Spanish police seized over 550 kilos (1,200 pounds) of cocaine from a sailboat in the Atlantic and arrested three people, including two French crew members, the interior ministry said Thursday.

One of the crew members tried to set fire to the boat when a Spanish navy ship with police on board neared the sailboat about 500 nautical miles from Spain's Canary Islands, the ministry said in a statement.

Two Spanish ex-policemen refused on Thursday to be extradited to Argentina to stand trial for allegedly torturing prisoners during the Franco dictatorship, a court said.

Dozens of angry supporters of the victims demonstrated near the courthouse in Madrid as Juan Antonio Gonzalez Pachecho, 67 -- known as Billy the Kid -- and Jesus Munecas Aguilar, 78, arrived for their hearing.

Police in Spain arrested a man with one of the biggest collections of child pornography ever seized there, with more than 800,000 images of violent abuse including bestiality, authorities said Wednesday.

"It is one of the biggest known seizures in Spain and surrounding countries of pedophiliac material in the possession of one person who shared it," a spokesman for the Civil Guard told Agence France Presse.

Surgeons in Spain successfully removed a giant benign tumor weighing 25 kilograms (55 pounds) from the womb of a 47-year-old woman, the hospital treating her said on Wednesday.

The head of obstetrics and gynecology at Torrevieja Hospital in eastern Spain, Eduardo Cazorla, "said that in his 20-year career he had never treated such a case", the hospital said in a statement.

Washing machines, fish fingers and football teams: not even household names are safe from a Spanish bankruptcy epidemic ravaging big and small businesses alike.

The number of companies filing for bankruptcy in Spain rose from 1,147 in 2007, the year before Spain's real estate bubble disastrously burst, to nearly 6,200 in 2009, according to the National Statistics Institute.

Spain will ban mobile phone use by train drivers except in cases of emergencies after a train flew off the rails and killed 79 people, the government said Tuesday.

"All calls will be centralized and the use of a mobile phone will be limited to specific calls and only in cases of emergencies," Public Works Minister Ana Pastor told a news conference.

Crisis-hit Greece has taken steps to fight corruption while Spain is dragging its feet on tackling bribery, graft watchdog Transparency International said as it released its annual report Tuesday.

"That's one of the most interesting issues for us, the difference between Spain and Greece," Finn Heinrich, lead researcher of the group's 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index, told Agence France Presse.

A Spanish court Friday ordered the immediate release of a man who raped and killed three children, cutting his prison time by 10 years in line with a European human rights ruling.

The killer, Miguel Ricart, was the latest convict to benefit from an October 21 ruling by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights.

Spain's conservative government on Friday approved a security reform branded repressive by critics, which toughens penalties for unauthorized protests and a range of other offences.

However it watered down an earlier draft of the bill which had reportedly proposed fines of up to 600,000 euros ($812,000) for insulting police officers or demonstrating near parliament without permission.

Global rating agency Standard & Poor's upgraded its outlook for Spain's debt on Friday, highlighting the prospects for export-led growth in the eurozone's fourth-largest economy.

The New York-based agency kept Spain's long-term credit rating at "BBB minus", just a notch above junk bond status, but raised the outlook to "stable" from "negative".