It came as a shock to Gordi Giro, the man making his first visit to a home he bought in an auction in Spain, to discover the former owner's mummified body sitting on the living room couch. Giro was horrified to find the body of Maria Luisa Zamora, who died of "natural" causes in 2001. It was also the year when she stopped making payments on the residence in the coastal town of Roses in Spain's northeast Catalonia region.

Maintenance workers responding to a complaint about a clogged toilet at the Palace of Justice, Spain found 30 pounds of hashish caught in a pipe was responsible for the blockage. The drug-filled drainage pipe was located Friday in a restroom used by prisoners inside the building that houses courtrooms and jail cells, in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the coast of Morocco.

The artworks once discarded as dump by figurative British painter Francis Bacon are set to go on sale in April. According to Ewbank managers, the company arranging the auction, the 45-lot which include mutilated paintings, photographs, personal diaries and some letters, is a first of its type and could fetch more than an estimated $98,410. The collection was rescued by Mac Robertson, a former electrician and Bacon's friend. According to a Times Online report, Robertson claims that Bacon allowed him to keep the stuff after he became angry over some workmen who littered his studio's floor with debris.

Authorities at Madrid International Airport, one of Europe's busiest air hubs, were trying their best to nab an elusive dog for the past eleven days, finally succeeding on Sunday by calling a team of animal rights activists. Snowy the terrier became lost at the airport on Jan. 31 after arriving on an Iberia cargo plane from Britain. His owners were traveling on a separate plane to vacation in Spain. According to Jaime Perez Guerra, a spokesman for Iberia airlines, the brown-and-white pooch spent 11 days in a sensitive outdoor area of the airport where planes fly over at very low altitude. That made it a tough job for the security people to capture him who were concerned about Snowy running onto a runway.

Scottish stockbroker Leven Brown, aka "El Loco" is planning to establish another feat by becoming the first person to windsurf across the Atlantic, and then turn back to do it again using a more difficult route. Brown was nicknamed El Loco last year, after taking time off from his job as a stockbroker, to row solo from Spain to Tobago for charity.