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The celebrated Spanish human rights investigator Baltasar Garzón escaped a second conviction for abuse of his powers, when the supreme court declared him not guilty in a case involving his investigation of crimes committed under the Franco dictatorship. The decision came too late to save Garzón's career as an investigating magistrate as the the supreme court had already disbarred him in a separate case for wiretapping conversations between defence lawyers and their clients in a corruption investigation involving the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy's People's party. The verdict means Garzón has been found guilty in only one of three cases brought against him, but campaigners still point to the extraordinary nature of these cases, with no investigating magistrate ever having been pursued by his fellow judges on three separate charges before.Six of the seven supreme court judges on the panel that heard Garzón's case declared him not guilty, with one in favour of a guilty verdict. They argued that it was not the court's job to pursue the "historic truth" about the past, while recognising that many events during and, especially, after the Spanish civil war would nowadays be classified as crimes against humanity.

The construction industry has collapsed, leaving hundreds of thousands out of work. Overindebted home-owners face financial misery and have cut back on spending. And the banks are staring at a mounting pile of bad mortgage debts.All of which means that now - just like the UK - Spain's government finds itself borrowing and spending like crazy to stop its economy from collapsing altogether. The estate developer Francisco Hernando Contreras, aka "El Pocero," (the Drain Man), was the man behind the El Quiñón housing development near Seseña, some 37 kilometers south of Madrid. He originally planned to build 13,000 apartments there during a massive property boom in Spain, but abandoned the project after building only some 5,600 units, accusing Seseña's mayor of paralyzing the project with red tape, and describing an anti-corruption probe by the state prosecutor into the development as a "political campaign."

Some 20,000 buildings are believed to have been damaged in what was Spain's worst earthquake for 50 years. The magnitude 5.2 tremor hit early on Wednesday evening, around two hours after a quake measuring 4.4. Many homes in the worst-affected areas were built in the 1960s, before laws were passed to ensure buildings in areas with seismic activity were more earthquake resistant.