MADRID: Spain's King Juan Carlos Abdicates

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's King Juan Carlos is abdicating after almost 40 years on the throne and his son Prince Felipe will succeed him, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said on Monday in a surprise announcement.

"His majesty, King Juan Carlos, has just communicated to me his will to give up the throne," Rajoy said. "I'm convinced this is the best moment for change."

Once popular Juan Carlos, who helped smooth Spain's transition to democracy in the 1970s after the Francisco Franco dictatorship, has lost public support in recent years due to corruption scandals and gaffes.

His daughter, Princess Cristina, and her husband, Inaki Urdangarin, are under investigation in a corruption case. Both deny any wrongdoing. A judge in Palma de Mallorca is expected to decide soon whether to put Urdangarin on trial on charges of embezzling 6 million euros in public funds through his charity.

The 76-year-old king, whose health is failing and has had five operations in two years, including hip replacement surgery, is stepping down for personal reasons, Rajoy said.

Spain does not have a precise law regulating abdication and succession. Rajoy said his cabinet would meet very soon to set out the steps for Prince Felipe to take over as Felipe VI.

The country is just pulling out of a difficult and long recession that has seen faith in politicians, the royal family and other institutions all dwindle.

Felipe, 46, has had an increasingly important role in ceremonial events in the past year and has not been stained by the corruption case involving his sister and her husband.

Juan Carlos was once beloved for his common touch and was seen as much more accessible than the British royals.

In 2012, at the height of Spain's financial crisis, the king fell and broke his hip during an elephant-hunting trip in Botswana. The lavish privately funded safari was secret until his accident and came at a time of particularly harsh public spending cuts.

Sixty-two percent of Spaniards were in favour of the king stepping down, according to a January poll by Sigma Dos. That compared with 45 percent a year earlier. Only 41 percent of those polled had a good or very good opinion of the king.

Felipe has a positive rating of 66 percent and most Spaniards believe the monarchy could recover its prestige if he took the throne, according to the poll.

Felipe married divorced journalist Leticia Ortiz in 2004 and they have two daughters.

(Reporting by Fiona Ortiz; Editing by Paul Day and Philippa Fletcher)

Madrid: Amnesty International's Spanish Office Receives Suspect Envelope

MADRID (Reuters) - The Madrid office of the human rights group Amnesty International received an envelope on Monday containing a suspicious substance, the city's emergency services said, adding they were preventively securing the area and attending staff. www.amnesty.org.uk

The building housing Amnesty's offices in the Spanish capital has been evacuated. The group's 30 workers were still inside and would be decontaminated, a spokesman said.

"Around 1745 CET (1545GMT) emergency services were alerted to an envelope in Amnesty International's offices with a suspicious substance, susceptible of being toxic," the emergency services spokesman said.

Bomb disposal specialists, who will analyse the envelope, were on the scene alongside firefighters and ambulance staff, while the road where Amnesty's Spanish headquarters are situated was cordoned off.

A spokesman for Amnesty International said in an email that the group's 30 staff were well and that no-one had shown any abnormal symptoms. He expected they would leave the building shortly.

(Reporting by Rodrigo de Miguel and Sarah White; Editing by Larry King)

MADRID: Donated Bodies Found Piled-up In Horror Basement: WARNING: Graphic Content:

MADRID (AP) — A Spanish university is investigating how dozens of bodies donated to medical science came to be piled up in a campus basement, following newspaper publication of grotesque images of the remains dumped in what the daily said resembled a chamber of horrors.

A university in Madrid is being accused of storing donated bodies in a "chamber of horrors."
LINK: The newspaper El Mundo published photos showing bodies and body parts piled in a room in what the paper described as "a scene from a horror film." The paper claimed some bodies had been there for seven years.

A statement from Madrid Complutense University said the bodies had been due for incineration as their use in research had ended but that spending cuts had caused delays.

It said it was an isolated occurrence and that the newspaper was distorting reality.

The university said the bodies had been treated with formaldehyde and mummified and posed no health risk.

El Mundo newspaper photo and video images Tuesday showed the discarded body parts, some not covered by sheets, piled on shelves and tables. The papers said there were some 250 bodies and that many had had been there for years.

It said some were kept in a refrigerated room, and compared the images to a mass grave.

The paper said the smell of death and formaldehyde was unbearable. The paper did point out that another medicine department at the university kept its donated bodies in very good conditions.

University spokeswoman Margot Almazan she could not comment on the number of corpses kept in the basement room or how long they might have been there until the probe was completed.

The university said it had reached an agreement recently with a funeral company and the bodies would be removed this week.

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MADRID: Four Arrested As Spanish Police Bust Drug Smugglers

MADRID (AP) — Officials say police have arrested four people and busted a gang suspected of smuggling marijuana buds and other drugs from southern Spain into Britain.

The investigation was triggered in January when evidence emerged that an organization was purchasing large quantities of hashish in Spain and transporting it for sale in Britain. www.drugfreeworld.org 

Investigators learned that the drugs were being acquired in the provinces of Granada and Murcia, where traffickers vacuum-packed them and hid them in trucks bound for England. www.drugs.ie 

Police said in a statement Sunday they arrested two Spaniards and two Britons as they transferred buds from Granada to Murcia, then they raided a drug- and equipment-filled house in hills near the towns of Abaran and Ricote.