The iconoclastic Spaniard is due to receive tributes at Thursday's event from colleagues and admirers, including fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, screenwriter Peter Morgan and fellow directors Stephen Frears and Sally Potter.

Almodovar is part of a creative generation that emerged after Spain ended decades of dictatorship in the late 1970s. His quirky and sometimes outrageous films helped launch the careers of Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

He found international success with "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" in 1988.

His 1999 movie "All About My Mother" won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, and Almodovar took the best original screenplay Oscar in 2002 for "Talk to Her."

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The Interior Ministry said Wednesday that border police noticed fresh scars and blood-stained gauze on her chest as well as pale patches beneath her skin.

The woman said she had recently had breast implant surgery. The statement said police were suspicious and sent her to a local hospital where the implants were removed and found to contain cocaine.

The woman arrived in Spain from Bogota, Colombia.

European authorities routinely submit passengers arriving from Latin America to stringent checks to combat drug smuggling.

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Artur Mas, leader of the northeastern region's ruling center-right coalition, had sought an absolute majority in Sunday's vote to get a mandate for an independence referendum that the central government says would be unconstitutional. But his Convergence and Union party lost seats while another rival, the pro-independence Republican Left of Catalonia, made big gains.

Mas is expected to take weeks to try to cobble together a coalition majority. Spain's central government in Madrid predicted Monday that the result will mark the end of a secession vote drive that has distracted authorities who are trying to prevent Spain from being forced into a bailout.

While the two Catalonian parties share the goal of holding the referendum, they are far apart on almost everything else and analysts said it would be very difficult for them to form an alliance.

"They agree on the issue of the right to decide the future of the Catalan people, but on economic issues they have opposite positions," said Carlos Berrera, a communications professor at the University of Navarra.

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The photos were taken on a hunt last year, when Delgado served as the mayor of the Calvià municipality.

Chesús Yuste, of the Parliamentary Association in Defense of Animals, has deemed the picture an example of "animal abuse," saying, “This kind of action should disappear for the good of society and for the mental health of all. This is harming Spain's image and dragging the country back to the 11th Century."

“He is a minister for tourism, but what kind of tourism is he promoting here?” Yuste asked.

h/t Daily News

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The rate reported by Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, was up from an upwardly revised 11.5 percent in August. In total, 18.49 million people were out of work in the eurozone in September, up 146,000 on the previous month, the biggest increase in three months.

While the eurozone's unemployment rate has been rising steadily for the past year as the economy struggled with a financial crisis and government spending cuts, the United States has seen its equivalent rate fall to 7.8 percent. The latest U.S. figures are due Friday.

With the eurozone economy fading, most economists think unemployment will keep increasing over the coming months and that the deteriorating economic picture will soon spook investors again after a brief hiatus.

"Financial markets have calmed somewhat, but we expect that the deteriorating economy will soon enough lead to more crisis headlines," said Tim Ohlenburg, senior economist at the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

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Standard & Poor's late Wednesday cut its rating on Spain's debt by two notches to BBB-, just a step above junk status, or non-investment grade. By indicating that it's a riskier asset to hold, S&P's downgrade may make it more expensive for the Spanish government to borrow money as it might scare off some of its bond investors.

The agency said it was concerned by the deepening economic recession, which has seen unemployment rise to nearly one in four and fueled social discontent. It also noted that the government's hesitation in requesting a European financial lifeline was "potentially raising the risks to Spain's rating."

Though S&P's warning may nudge the Spanish government to make a bailout request sooner rather than later, rival agency Moody's has indicated it may cut its rating for Spain in the event of a bailout request.

"It would appear that when it comes to the rating Spain is a bit between a rock and a hard place," said Gary Jenkins, managing director of Swordfish Research.

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"I don't want to go down the path of Spain," Romney said during the debate, adding: "I want to go down the path of growth that puts Americans to work."

From the AP:

"'What I see is ignorance of what is reality, but especially of the potential of the Spanish economy,'" said Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria.

Maria Dolores Cospedal, leader of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's Popular Party, noted that 'Spain is not on fire from all sides like some on the outside have suggested.' Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo called it 'very unfortunate that other countries should be put up as examples' when the facts are skewed."

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Around 20,000 people marched in Madrid behind a banner that said, "They want to ruin the country. We have to stop them." The rally in Spain's capital was supported by 150 organizations.

Protesters chanted slogans against cuts and waved placards reading "youth without jobs, society with no future." That is a reference to the youth unemployment rate, which surpasses 50 percent. Spain's overall jobless rate is nearly 25 percent and social unrest is on the rise.

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Documentarians Brandon Jourdan and Marianne Maeckelbergh of the Global Uprisings project have been making short films about unrest and dissent all around the globe in recent months, from Europe to Egypt to the U.S.. They put together this short film (below), chronicling the protests and the police response, and detailing the reasons why so many Spaniards took to the streets.

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Thousands of protesters clashed with riot police in Spain's capital Tuesday in a showdown on the doorstep of the parliament building in Madrid.

Tuesday's march aimed to manifest rage against a new round of harsh austerity measures the government will announce in the 2013 budget on Thursday.

A manifesto for the day stated that "the current situation has exceeded all tolerable limits" and demanded a reconstitution of the entire Spanish government, including electoral and tax reform, and a moratorium on Spain paying national debts in the service of "private interests."

The Indignados, as the Spanish anti-austerity, anti-capitalist demonstrators are known, strongly influenced Occupy organizing models and tactics last year, including repurposing city squares for encampments and assemblies.

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Yes, octogenarian Cecilia Gimenez, who destroyed transformed García Martínez’s 19th-century fresco of Jesus into the now infamous Beast Jesus, isn’t pleased that she’s been left out of the spoils of her work. Spanish newspaper El Correo explains that since last Saturday the church has started charging visitors to the site and Gimenez wants some of the €2,000 they’ve raised in four days.

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Of the unfortunate restoration, BBC correspondent Christian Fraser said, "The once-dignified portrait now resembles a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic." (Punsters have taken to calling it "Ecce Mono" -- Behold the Monkey.)

But fear not, for the city has a plan. Juan Josi Ojeda, the city's culture council member,  told BBC, "If we can't fix it, we will probably cover the wall with a photo of the painting."

Gomez claims the church’s priest gave her permission and told the BBC, "Everybody who came into the church could see I was painting."

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A good Spain song is like falling into a trance: It’s a blend of disparate, vibrato-rich sounds that, when played right, sounds inevitable. It’s also a sound very few people have heard lately: This band broke up more than a decade ago.

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Spaniards are desperate.

Enter American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

The controversial owner of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. and third-richest American wants to build a version of the Nevada gambling mecca in the outskirts of Madrid or Barcelona. A mega-resort dedicated to entertainment and business conferences, it would include 12 hotels, six casinos and three golf courses spread across 2,000 acres — the biggest urban development project in Spain since the 1992 Olympics.

The main hook: EuroVegas would create up to 250,000 jobs in a country where almost 6 million people, up to a quarter of the workforce, are unemployed.

At least that was the pitch until the projected number fell to 14,000 when the company’s directors visited Spain in June, when they also announced a drop in investment from $21 billion to $7.3 billion, two-thirds of which would have to come from Spanish banks.

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The three — a Russian, a Russian of Chechen descent and a Turk, according to Spanish police — were detained Wednesday. The Turk was arrested in the southern city of La Linea bordering the British colony of Gibraltar, while the other two were picked up near the central city of Ciudad Real as they traveled toward a northern Spanish town near the border with France.

Enough explosive material was found in the house in La Linea where the Turk lived to blow up a bus, and the material could be especially dangerous if combined with shrapnel, Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz said.

Investigators found no indications that the three were targeting Gibraltar, he said, declining to offer specifics on possible targets, except that "there are clear indications they could have been planning an attack in Spain and/or another country."

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