Zaragoza, Spain  - General Motors Europe will file for bankruptcy protection unless it urgently obtains 955 million euros (1.2 billion dollars) to cover immediate payment needs, employees' representatives at a Spanish GM factory said in a statement Wednesday.

The works committee referred to information given after GM European management and employees' representatives met Tuesday in Ruesselsheim, Germany.

Benidorm, Spain  - Reading a lot can be dangerous, and being too smart can lead a person to unhappiness: that is why Serb tennis player-cum-intellectual Janko Tipsarevic hit the brakes.

"I realized that I was reading too much, starting to doubt myself, life, my profession and tennis. I stopped a bit," Tipsarevic told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in an interview ahead of the Davis Cup tie against Spain from Friday.

Barcelona  - Jaime Martinez-Bordiu, 44, grandson of Spain's 1939-75 dictator Francisco Franco, has been sentenced to one year in prison for abusing his girlfriend, a Barcelona court announced Wednesday.

Martinez-Bordiu will not however be jailed, because he did not have a criminal record.

Martinez-Bordiu threw Ruth Martinez onto a chair, hurled her suitcase to the ground and threatened to kill her to prevent her from leaving the hotel where the two were staying in the southern town of Mijas in 2007, the court said.

Madrid - Spain's third-biggest daily ABC will cut its staff by about a half to 218 people, media reports Wednesday quoted its owner Vocento as saying.

The media group said the cuts were necessary to ensure the survival of ABC and to adapt it to market conditions.

In 2008, ABC had still been the only Spanish newspaper to strongly increase its distribution, which went up 10 per cent to 250,000 copies a day.

Madrid - Vicente Boluda, interim president of Spanish giants Real Madrid, has told sports daily AS that elections will be held at the club on July 5.

AS on Wednesday quoted Boluda as saying, in an interview which took place on Tuesday night, that "the elections will be held on July 5... It is impossible to organize them before."

So far, there has been no official confirmation from the club

of the July 5 election date.

He added that on July 7 "the players will return from holiday, and on the 10th they will be in training."

Boluda did not clarify whether he would be a candidate or not.