect, gave evidence to the judge for five hours before being charged with influence-peddling, a statement from the Canaries high court said.

Morales is married to Princess Alexia of Greece, the daughter the former Greek King Constantine, who is the brother of Spain’s Queen Sofia.

The government aims to make it easier for those who wish to pay their traffic fines and more difficult for those who do not

As expected, Congress has this Thursday approved proposed reforms to the Road Safety Law, but with a surprise abstention from the Partido Popular when the vote took place. The reform now goes on to the Senate for debate.

The convoy suffered a total electrical breakdown

A newly born baby was evacuated by ambulance when the 1-45pm AVE high speed train from Sevilla, destination Madrid, suffered a technical breakdown some 20kms from Córdoba station.

The passengers were then subjected to a two hour rescue operation in temperatures of 39 degrees and with no working air-conditioning in the carriages. During their wait they were allowed out on to the track and given refreshments, but it was decided that such conditions were not appropriate for the baby.

A US government delegation will visit Spain next week to discuss whether the country can take in Guantanamo detainees, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos announced on Saturday.

The minister said requests from the US would be looked at “in a positive fashion”.

But he added considerations would be made while “respecting our internal laws and looking case by case at those who wish to be taken in by Spain.”

Spain’s cabinet has agreed to send 450 soldiers to Afghanistan next month to reinforce security ahead of the 20 August presidential election, a government statement said Friday.

But the decision still requires parliamentary approval.

The soldiers will be in place from 21 July and will stay there “for 30 days after 20 August, or after the second round, if one takes place,” said the statement issued after a cabinet meeting.

A US federal judge on Wednesday gave treasure hunting firm Odyssey until 6 July to challenge a court ruling ordering it to hand over treasures recovered from a Spanish ship wreck to Spain.

The Tampa, Florida-based company had been ordered to turn over half a million silver coins and hundreds of gold objects it discovered somewhere in “international waters in the Atlantic Ocean.”

The discovery of the sunken treasure, from a ship code-named “Black Swan,” was announced in 2007.

A Spanish bakery accused of barbaric behaviour towards an illegal worker will face “the full weight of the law”, the government has vowed.

The statement comes amid shock over the case of a Bolivian worker whose arm was cut off in an accident at work.

Bosses at the bakery in Valencia are accused of dumping him 100m (330 feet) from the hospital entrance and throwing the severed limb in a rubbish bin.

Spain’s former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar has filed a lawsuit against a Moroccan internet news site that claimed he was the father of French politician Rachida Dati’s baby, a spokesman said Monday.

Moroccan newspaper Le Soir reported that Aznar had filed the defamation suit at a Madrid court against the L’Observateur website, which reported in September that he was the father of Dati’s baby girl Zohra, born in January.

Spain’s royal palace expressed its annoyance Friday at Ryanair’s advertisements portraying Queen Sofia, who recently flew on the Irish budget airline, without her permission.

The company, known for its controversial ad campaigns and for its use of images of celebrities without their permission, released an ad with a photo of the wife of King Juan Carlos and the slogan “fly like a monarch”.

A road repair crew found an arms cache, including explosives and a gun, near Madrid on Friday belonging to the armed Basque separatist group ETA, the interior ministry said.

The cache contained a pistol and silencer, a kilo of bomb-making chemicals, four detonators, a shovel and instructions written in the Basque language, all stored in hermetically sealed plastic containers, it said in a statement.

Spain’s nuclear watchdog has recommended that the government renew the operating licence of the oldest of the country’s six nuclear plants for another 10 years.

The Nuclear Safety Council said it will only publish its recommendations on Monday after weekend elections for the European Parliament but radio Cadena Ser and other media said the report it sent to the industry ministry said the plant at Garona could safely operate for another decade.

A deep sea treasure-hunting company has been ordered by a US judge to hand over half a million gold and silver coins to the government of Spain.

The company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, raised the haul from a shipwreck in the Atlantic, suspected to be that of a Spanish naval vessel.

The Spanish government argued that the treasure formed part of the country’s national heritage.

But Odyssey intends to appeal, saying it has a claim to the treasure.

The number of foreigners living in Spain rose by 329,929 last year to 5.6 million, with the largest numbers of new arrivals coming from Romania, Morocco and Britain, official data showed Wednesday.

As of 1 January 2009, there were a total of 5,598,691 foreigners living in Spain, 40.5 percent of them from other European Union countries, the national statistics institute said.

Police in the southern Spanish city of Seville Wednesday arrested 10 Greenpeace activists who had staged a protest against the effects of climate change on tourism, the organisation said.

It said eight members of the environmental group climbed the steps of a famous monument, Seville’s 13th century Torre del Oro (Gold Tower), pretending to be tourists.

Two of them then climbed over the battlements in an attempt to unfurl a 70-square-meter banner reading ‘Closed by Climate Change’, but were stopped by police, Greenpeace and an AFP photographer said.

The leftist mayor of a town in southern Spain was fined EUR 6,840 on Tuesday for accusing King Juan Carlos of being “corrupt” and the “son of a scoundrel”.

The judge said the comments by Jose Antonio Barroso, the mayor of Puerto Real in the Andalucia region, constituted a “personal insult” rather than just a political opinion that any citizen has the right to express.

The fine was less than the EUR 10,800 called for by the prosecution.

A judge in southern Spain on Friday said he is not competent to order the opening the grave of poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was shot by Franco supporters at the outbreak of the 1936-1939 civil war.

The Andalucia high court said the judge had refused to take the case, which had been passed to him last November by the country’s most prominent judge, Baltasar Garzon.

Spanish consumer prices fell 0.8 percent in May from the same time last year in the third monthly decline in a row, raising fears of possible deflation – a prolonged period of falling prices.

In March, Spain posted its first 12-month drop in prices since the national statistics institute INE began tracking inflation in 1961, with a 0.1-percent decline that month. Prices dropped another 0.2 percent in April.

A Royal Navy patrol launch stationed in Gibraltar ordered a Spanish police vessel to abandon the waters around the British territory, a British military spokesman said Monday.

The incident occurred on 10 April when the Spanish vessel was close to the western approach to the Gibraltar airport runway, which juts out into the bay.

“It was definitely in Gibraltar waters,” said a spokesman at the Command British Forces Gibraltar.

Spain’s television sector was on the brink of a major shakeup Thursday after another private broadcaster, Antena 3, said it was open to a merger to deal with a sharp drop in advertising revenue in the country’s worst recession in over 50 years.

“We are not closed to relationships, but we need to study all the options open to us, without haste,” Antena 3 chief executive officer Silvio Gonzalez told a conference, adding the final decision would be “based on whether any deal creates value.”

Spanish police said Monday they had detained an Ecuadoran man caught driving with his two sons in the trunk of his car.

The 32-year-old, who already had a criminal record for falsifying documents, was detained late on Sunday on a road near the town of Ciempozuelos, police said.

He admitted he had driven the 35 kilometres (20 miles) from the Spanish capital with his two sons, aged seven and 11, in the trunk because there was no room for them otherwise.