MARBELLA CLUB

Play was possible earlier on, but only 12 of the 68 players completed their day's work before the hold-up came at lunchtime. 

Rain in Spain: Players hit the driving range at a wet Spanish Open

Frenchman Bourdy, with only one top 10 finish in the past year, led on five under par by one from England's Simon Dyson and Robert Rock, 19-year-old Italian Matteo Manassero and home hope Jorge Campillo, a graduate from last season's Challenge Tour. 

The best early move came from Ireland's Peter Lawrie, whose only victory in nearly 300 Tour events came on the course four years ago. 

He birdied the first and third to climb into a share of 10th spot on two under, but had completed only one more hole when officials decided to bring the players in. 

With conditions improving and the threat of lightning passing it was announced that play would resume at 3pm local time, but with almost two hours lost the third round looked likely to spill into Sunday.

Cloudy skies: Italian Matteo Manasser

Instruction court two in Granada has ordered the reopening of the possible theft of a baby girl in 1990 in the Hospital Clínico in Granada. The case had previously been closed because of a lack of evidence. The hospital supposedly gave the family the body of dead baby in the place of their newly born daughter. Now a new report from a prestigious laboratory, quoted by the father Eduardo Rayo, says the DNA given to the parents did not correspond to the mother, but came from an adult and not newly born baby. The National Toxicology Institute had said that the DNA test was non-conclusive. As the instruction case gets back underway the family have indicted 15 people.

The airline has been objecting to the obligation of using the walkways, preferring their passengers to walk to the planes on the tarmac Ryanair has said it will not launch an appeal against the prohibition of embarking by foot at El Altet airport in Alicante. The sentence from Mercantile Court 3 in Alicante on March 26 ruled in favour of AENA, the Spanish Airports Authority, regarding the use of the airbridges allowing passengers to walk directly onto the planes. The ruling, ordering Ryanair to use the airbridges could have been appealed by the airline, but they have decided not to do so. The sentence considered the procedures in use at Alicante airport ‘are not arbitrary decisions by the authorities, but the fruit of their obligation to provide a service with all guarantees’. AENA said that they had always been open to study any operations with Ryanair, but provided that quality and safety in the provision of services are not put at risk. Neither can it be a discrimination against the other airlines.

There has been another incident between the Gibraltar Police and Spanish Coastguards. The Gibraltar authorities say the scuffle came about over the persecution of inflatable boats last Wednesday in the waters around the Rock. Reports indicate that a boat from the Spanish Coastguard approached an inflatable containing three people. Another boat from the Royal Gibraltar Police, also approached the inflatable, to arrest the occupants. Such inflatable boats have been banned under Gibraltar law for some ten years, to avoid their use for drug or contraband trafficking. The Gibraltar Government has issued a statement claiming that the Spanish Coastguard ‘assisted’ the three people on the boat ‘to avoid Gibraltar jurisdiction’ in ‘Gibraltar territorial waters’. However the Spanish do not recognise such waters. While the two sides were conversing about what was going on, two other boats, ‘suspected of carrying objects of prohibited importation’ were seen going from Punta de Europa and the bay, and both the Royal Gibraltar Police and SVA started a chase. The Gibraltar Police told the Spanish Coastguard to stop their chase as they were ‘in Gibraltar territorial waters’ but this request was ignored. The Gibraltar Government considers the Spanish Coastguard assisted the traffickers, stopping their arrest by the Gibraltar Police and describing that as ‘lamentable’. The British Foreign Office has confirmed it is taking up the matter with Spain. Gibraltar First Minister, Fabian Picardo, is asking why one of the Royal Navy vessels stationed in Gibraltar did not act. The Gibraltar Government says it ‘will be seeking clarification of the actions of the Royal Navy vessel ‘Scimitar’ which, although in the area, did not assist the Gibraltar Police engaged in the events’.

23 year old British tourist has fallen to her death from the third floor balcony of her hotel in Magalluf, Mallorca. Emergency sources said it happened at 4.25am Saturday morning at the Hotel Teix in Calle Pinada. Local police and emergency health services went to scene. After 20 minutes of an attempt to re-animate her heart, the woman was pronounced dead. Online descriptions for the Hotel say it is the best place to stay of you are looking for non-stop partying, adding it not suitable for families.

Four of the last reporters and photographers willing to cover crime stories have been slain in less than a week in violence-torn Veracruz state, where two Mexican drug cartels are warring over control of smuggling routes and targeting sources of independent information. The brutal campaign is bleeding the media and threatening to turn Veracruz into the latest state in Mexico where fear snuffs out reporting on the drug war. Three photojournalists who worked the perilous crime beat in the port city of Veracruz were found dismembered and dumped in plastic bags in a canal Thursday, less than a week after a reporter for an investigative newsmagazine was beaten and strangled in her home in the state capital of Xalapa. Press freedom groups said all three photographers had temporarily fled the state after receiving threats last year. The organizations called for immediate government action to halt a wave of attacks that has killed at least seven current and former reporters and photographers in Veracruz over the last 18 months. Like most of those, the men found Thursday were among the few journalists left working on crime-related stories in the state. Threats and killings have spawned an atmosphere of terror and self-censorship, and most local media are too intimidated to report on drug-related violence. Social media and blogs are often the only outlets reporting on serious crime. Veracruz isn't the only battleground for Mexican media. In at least three northeastern states, journalists are under siege from assailants throwing grenades inside newsrooms and gunmen firing into newspaper and TV station buildings. In the state of Tamaulipas, on the border with Texas, local media stopped covering drug trafficking violence, mentioning drug cartels or reporting on organized crime shortly after two gangs began fighting for control of Nuevo Laredo in 2004. As part of that war, reporters were targeted to keep them silent or because they had links to gangs. Mexico has become one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists in recent years, amid a government offensive against drug cartels and fighting among gangs that have brought tens of thousands of deaths, kidnappings and extortion cases. Prosecutions in journalist killings are almost nonxistent, although that is widely true of all homicides and other serious crimes in Mexico. The latest killings came in Boca del Rio, a town near the port city of Veracruz where police found the bodies. The victims bore signs of torture and had been dismembered, the state prosecutors' office said. One victim was identified as Guillermo Luna Varela, a crime-news photographer for the website http://www.veracruznews.com.mx who was last seen by local reporters covering a car accident Wednesday afternoon. According to a fellow journalist, who insisted on speaking anonymously out of fear, Luna was in his 20s and had begun his career working for the local newspaper Notiver. The journalist said Luna was the nephew of another of the men found dead, Gabriel Huge. Huge was in his early 30s and worked as a photojournalist for Notiver until last summer, when he fled the state soon after two of the paper's reporters were slain in still-unsolved killings. He had returned to the state to work as a reporter, but it was not immediately clear what kind of stories he was covering recently. State officials said the third victim was Esteban Rodriguez, who was a photographer for the local newspaper AZ until last summer, when he too quit and fled the state. He later came back, but took up work as a welder. The London-based press freedom group Article 19 said he, like the other two, had been a crime photographer. The fourth victim was Luna's girlfriend, Irasema Becerra, state prosecutors said. Article 19 said in a report last year that Luna, Varela and Rodriguez were among 13 Veracruz journalists who had fled their homes because of crime-related threats and official unwillingness to protect them or investigate the danger. The Committee to Protect Journalists said in 2008 that Huge had been detained and beaten by federal police as he tried to cover a fatal auto accident involving officers. Last June, Miguel Angel Lopez Velasco, a columnist and editorial director for Notiver, was shot to death in Veracruz along with his wife and one of his children. Authorities that month also found the body of journalist Noel Lopez buried in a clandestine grave in the town of Chinameca. Lopez, who disappeared three months earlier, had worked for the weeklies Horizonte and Noticias de Acayucan and for the daily newspaper La Verdad. The following month, Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, a police reporter for Notiver, was found with her throat cut in the state. Lopez was found after a suspect in another case confessed to killing him, but the other two murders have not been resolved. The cartel war in Veracruz reached a bloody peak in September when 35 bodies were dumped on a main highway in rush-hour traffic. Local law enforcement in the state was considered so corrupt and infiltrated by the Zetas and other gangs that Mexico's federal government fired 800 officers and 300 administrative personnel in the city of Veracruz-Boca del Rio in December and sent in about 800 marines to patrol. Mike O'Connor, the Committee to Protect Journalists' representative for Mexico, said journalists in Veracruz were exercising an unusual degree of self-censorship even before Ordaz and Lopez were killed. He said media avoided much coverage of crime and corruption. "Important news was not covered because it might upset the Zetas. Then these guys were killed and self-censorship cracked down even more," O'Connor said. "Almost all of the police beat reporters left town after those killings." Regina Martinez, a correspondent for the national magazine Proceso, continued to cover crime-related stories along with a handful of other journalists, however. On Saturday, authorities went to her home in Xalapa, the state capital, after a neighbor reported it to be suspiciously quiet. They found the reporter dead in her bathroom with signs she had been beaten and strangled. "Self-censorship was extraordinarily strong but whoever killed these journalists wanted more," O'Connor said. "It still wasn't enough to satisfy whoever killed these journalists." Mexico's human rights commission says 74 media workers were slain from 2000 to 2011. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 51 were killed in that time. It noted in a statement on the Mexico killings that Thursday was World Press Freedom Day.