Spain

4 July 2019; MEMO: British royal marines and officials in Gibraltar have detained a supertanker suspected of carrying crude oil to Syria, in breach of European Union sanctions, the government of Gibraltar said, Reuters reports.

In a statement the government said it had reasonable grounds to believe that the Grace 1 vessel was carrying its shipment of crude oil to the Banyas Refinery in Syria.

28 June 2019; DW: Hundreds of firefighters are struggling to contain a wildfire that continues to spread over heavily forested hills in the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia. Firefighters said Thursday that the blaze was not under control.

"We're at a moment when the blaze is getting bigger," Miquel Buch, the regional interior minister, told local media.

6 May 2019; DW: The Spanish separatist has scuppered a ban on contesting the European elections. A court ruled he still has a fundamental right to contest the election even though he has fled the country and faces arrest if he returns.

Carles Puigdemont, the exiled former president of the Spanish state of Catalonia who fled to Belgium after a failed secession bid, has been cleared to run in the European elections, a court ruled on Sunday.

30 Apr 2019; DW: Spanish election authorities have banned the Catalan former President Carles Puigdemont from running as a candidate for the European Parliament.

Puigdemont and two former colleagues in the regional government had wanted to highlight the cause of Catalan independence on an international stage, after secessionist efforts were swiftly quashed by Madrid in 2017.

MADRID, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Prime Minster Pedro Sanchez said his Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) has "won the future and left the past behind" after the party took lead in Sunday's general election.

According to data published by the Spanish Interior Ministry with over 99 percent of the votes counted, the PSOE won 28.70 percent of the votes to win 123 seats in the 350 seat Spanish Congress of Deputies.

This means the PSOE had 37 more seats than in the June 2016 election when the Socialists won 22.63 percent of the vote and 85 seats.

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — Spain’s third parliamentary election in less than four years did little to dispel uncertainty over the political future of the eurozone’s fourth largest economy.

The center-left Socialist party won re-election in Sunday’s ballot, collecting nearly 29% of votes, and will try to form a government. It would be one of only a handful of socialist governments in the European Union.

But with only 123 seats in the 350-seat Congress of Deputies, Spain’s parliament, it needs to negotiate the support of smaller rival parties to pass legislation.

MADRID (AP) — Appealing to Spain’s large pool of undecided voters, top candidates on both the right and left urged Spaniards to choose wisely and keep the far-right at bay in Sunday’s general election.

What those undecided voters do in this tight race will shape the fortunes of the two political blocs that loosely took shape during campaigning that ended Friday. With no one party expected to win over 50 percent of Sunday’s vote, the question becomes which of Spain’s top five parties will join together after the vote to create a governing alliance.

1 Apr 2019; DW: Six countries in southern in eastern Europe are more concerned with emigration than they are with immigration, according to a new European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR) survey published by The Guardian newspaper on Monday.

27 Mar 2019; DW: The leader of a North Korean dissident group raided the North Korean Embassy in Madrid last month and offered stolen materials to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a Spanish court has said.

Mexican citizen Adrian Hong Chang contacted "the FBI in New York five days after the assault to facilitate information related to the incident in the embassy," Spain's National Court said Tuesday.

17 Mar 2019; DW: Thousands of people marched through the streets of Madrid on Saturday in support of Catalan politicians and activists who are currently on trial for attempting to secede from Spain in October 2017.

Organizers said 120,000 people attended the march, but police estimated about 18,000 people attended the first major separatist march in the Spanish capital.