Reuters

MADRID/BARCELONA (Reuters) - Spain’s Supreme Court has ruled that five Catalan separatist leaders can leave prison to be sworn in as lawmakers next Tuesday but said it would not halt the trial over their role in Catalonia’s independence bid in 2017. Oriol Junqueras, Josep Rull, Jordi Turull and Jordi Sanchez all won seats in the lower house of parliament in a national election on April 28. Raul Romeva, won an upper chamber seat. The five are currently being held in custody on charges of rebell

MADRID (Reuters) - The leaders of all of Spain’s main political parties invited their supporters on Friday night to prepare for power, as campaigning for one of the tightest national elections in decades drew to a close. No single party will get an overall majority in Sunday’s ballot, and opinion polls suggest all five leading contenders have a realistic chance of playing a role in government. Divisive and often ill-tempered, the election has been fought mainly on emotive topics - notably issu

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain’s election board blocked on Tuesday the far-right Vox party from participating in the only confirmed debate between leading contenders for the April 28 election. The ruling shows the complexity of Spain’s shift from decades of two-party rule to a fragmented political landscape where no one party looks set to win a majority and Vox has gone from relative obscurity to major force in less than a year. Vox has never won more than 5 percent of votes in national elections, b

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain’s Banco Santander lost a battle to regain ownership of its headquarters outside Madrid on Monday when a Spanish court ruled that the billionaire Reuben brothers had won a tender with a cash bid, net of debt, of 283 million euros ($325 million). Santander pays millions of euros in monthly rent to the owner of the 250 hectare plot whose nine futuristic buildings include offices, restaurants and a residence for its employees, which has an enterprise value of almost 3 billi

MADRID/BARCELONA (Reuters) - Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Catalan leader Quim Torra expressed a commitment to dialogue on Thursday in a symbolic joint declaration to ease tensions in the protracted crisis over Catalonia’s ambitions to split from Spain. The statement indicates a turning point in the conflict between Madrid and the northeastern region, opening the door for a political solution to a dispute which reached its summit last year with its unilateral declaration of independe

(Reuters) - Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar premiered his retrospective drama “Pain and Glory” in Madrid on Wednesday, reuniting actors Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, who had risen to Hollywood stardom after starting in his movies.

MADRID (Reuters) - Migrants from Central America are turning to former colonial master Spain as they face rejection from the United States in their attempts to escape rampant violence and poverty at home, but the streets of Madrid offer little relief.

MADRID/HAVANA (Reuters) - Spanish premier Pedro Sanchez agreed with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel to deepen bilateral political ties on Thursday, at the start of the first official visit by a Spanish leader to the Communist-run country in three decades.

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain’s Supreme Court on Friday ruled that five men who attacked a teenager at a bull-running festival were guilty of rape not the lesser crime of sexual abuse, concluding a case that sparked mass protests across Spain over chauvinism and sexual abuse.

MONTSERRAT, Spain (Reuters) - Tourists and worshippers visiting Catalonia’s imposing mountain-side Montserrat Monastery on a sunny Sunday this month appeared to pay little heed to two men with placards demanding that the local abbot be defrocked for covering up sexual abuse.

Tourists and worshippers visiting Catalonia's imposing mountain-side Montserrat Monastery on a sunny Sunday this month appeared to pay little heed to two men with placards demanding that the local abbot be defrocked for covering up sexual abuse. But the pair, who say they were sexually abused in their youth, are making themselves heard by society in Spain and elsewhere as they pressure the Catholic Church to come clean on such wrongdoing by clergy.

SALINAS, Spain (Reuters) - Carmen Lopez can only imagine what the sea looks like, but the blind 21-year-old Spaniard is in her element riding the surf. Guided by instinct and signals whistled by her coach, Lopez has been training hard to become Spain’s first blind female athlete to enter the World Adaptive Surfing Championship in La Jolla, California, on Wednesday. “The sea is where I feel peace and freedom, as if it were where I’m supposed to be,” she said sitting on her surfboard after an ho

MADRID (Reuters) - European Central Bank policymaker Pablo Hernandez de Cos said on Monday that the central bank might need to look into whether downside risks to growth it had so far deemed temporary were becoming more persistent.

GUADALAJARA, Spain (Reuters) - Painfully aware that his advancing illness will eventually leave him on life support, Spaniard Mariano Lopez has his hopes pinned not on a cure but on a parliamentary bill that would allow him to meet death on his own terms.

MADRID (Reuters) - Global campaigners are showcasing events to mark Women’s Day on Friday with the slogan ‘a balanced world is a better world’ - but in Spain the gender equality debate is sowing divisions that appear deeper than ever.

A Michelin-starred restaurant in Berlin forced to close its doors by the coronavirus lockdown has turned its culinary skills to helping to feed doctors, nurses, policemen and firefighters who cannot work from home.

Most Asian currencies were set for weekly gains against the dollar on Friday, af...

BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - Catalan separatists chanting “Freedom for the political prisoners” and “Independence!” took part in largely peaceful rallies on Tuesday that failed to draw massive crowds at a time when the restive Spanish region has come to a crossroads.

BARCELONA (Reuters) - Barcelona spent much of the close season trying to bring Neymar back to the club two years after he left to join Paris St Germain but on Friday the Brazilian’s attempts to negotiate with his old side ended in mutual recriminations.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nine former U.S. ambassadors on Tuesday warned that Afghanistan could collapse in a “total civil war” if President Donald Trump withdraws all U.S. forces before the Kabul government and the Taliban conclude a peace settlement. “A major troop withdrawal must be contingent on a final peace,” the nine wrote on the website of the Atlantic Council, a think tank. “The initial U.S. drawdown should not go so far or so fast that the Taliban believe they can achieve military victory

June 27 (Reuters) - Australian shares were muted on Thursday as more modest U.S. rate cut expectations took the sheen off defensive stocks, but many investors kept to the sidelines ahead of this weekend’s Group of 20 meeting in Japan. The S&P/ASX 200 index was up 0.5 points at 6,641 points by 0205 GMT. The benchmark was 0.26% lower on Wednesday. Global financial markets and China’s major trading partners are hoping for signs of a thaw in testy U.S.-China trade relations when the countries’ pre