From two days ago

A Spanish man who was imprisoned as a teenager for being gay has become the first to receive an official letter of apology.

Antoni Ruiz spent three months in jail under a law introduced during General Franco's dictatorship.

In 1976, when he was 17 years old, Mr Ruiz told his family he was gay.

It was just months after General Francisco Franco had died and homosexuality was strictly illegal.

When Mr Ruiz's worried parents confided in a Catholic monk, he promptly denounced their son to the authorities.

The teenager spent three months in prison and was banned from returning home for another year.

Mr Ruiz now heads an association for other former prisoners and estimates that around 5,000 homosexuals suffered a similar fate to him during Franco's dictatorship.

Now he has become the first to receive official recognition of his suffering in a letter from the justice minister of Spain.

- BBC

Rene and I are honeymooning in the south of Spain - where gay marriage is also legal now. The country has advanced far in three decades...