Armed Basque separatist group ETA on Monday welcomed as "constructive" proposals by a group of international experts who had called for it to disarm and dismantle its military apparatus.

ETA, blamed for more than 800 deaths in a four-decade campaign of bombings and shootings for the independence of the Basque homeland which straddles northern Spain and southwestern France, announced a "definitive end" to its armed activity in October 2011.

Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Monday refused to resign over a corruption scandal rocking his government as it fights to rescue the eurozone's fourth-biggest economy from an economic crisis.

He batted off calls from his political opponents to step down over allegations that he received secret payments through his Popular Party before he became premier in 2011.

Spanish police said Thursday they had smashed an international cocaine ring in a two-year operation with other forces that led to the arrests of 74 people in Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

Police seized 575 kilograms (1,270 pounds) of the drug and closed five secret laboratories in a global swoop together with U.S., Brazilian and French police.

Spanish opera star Placido Domingo said Wednesday he expected to feel "much better soon" after treatment for a blockage in his lung which forced him to cancel a string of concerts in Madrid.

"I will be feeling much better soon. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart," he told his fans in a message on the social network Facebook.

Around 100 African migrants stormed a border fence from Morocco into Spanish territory on Tuesday, leaving five police officers injured, Spanish authorities said.

Officials said about 40 of the migrants managed to cross the fence separating the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco on the Mediterranean coast, in the latest in a wave of such attempts.

A corruption scandal implicating Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy reignited on Tuesday with the publication of an original handwritten account ledger apparently showing illegal payments to him while he was a minister.

The document published by El Mundo newspaper fanned a scandal that has outraged Spaniards suffering in a recession and had sparked calls for Rajoy to resign earlier this year.

A bus careened off a central Spanish highway and ploughed into a metal safety barrier Monday, blowing out windows and tearing away one side of the vehicle in an accident that killed nine people.

Another 22 people were injured when the bus came off the road as it traveled downhill near Avila northwest of Madrid, trapping several passengers in the wreckage, emergency services said.

The number of Spanish jobless benefit claimants took a record plunge in June as an avalanche of summer jobs opened up, government data showed Tuesday, a rare glimmer of hope for the recession-hit economy.

But when the figures were corrected to strip out seasonal variations, the number of people registering as unemployed actually edged slightly higher, the Labor Ministry report showed.

In blue gloves and goggles, Maria Jesus Vicent's team of young researchers busily mix chemicals in their laboratory, where they work at improving medications for cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

Theirs is a well-equipped lab, but like researchers across Spain, they warn that steep funding cuts made during the financial and economic crisis are threatening to ground their potentially life-saving work -- and driving the country's most talented scientists away.

Police found three Britons shot dead in a house near the resort city of Malaga in southern Spain on Wednesday, officials said.

A source in the Civil Guard told Agence France Presse that a man and two females were found in a house in the town of Mijas, southwest of Malaga, and identified them as British.