Researchers in northern Spain believe they have discovered the oldest written record of a precursor of the Basque language, pushing back its earliest evidence to the first century B.C. The Aranzadi Science Society said it's a five-word inscription found on a flat piece of bronze shaped like a human hand that archaeologists unearthed last year.

(AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)MADRID – Spain became the first country in western Europe to accumulate more than 1 million confirmed COVID-19 infections on Wednesday as the nation of 47 million struggles to contain a resurgence of the virus. The health ministry said that its accumulative case load since the start of the pandemic reached 1,005,295 after reporting 16,973 more cases in the past 24 hours. “Some very hard weeks are coming.”France is not far behind in western Europe with over 930,000 reported cases. Russia has reported over 1.4 million cases. The U.S. leads the world with over 8 million reported cases, according to the Johns Hopkins tally that is considered a global standard for charting the progress of the pandemic.