Madrid - A bomb attack by suspected Basque terrorists in Spain has caused serious damage, the Basque Interior Ministry reported Saturday.

The attack took place overnight when a 5-kilo bomb hidden in a rucksack exploded in front of a courthouse in the town of Tolosa to the south of San Sebastian in the Basque region of northern Spain.

No people were injured in the blast which blew a 3-metre hole out of the facade of the courthouse and shattered all the windows in the five-storey building.

Madrid - Spain and Italy "clarified" their spat over Madrid's immigration policies on Friday, after Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni described Spain's system as "permissive," Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega has said.

Maroni had claimed in an interview with Italian media on Thursday that there were now less than 120,000 Roma Gypsies in Italy, because many of them had gone to "the more permissive Spain of (Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez) Zapatero."

Madrid - The thousands of African would-be immigrants arriving on Spain's Canary Islands include increasing numbers of children, the daily El Pais reported Friday.

The number of unaccompanied minors arriving annually has risen from a few hundred in 2000 to more than 700 by 2007. Children as young as 9 years old have been amongst the arrivals.

Reception centres on the islands now house 1,200 minors, more than twice as many as facilities there are designed to care for. Local authorities have called on the government to take most of the children to the Spanish mainland.

Madrid - Spanish police have smashed one of the country's biggest drug rings, detaining 44 people, police said Friday.

Eleven others were also indicted. The suspects included 34 Spaniards, 13 Moroccans as well as people from France, the Netherlands, Gibraltar and the Palestinian territories.

The arrests were made in southern Spain and in the Spanish enclave of Melilla on the Moroccan coast.

Police seized two boats and four personal water craft which had been used for transporting hashish from Morocco, as well as 3 tons of hashish and 3 kilograms of cocaine.

Madrid - The technician who fixed a technical problem on a passenger plane that crashed on August 20 did not comply with the instructions of plane maker Boeing because the Spanish airline had not included them in its handbook, the daily El Mundo reported Friday.

The Spanair MD-82 crashed at Madrid airport after take-off, killing 154 and injuring 18 people. The plane was manufactured by McDonnell Douglas, which merged with Boeing in 1997.

Before the flight, a technician inspected a temperature gauge that had broken down five times in 48 hours, according to El Mundo.

Madrid - They call themselves kings and queens. They rule over streets they have named the Inca, Aztec or Hispanic kingdom. They believe in God, honour and brotherhood. And whoever breaks the code of silence, does so at his own risk.

The Latin Kings are the best-known among the Hispanic youth gangs that have formed in Spain among the immigrants from its former colonies.

Gradually, Spanish police experts are beginning to understand the mentality of the street gangs born or based on models in poor and crime-infested neighbourhoods in the Americas.