Spain's government Friday approved an emergency reform of the crisis-hit education sector, hoping to reduce the number of school dropouts and curb the soaring youth unemployment rate.

Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria said the plan aimed to improve young people's job prospects at a time when unemployment among those aged 16 to 24 has surpassed 57 percent, and 25 percent of Spaniards drop out of school early.

A judge rejected on Thursday an appeal by Spanish King Juan Carlos's daughter in a corruption probe, insisting her tax returns be admitted for scrutiny in the investigation which has plunged the family into scandal.

The Infanta Cristina, 47, Juan Carlos's youngest daughter, had appealed against the order for 10 years' worth of her income statements to be included in the evidence he is examining.

The Catalonia bookshop in Barcelona survived a civil war and a fire over its 88 years of business -- but nothing could protect it from Spain's recession.

Like bookshops, theaters and cinemas across Spain, it was no longer getting enough punters to survive.

A Palestinian man who lived in Canada for the past 26 years has been deported to Lebanon over a 1968 attack on an Israeli airliner, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced Monday.

Issa Mohammed immigrated to Canada using a false alias in 1987, after being convicted by a Greek court of storming a civilian airliner and killing a passenger and later being released from jail in a hostage exchange.

With a pumpkin for a drum, carrots for flutes and turnips for trumpets, musicians from Vienna transformed the fresh goods in a Madrid market into honking, whistling instruments on Monday.

Visiting members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra marked the centenary of the San Miguel market in the center of the Spanish capital by taking saws and drills to its vegetables, coring and boring holes in them to make wind instruments.

One of Britain's most wanted fugitives, 32-year-old Andrew Moran, has been arrested in a Spanish coastal town after four years on the run, police said Sunday.

Moran, who absconded from his trial for armed robbery in 2009, was detained in the town of Calpe on the Costa Blanca, according to a Spanish police statement, which described the Briton as "a dangerous fugitive".

Banks seized nearly 40,000 homes in Spain last year due to unpaid mortgages, official data showed Friday, as a sharp economic downturn and record unemployment took its toll.

A total of 39,167 homes were seized in 2012, the Bank of Spain said in a bulletin based on a survey of lenders which approve over 85 percent of mortgages in the country.

Thousands of striking students and teachers protested across crisis-wracked Spain Thursday against spending cuts they say are destroying the country's public education system.

In Madrid the protesters, many of them wearing green T-shirts that have become a symbol of their movement against the budget cuts, marched to the education ministry where they called on Education Minister Jose Ignacio Wert to resign.

Spanish police said Thursday they busted a network of Moroccan and Chinese nationals who laundered hundreds of thousands of euros a week in drug money.

Officers arrested two Chinese nationals, one suspect from Hong Kong and three Moroccans in raids at locations including a major Chinese trading estate near Madrid, a police statement said.

Spain's Constitutional Court on Wednesday put a brake on Catalonia's drive for a referendum on independence by opening the door to a legal challenge against the region's claim to sovereignty.

Catalonia's regional parliament in January passed a "declaration of sovereignty" which it said gave Catalonia grounds "to exercise its right to decide" its political future.