A French court on Thursday sentenced two Basques to prison terms of four and eight years for belonging to the armed Basque separatist group ETA. Kizkitza Gil de San Vicente Gurruchaga and Zigor Merodio Larraona were arrested in June 2006 in Bordeaux in a motor vehicle with a false registration plate. Kizkitza Gil de San Vicente Gurruchaga, who has already served nearly four years in prison, was expected to be released from custody within days.

The body of a member of the armed Basque separatist group ETA who disappeared nearly a year ago has been identified in a French morgue, a source close to the case said Thursday. Joan Anza was found dead in a street in the southern city of Toulouse late last April following "health problems", the source said, following identification of his remains in a Toulouse hospital mortuary.

The general in charge of US military activities in Latin America said Thursday he had no evidence of links between Venezuela's leftist government and Colombian and Basque guerrilla groups. "We have not seen any connections specifically that I can verify that there has been a direct government-to-terrorist connection," General Douglas Fraser, head of the US Southern Command, told a Senate hearing.

Other world leaders should follow the example of US President Barack Obama and meet the Dalai Lama despite China's objections, the Tibetan spiritual leader's envoy to Europe said Thursday. "President Obama did not give in to this pressure and met with his holiness the Dalai Lama," Kelsang Gyaltsen told reporters in Madrid after a meeting with Spanish legislators.

Arsenal captain Cesc Fabregas is set to miss Saturday's Premier League clash at Hull with a hamstring injury. Fabregas suffered the injury in the first half of last weekend's victory over Burnley and was ruled out of the midweek Champions League victory over Porto as a result. Gunners boss Arsene Wenger had rated the Spain midfielder's chances of facing Hull as 50-50, but his creative talisman looks certain to absent from the trip to the KC Stadium.

Former Wimbledon champion Rafael Nadal has confirmed he will start his bid to regain the grass-court grand slam by competing at Queen's in June. Nadal was unable to defend the Wimbledon crown he won in 2008 after a knee injury forced him to withdraw from last year's event. But the Spaniard is determined to dethrone Roger Federer and will play in the pre-Wimbledon warm-up event, which he won in 2008, in an attempt to hone his grass-court game before heading to the All England Club.

Spanish media on Thursday lamented as a "catastrophe" Real Madrid's exit from the Champions League in the round of 16 for the sixth year in a row. AS used the word as an accusatory single-word headline after French side Lyon dumped the big-spenders out of the tournament 2-1 on aggregate. "A desolate reality, an unmitigated disaster, a continuing nightmare," fulminated AS.

Unions at General Motors' Opel plant in Spain said negotiations with management on a restructuring plan for the factory collapsed late on Wednesday. The central government in Madrid immediately called a meeting between the two sides for Thursday to try and reach a deal over the plant in Figueruelas, northern Spain, which employs 7,000 people.

Russian officials have given the green light to the extradition of a prominent Georgian crime boss wanted in Spain on money laundering charges, the Kommersant daily reported on Thursday. Russia's federal migration service removed the last legal obstacle to the extradition of Tariel Oniani by determining that he was not a Russian citizen, Kommersant said, citing an unnamed official in the service.

Spanish aid worker Alicia Gamez returned home Wednesday hours after she was freed from a four-month kidnapping ordeal at the hands of Al-Qaeda in Mauritania. A smiling Gamez stepped off a plane at Barcelona's airport, and said she was "happy to be home" but needed "time to recuperate". "What I want now is to rest and, above all, to be with my family," she said in a brief statement.