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☆ Spanish mountaineer, 84, injured just short of goal to become world's oldest climber
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

A Sherpa fell on Carlos Soria, injuring his tibia, a message posted on his behalf on his Twitter and Facebook accounts said. The climber, who was on his 15th attempt on Mt Dhaulagiri, was preparing to make a push for the summit when the incident occurred, the Himalayan Times newspaper said. Sherpa guides were bringing him down to base camp, for him to be evacuated to Kathmandu by helicopter, Guragai added. Soria has successfully climbed 12 of the world's 8,000-metre peaks and had the Dhaulagiri and Tibet's Shishapangma left to become the oldest climber to reach the summits of the planet's 14-highest peaks. Writing by Emma Pinedo; Editing by Aislinn Laing and Emelia Sithole-MatariseOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Spain has one swimming pool for every 37 residents, and these, too, are now in the spotlight. While her swimming pool has been empty for five years since her children grew up, Garcia, 61, said the town has been stigmatised unfairly for its pools. Pools are being used as a scapegoat for a lack of coherent water policy in Spain, she said. It is a sentiment shared by Gonzalo Delacamara, director of the IE Centre for Water & Climate Adaptation in Madrid. While the use of water to fill swimming pools during a drought is irresponsible, the bulk of Spain's water resources are taken by the agriculture sector, accounting for 70% of water usage, he said.

☆ Spanish extreme athlete emerges into daylight after 500 days living in cave
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Beatriz Flamini, an elite sportswoman, mountaineer and climber, is said by her support team to have broken a world record for longest time spent in a cave. She was 48 when she went into the cave, and celebrated two birthdays alone underground. WOOLLY HATSFlamini spent her time underground doing exercises to keep her fit and busy, painting and drawing and knitting woolly hats. She took two GoPro cameras to document her time, and got through 60 books and 1,000 litres of water, according to her support team. A spokesman for Guinness was not able to immediately confirm whether there was a separate record for voluntary time living in a cave and whether Flamini had broken it.

[1/5] Javier Ramiro, Co-Chief Scientific Officer of Spanish indoor hops farming start-up Ekonoke controls the plantation of hops in Alcobendas, Spain, March 23, 2023. "We're on a mission to save the world's beer," Ines Sagrario, chief executive and co-founder of Ekonoke, told Reuters. Strict hygiene measures such as protective clothing for staff ensure the space remains pest-free, taking the pesticides on which traditional farming often depends out of the equation. The most obvious challenge indoor farming faces, he said, is its high energy cost. "Demand from breweries is quite inelastic; you can't make beer without hops and they don't want to produce less," Sagrario said.

☆ Amid risk of stalling in EV race, Spain's rebooted aid scheme gets warm reception
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-11 | by ( Joan Faus | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +6 min

Madrid will launch a new, more flexible version of the PERTE scheme around July, worth 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion) after last year's initial funding round flopped, with only 27% of an earmarked 2.9 billion euros allocated. Stellantis already manufactures EVs in Spain and received 67 million euros from the first PERTE, but could request more funds to boost production. Griffiths said using the EU funds is "essential" for Spain's future as some investments would otherwise be non-viable. Unlike Germany, Europe's leading car producer, Spain lacks a domestic manufacturer to champion the EV cause. In last year's PERTE round, VW-SEAT received the highest payout, of 357 million euros, but had hoped for more.

☆ Spain's data regulator asks EU data protection committee to evaluate ChatGPT issues
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-11 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

MADRID, April 11 (Reuters) - Spain's data protection agency AEPD has asked Europe's data protection committee to evaluate privacy concerns surrounding OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbox ChatGPT, the agency told Reuters on Tuesday, after the software was temporarily banned in Italy. "The AEPD understands that global processing operations that may have a significant impact on the rights of individuals require coordinated decisions at European level," a spokesperson for the agency said in an emailed statement. "Therefore, in the short term, it has requested that the issue of ChatGPT be included in the next Plenary of the European Data Protection Committee, so that harmonised actions can be implemented within the framework of the application of the General Data Protection Regulation." Reporting by Aislinn Laing; Writing by David LatonaOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

REUTERS/Nacho DoceMADRID, April 5 (Reuters) - A 68-year-old Spanish TV actress said that her newly adopted daughter was conceived using her dead son's frozen sperm and is in fact her granddaughter, reigniting a debate over the bioethics of surrogacy and children's right to privacy in Spain. The weeks-old baby, named Ana Sandra, was born to a surrogate mother identified on Wednesday by the Lecturas magazine as a Cuban woman living in Miami, Florida. "This girl isn't my daughter, but my granddaughter," TV actress Ana Obregon told celebrity magazine ¡Hola! Obregon's only biological child, her son Aless Lequio, died of cancer in 2020 at the age of 27. Obregon rose to prominence in the 1980s and starred in Spanish sitcoms in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Since then, critics say those schemes have come back to bite the economy by ramping up competition for scarce housing - fuelling inflation and piling pressure particularly onto young, local, entry-level workers. Rents in Lisbon have jumped 65% since 2015 and sale prices have sky-rocketed 137%, figures from Confidencial Imobiliario, which collects data on housing, show. Locals struggled to keep up in a country where public housing only represents 2% of the property market, according to government data. The average rent for a one-bedroom flat in Lisbon is around 1,350 euros, a study by housing portal Imovirtual showed. "If housing stays this expensive or gets worse, (foreign) people ... will start moving back to their own countries."

☆ Church tower reemerges from parched reservoir in drought-hit Spain
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-17 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

The weather will be drier and hotter than usual this spring along the northeastern Mediterranean coast that includes Catalonia. The dry weather will heighten the risk of wildfires even as it brings average rainfall nationwide, Spain's meteorological agency AEMET said. "Heat waves in this geographical area of the planet are more frequent, are increasing more frequently than in other regions," he said. Spain's drought nationwide measured over 12 months is no worse than it was in 2017, 2012 and 2005. But the average water level in Catalonia's reservoirs stands at just 27%, slightly above the level in parts of the southern region of Andalucia.

☆ Spanish banks' exposure to Credit Suisse well below 1 bln euros, source says
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-16 | by ( Jesús Aguado | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

MADRID, March 16 (Reuters) - Spanish banks' exposure to struggling Swiss lender Credit Suisse (CSGN.S) is immaterial and lower than 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion), a source with knowledge of the matter said on Thursday. "The total exposure from Spanish lenders to Credit Suisse is well below 1 billion euros," the source said, without elaborating further. Credit Suisse in Spain declined to comment. Two supervisory sources told Reuters on Wednesday that the European Central Bank had contacted banks on its watch to quiz them on their exposure to Credit Suisse. On Thursday, the head of Spanish banking association AEB Alejandra Kindelan said she saw "no risk of contagion to Spanish banks", adding that domestic banks were well funded and properly supervised.

MADRID/PARIS/STOCKHOLM, March 2 (Reuters) - France and Spain are poised to announce a breakthrough this week in a long-running impasse over hefty costs of what would be their first undersea electricity link, a minister and sources in both countries told Reuters. That was due to unforeseen seabed instability on the French side that required costly re-routing, and rising costs of raw materials. Spain is a growing producer of renewable energy that it exports to France and it wants its neighbour to pay most of the extra costs. That had led to disagreement amid wider tensions between them about pipeline connections and protectionism. Spanish sources said the go-ahead would likely mean that France, whose nuclear power industry has been beset by problems, finally agreed to pay more.

More than 50% of workers earned less than 1,000 euros per month last year while rents and house prices have skyrocketed. Prime Minister Antonio Costa told a news conference the crisis was now affecting all families, not just the most vulnerable. It is not clear when the measures, worth at least 900 million euros ($962.19 million), will come into effect. To address the housing shortage, Costa said the state would rent vacant houses direct from landlords for a period of five years and put them on the rental market. At a small housing protest in Lisbon, 23-year-old activist Andreia Galvao accused the government of failing to live up to promises it made to address the housing crisis in the past.

France, which relies on its aging nuclear fleet to generate electricity, is leading a campaign to count hydrogen made using nuclear power -- known as "red" hydrogen -- in the EU's new renewable energy targets, which currently focus on green hydrogen made using electricity from renewable sources. After much foot-dragging, French President Emmanuel Macron agreed to the hydrogen pipeline between Barcelona and Marseille in October, a deal formalised at a summit with Spanish counterpart Pedro Sanchez in Barcelona in January. In Madrid, officials say the row is a "misunderstanding" and they are willing to be flexible on red hydrogen in other legislation such as the gas market directive, but not in the renewables bill. "Red hydrogen cannot be renewable because nuclear is not an energy that can be considered as such. France wants this to include its red hydrogen but it must first be designated as renewable.

[1/3] Migrants run towards the fence separating Morocco from Spain, after thousands of migrants swam across the border, in Ceuta, Spain, May 19, 2021. Spanish exports to Algeria fell 41% to 1 billion euros ($1.09 billion) in the January-November 2022 period compared with a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Industry. State-owned railway operators Renfe and Adif are working with their Moroccan counterpart to develop new train lines, which could mean 6 billion euros of business. A joint declaration made no mention of Spain's enclaves in Morocco although it reiterated Spain's new position on Western Sahara. Both countries agreed to cooperate on repatriations of illegal migrants.

☆ Spain church machete attack suspect was 25-year-old Moroccan, police confirm
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-26 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

[1/2] People observe a moment of silence a day after a 25-year-old Moroccan suspect attacked two churches, in Algeciras, Spain January 26, 2023. REUTERS/Marcelo del PozoMADRID, Jan 26 (Reuters) - The suspect in a machete attack on two churches in southern Spain in which one clergyman was killed and another seriously injured is a 25-year-old Moroccan man who was due to be deported from the country, police said on Thursday. A police source denied local media reports that the suspect had been under surveillance by security operatives in the days or months before the attack. The man was not in Spain legally and his deportation process began in June last year and was ongoing, the source added. According to a High Court ruling, the perpetrators were linked to Al Qaeda and the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group.

☆ Spain says it is open to sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-25 | by ( Belén Carreño | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

MADRID, Jan 25 (Reuters) - Spain's defence minister said on Wednesday Madrid was open to providing Ukraine with German-made Leopard 2 tanks, after Germany agreed to send the tanks and said NATO allies could do the same. Spain has 108 2A4 tanks, according to security and defence researcher Felix Arteaga of the Elcano think-tank. In late 2022, Spain delivered its largest package of defence materiel for Ukraine to date, sending to the logistics hub in Poland heavy weapons, long-range and anti-tank ammunition. Spain has sent four U.S.-made HAWK air defence systems and has committed to sending two more. It is also offering medical treatment to wounded Ukrainian soldiers, and air defence training at its air base in Toledo.

☆ At least one dead, several injured in machete attack at southern Spain churches
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-25 | by ( David Latona | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

[1/3] A body covered in thermal blanket is seen at the scene of a stabbing incident at a church in Algeciras, Spain January 25, 2023 in this screen grab from a video. The man attacked clergymen at two different churches - San Isidro and Nuestra Senora de La Palma, around 300 metres (1,000 feet) apart - just after 8pm on Wednesday evening in downtown Algeciras, a spokesperson for the city said. Jose Ignacio Landaluce, the mayor of Algeciras, has declared a day of mourning in the city for Thursday and a rally outside Nuestra Senora de La Palma church at midday. Earlier on Wednesday, two people were killed and several others injured when a 33-year-old stateless Palestinian man attacked them with a knife on a regional train travelling between Kiel and Hamburg in northern Germany, authorities said. Reporting by David Latona, Belén Carreño and Aislinn Laing; Editing by Rosalba O'BrienOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

REUTERS/Violeta Santos MouraCompanies Enagas SA FollowBARCELONA/LISBON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - An underwater pipeline to carry green hydrogen between Barcelona and Marseille will cost around 2 billion euros ($2.1 billion), according to preliminary estimates of the project agreed between Spain, Portugal and France, two sources told Reuters. Spain and Portugal aim to become clean hydrogen hubs and net energy exporters, causing tensions with France which plans to produce its own hydrogen using nuclear energy. The pipeline will only carry hydrogen in order to meet EU funding criteria, though "improvements" could be made in future to allow for some gas, a Spanish government source said. As a result, the industry source said, they have pushed their four grid operators to "speed up technical studies, potential pipeline layouts and cost assessments". "If you already have an overland pipeline why build an undersea pipeline?"

☆ Ukrainian embassy in Madrid receives 'bloody package'
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-02 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: 1 min

MADRID, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Spanish police have cordoned off the area surrounding the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid after it received a "bloody package" similar to the ones sent to other embassies abroad, Ukraine's foreign ministry said on Friday. This comes after a spate of six letter bombs targeted high-profile targets in Spain related to the war in Ukraine, including the United States' embassy, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the Defence Minister, an arms manufacturer, an air base and a European satellite centre. On Friday, the Ukrainian foreign ministry said several of the country's embassies abroad have received "bloody packages" containing animal eyes. Reporting by David Latona in Madrid and Tom Balmforth in Kyiv; Editing by Aislinn LaingOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ Ukraine ramps up security at diplomatic missions after blast at embassy in Spain
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-30 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

[1/4] Police stands outside of Ukrainian embassy after, Spanish police said, blast at embassy building injured one employee while handling a letter, in Madrid, Spain November 30, 2022. REUTERS/Juan MedinaMADRID/KYIV, Nov 30 (Reuters) - Ukraine on Wednesday ramped up security at its embassies abroad after Spanish police and government said an employee at the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid was injured opening a letter bomb. Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba has ordered all Ukrainian embassies abroad to "urgently" strengthen their security, according to a statement from Ukraine's foreign ministry. An officer at Ukraine's embassy to Spain declined to comment. The residential area surrounding the embassy in northwestern Madrid has been cordoned off and a bomb disposal unit is deployed at the scene, state broadcaster TVE reported.

☆ Interpol confirms red notice for Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-30 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

LISBON, Nov 30 (Reuters) - Global police agency Interpol confirmed on Wednesday it had issued a red notice for Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos, daughter of the country's former president, asking global law enforcement authorities to locate and provisionally arrest her. Portugal's Lusa news agency reported on Nov. 18 that Interpol had issued an international arrest warrant for dos Santos. But Interpol told Reuters it had issued a red notice instead at the request of Angolan authorities. A source close to dos Santos said on Nov. 19 that she had yet to be notified by Interpol. Dos Santos has given interviews recently, telling CNN Portugal on Tuesday the courts in Angola were not independent" and judges there were "used to fulfil a political agenda".

☆ Letter bomb injures one at Ukraine's Madrid embassy, Kyiv ramps up security
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-30 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

[1/5] Police stands outside of Ukrainian embassy after, Spanish police said, blast at embassy building injured one employee while handling a letter, in Madrid, Spain November 30, 2022. REUTERS/Juan MedinaMADRID/KYIV, Nov 30 (Reuters) - A security officer at Ukraine's embassy in Madrid was injured when he opened a letter bomb addressed to the ambassador on Wednesday, and Kyiv ordered a bolstering of security at all its representative offices abroad. The security officer suffered light injuries and went under his own steam to hospital for treatment, Spanish government official Mercedes Gonzalez told broadcaster Telemadrid. The residential area surrounding the embassy in northwestern Madrid was cordoned off and a bomb disposal unit was deployed to the scene. Reuters footage showed scores of police officers, armed with assault rifles and blocking roads with vans, in the neighbourhood around the embassy.

☆ Arias in the throes of war: Ukrainian companies crowned at 'Opera Oscars'
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-29 | by ( David Latona | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

MADRID, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Two Ukrainian opera houses were awarded this year's "Opera Oscar" for offering up mellifluous cadenzas and virtuosic trills amid power cuts and artillery blasts on their country's territory - allowing audiences to evade, if only for a few hours, the war outside. In recognition of their "outstanding work in challenging circumstances", the opera theatres in the Ukrainian cities of Lviv and Odesa jointly clinched the Company of the Year prize at the International Opera Awards ceremony held on Monday in Madrid's Teatro Real. The jury celebrated their "courage and resilience for continuing to perform despite the dangers and depredations unleashed by the war." Samoan tenor Pene Pati bagged the Opera Magazine Readers' award, the only one decided by popular vote instead of a jury. Soprano Sabine Devieilhe and baritone Stephane Degout, both French, won Female Singer and Male Singer, respectively.

LISBON, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Portugal expects economic growth of at least 6.7% this year, beating its 6.5% forecast on the back of domestic demand and tourism, helping the country further slash one of Europe's heaviest public debt burdens, its finance minister told Reuters. "Even if (quarter-on-quarter) growth is zero in the fourth quarter, we're going to have a growth rate of 6.7% in 2022, one of the highest in Europe," Medina said. Growth accelerated to 0.4% in the third quarter from the previous quarter's 0.1% as private consumption unexpectedly rose despite inflation at three-decade highs. Despite a worrying fast rise in rates, Medina expects Portugal to avoid a spike in bad loans of households thanks to measures such as a recent decree ordering banks to renegotiate mortgages of up to 300,000 euros for vulnerable families. ($1 = 0.9626 euros)Reporting by Sergio Goncalves and Aislinn Laing, editing by Andrei Khalip and Emelia Sithole-MatariseOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ Spanish soccer fan walking to Qatar World Cup missing in Iran
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-26 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

[1/2] Spanish man, Santiago Sanchez, walks in Iraq's Kurdistan region towards Qatar, where he aims to attend the 2022 World Cup, near Zakho, Iraq August 28, 2022. REUTERS/Charlotte BruneauMADRID, Oct 26 (Reuters) - A 41-year-old Spanish soccer fan who set out to walk to Qatar to attend the World Cup in November has gone missing in Iran, where unrest has erupted in the past few weeks, Spain's foreign ministry has confirmed. Spain's Foreign Ministry confirmed Sanchez was in Iran and its embassy in Tehran was urgently seeking information on his whereabouts to provide him with consular assistance. He has already been to Iran, it's a hospitable country... but this time it was a delicate moment." He told Reuters in Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan last month that he hoped he might meet the Spanish team and inspire them to victory in the 2022 World Cup.

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