Two political leaders of the Basque separatist group ETA were arrested in southwestern France on Tuesday, local police and the Spanish interior minister said.

The arrests of ETA members David Pla and Iratxe Sorzabal "completes the decapitation of ETA", minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz told reporters as he arrived for a meeting in Brussels.

Pro-independence parties vowing to break Catalonia away from Spain if they win a regional election are set to secure a majority of seats in the vote, polls indicated Monday.

Two polls of voting intentions showed pro-independence candidates could win an absolute majority of seats in the regional parliament in Sunday's ballots, even though they may get less than half the votes overall.

Data shows Spain's economy recovering, but tell that to Javier Pichel: this summer he packed and left for the only place he could find a decent job -- Germany.

Millions of Spaniards are scraping by on benefits, family handouts or working cash-in-hand as they wait for the apparent economic rebound to create the hundreds of thousands of jobs the government is promising.

The EU on Thursday warned that a Catalonia vote for independence from Spain would automatically mean its exit from the bloc and it would have to apply for re-admission.

"If part of a member state ceases to be part of that state, because of the territory becoming an independent state, the (EU treaties) would no longer apply to that territory," European Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas said when asked about the possible consequences of a September 27 regional vote in Catalonia.

A Spanish judge Monday charged a man with killing a U.S. woman on a pilgrims' hiking trail as authorities sought to identify a body thought to be hers, officials said.

A judge in the northern town of Astorga ordered the suspect to be held in custody without bail, the court said in a statement. 

A Spanish coast guard ship rescued 40 sub-Saharan African migrants, including a child, from a boat off the Spanish resort island of Gran Canaria, emergency services said Sunday.

The boat was intercepted late on Saturday in the Atlantic some 18 nautical miles southeast of the  island. 

Some 1.4 million people on Friday joined a march demanding independence for the Catalonia region from Spain, Barcelona city police said.

Officials published the figure on Twitter after the demonstration, which marked the start of campaigning for a September 27 regional election billed by Catalan leaders as an indirect vote on independence.

Spanish police said they arrested an 18-year-old Moroccan woman on Saturday accused of preparing to travel to Syria to join the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).

She was the latest in a series of suspected IS sympathizers detained in Spain since last year over security fears.

Catalonia's president vowed Friday to begin seceding from Spain if pro-independence parties win a majority of seats -- not votes -- in regional parliament elections set for later this month.

Catalonia's main pro-independence parties have agreed for the first time to run on a single unified list dubbed "Together for the Yes" in the September 27 regional vote. 

Spain's prime minister defended Thursday a contested judicial reform that would make it possible to quickly suspend leaders of Catalonia if they go ahead with a secession plan for the wealthy region.

The reform, presented by Spain's conservative government on Tuesday, would increase the powers of Spain's Constitutional Court to ensure its rulings are met, a move aimed directly at Catalonia.