Madrid - Pressure is mounting in Spain to settle accounts with the 1939-75 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, with critics seeing government measures to rehabilitate his victims as half-hearted.

The government "forgot the state's responsibility to investigate human rights violations," the human rights group Amnesty International charged, but government representatives stressed its commitment to redressing the injustices of the Franco era.

In 2007, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government passed the Law of Historic Memory, aimed at restoring dignity to leftists killed during the 1936-39 civil war and Franco's subsequent dictatorship.

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain - At least three would-be immigrants died during a crossing from Africa to Spain's Canary Islands, radio reports said Wednesday.

Madrid, September 3: A team led by scientists from University of the Basque Country in northern Spain has managed to measure wind details of the planet Venus.

At a height of between 45 km and 70 km above the surface, there are dense layers of sulphuric acid clouds totally covering Venus.

It was in the 1960s that scientists discovered, by means of telescopic observations, that the top level of cloud layers moved very rapidly, orbiting the planet in only four days, compared to the planet's own orbit of 224 days.

Madrid  - A judicial move to investigate killings and disappearances during Spain's 1936-39 Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of General Francisco Franco sparked controversy on Tuesday.

Associations representing Franco's victims and leftist parties welcomed the move as finally doing justice to thousands of victims, while conservative commentators said it reopened old wounds.

National Court judge Baltasar Garzon announced Monday that he was requesting information on deaths and disappearances during the war, which was sparked by Franco's uprising against the legal republican government, and during the dictatorship that lasted until Franco's death in 1975.

San Sebastian, Spain - Members of the Basque regional government are planning to sue Spain at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for blocking a referendum-like vote on the self-determination of the northern region, regional Prime Minister Juan Jose Ibarretxe said on Monday.

Ibarretxe urged Basque citizens to join the legal move in defence of the referendum foreseen for October 25.

Madrid - The captain of the MD-82 passenger plane that crashed in Madrid expected the airline Spanair to switch it after discovering a technical problem just before take-off, the Spanish daily El Pais said Monday.

Captain Antonio Garcia Luna, who was killed in the August 20 accident with 153 other people, asked an airport company employee to arrange for two buses to take the passengers to a new aircraft, the daily quoted the employee in question as telling police.