Spain's oldest flamenco festival will visit India in 2014, retracing the origins of the classic Spanish musical form, organizers said Wednesday.

The Cante de las Minas festival plans its first overseas event in March in Jodhpur, in Rajasthan state -- considered the home of the migrant gypsies from whom southern Spain's flamenco culture sprang.

Syrian opposition representatives have demanded international guarantees that President Bashar Assad step down in any peace deal, former opposition chief Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib said on Tuesday, as Russia and the United States step up efforts to organize a peace conference.

The demand was one of eight points set out in a roadmap agreed by delegates to a two-day Syrian National Consultation meeting in Madrid, Khatib said on his Facebook page.

Branches of the divided Syrian opposition held talks in Madrid on Monday seeking to harmonize their approach to the country's bloody civil war, their Spanish government hosts said.

The talks included Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, who resigned last week as leader of the Syrian National Coalition, plus other members of the coalition and "various movements" of the opposition to Syria's President Bashar Assad, the Spanish foreign ministry said in a statement.

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.