World

VENICE — Italy was poised to declare a state of emergency for Venice on Thursday after an exceptional tide surged through churches, shops and homes, causing millions of euros worth of damage to the UNESCO city.

Tourists larked around in the flooded St Mark's Square in the sunshine, snapping selfies in their neon plastic boots and taking advantage of a respite in bad weather which has driven the high tides.

Sirens warning of fresh flooding rang through the canal city early on Thursday but the water level remained low compared to Tuesday's tide, the highest in 50 years.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who has called the flooding "a blow to the heart of our country", met Venice's mayor and emergency services before jumping in a speed boat to visit businesses and locals affected by the tide.

Residents whose houses had been hit would immediately get up to 5,000 euros ($5,500) in government aid, while restaurant and shop owners could receive up to 20,000 euros and apply for more later, he said.

Several museums remained closed to the public on Thursday.

As authorities assessed the extent of the damage to Venice's cultural treasures, such as St Mark's Basilica where water invaded the crypt, locals were defiant.

Many stopped for their habitual coffees at flooded bars, drinking their espresso while standing in several inches of water.

Austrian tourist Cornelia Litschauer, 28, said she felt mixed emotions seeing Venice's famous square half submerged.

"For the tourists it's amazing, it's something to see. But for the people who live here it's a real problem," Litschauer said, cradling her white Chihuahua Pablo

"It's strange. Tourists are taking pictures but the city is suffering."

'Need to adapt' 

The Locanda Al Leon Hotel said its bookings had suffered from the international media coverage of the flood, with some guests cancelling their rooms after seeing images of Venice underwater.

Under the arches of the Ducal Palace, a couple from Hong Kong posed for photos in the chilly morning sun.

"This [trip] was planned a long time ago so we couldn't change it," groom Jay Wong, 34, said.

"Actually this is a good experience. It's an adventure."

Tuesday's "acqua alta", or high waters, submerged around 80 per cent of the city, officials said.

Only once since records began in 1923 has the water crept even higher, reaching 1.94 metres in 1966.

Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi arrived for a private tour of the damage sustained to the basilica, while rival leader of the Italian right Matteo Salvini was due to drop by for the same on Friday.

French tourist Manon Gaudre, 22, said seeing Venice submerged was a "unique experience".

"The damage it's causing to monuments and the people is worrying," she said, wondering if climate change was to blame.

Many, including Venice's mayor, have blamed the disaster on global warming and warned that Italy — a country prone to natural disasters — must wake up to the risks posed by ever more volatile seasons.

"We need to be resilient and adapt. We need a policy that looks at the climate through completely different eyes," Environment Minister Sergio Costa said on Thursday.

Mayor Luigi Brugnaro has estimated the damage to Venice at hundreds of millions of euros.

The Serenissima, as the floating city is called, is home to a mere 50,000 residents but receives 36 million global visitors each year.

A massive infrastructure project called MOSE has been under way since 2003 to protect the city, but it has been plagued by cost overruns, corruption scandals and delays.

"This engineering solution that will end up costing nearly 6 billion euros has got to work," Transport Minister Paola De Micheli said.

The plan involves 78 gates that can be raised to protect Venice's lagoon during high tides — but a recent attempt to test part of it caused worrying vibrations and engineers discovered it had rusted.

JAKARTA — Indonesian Mirnawati once ate rice with every meal, but its link to diabetes convinced her to join a growing movement to quit a staple food in the third biggest rice-consuming nation on Earth.

As the World Diabetes Day marked on Thursday, the southeast Asian nation has been struggling to tackle the disease that affects as many as 20 million of its 260 million people, especially that Diabetes has emerged as one of its deadliest killers behind stroke and heart disease.

But kicking the rice habit is not easy; with Indonesia's favourite dish nasi goreng (mixed fried rice) sold everywhere, and the grain woven into the culinary fabric of a nation whose late dictator transformed it into a must-have meal.

"In my first week without rice, I felt like I was being possessed by ghosts," said Mirnawati, a 34-year-old former construction company employee who goes by one name.

"But now I'll never go back to it," she added, about four months into her new diet.

Complications from diabetes, which affects some 425 million globally, can lead to heart attacks, stroke, blindness and even limb amputation.

Most of the world's sufferers live in low and middle-income countries like Indonesia.

Rice is packed with fibre and key vitamins. But an unbalanced diet that relies too heavily on refined white rice has been linked to an increasing global prevalence of diabetes and insulin resistance as it raises blood sugar levels, according to experts.

That is what led Mirnawati — along with her mother and cousin — to drop rice in favour of more vegetables, meat and nuts.

It is a step that an increasing number of Indonesians are taking in an informal “no rice” movement, although there are no official numbers.

The push, partly driven by social media, has been backed by local governments including cultural capital Yogyakarta which last year rolled out a campaign to convince residents to go without rice at least one day a week.

GOMA, DRC — The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Thursday introduced a second vaccine to fight a 15-month-old epidemic of Ebola in the east of the country, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said.

The new vaccine, produced by a Belgian subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, will be administered to about 50,000 people over four months, the charity said.

More than a quarter of a million people, many of them frontline health workers, have been immunised with another anti-Ebola vaccine in a programme begun last year.

The epidemic began in August 2018 in the province of North Kivu before spreading to neighbouring Ituri and South Kivu — a remote and largely lawless region bordering Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

The notorious haemorrhagic virus has so far killed 2,193 people, according to the latest official figures.

It is the DRC's 10th Ebola epidemic and the second deadliest on record after an outbreak that struck west Africa in 2014-16, claiming more than 11,300 lives.

 Two-dose vaccine 

Fifteen people received an injection of the new vaccine in MSF facilities in the North Kivu capital of Goma early on Thursday, a spokeswoman for the charity said.

The formula is administered in two doses at 56-day intervals, and those who have received the vaccine have been reminded to return for the second shot, she said. 

The disease's epicentre is about 350 kilometres north of Goma, a sprawling urban hub of between one and two million people on the border with Rwanda.

Four Ebola cases were recorded in the city in July and August, sparking fears the virus could spin out of control in a chaotic, mobile environment.

Efforts to combat Ebola in the eastern part of the DRC have been hampered by militia violence and local resistance to preventative measures, care facilities and safe burials. 

Health workers have been attacked 300 times, leaving six people dead and 70 wounded since the start of the year.

Despite these problems, statistics point to a downward trend. 

The health ministry late Wednesday said it had recorded four new cases of Ebola but no deaths, while 508 suspected cases were being monitored.

"In its current phase, the epidemic is not urban but has become rural," Professor Jean-Jacques Muyemebe, in charge of coordinating the anti-Ebola fight, said last month.

"We have to track it down, force it into a corner and eliminate it," he said.

 Novel vaccines 

The new J&J vaccine was initially rejected by the DRC's former health minister Oly Ilunga, who cited the risks of introducing a new product in communities where mistrust of Ebola responders is already high.

But Ilunga's resignation in July appears to have paved the way for approval of the second vaccine. He currently faces charges that he embezzled Ebola funds.

Both vaccines are novel formulas that, when they were introduced, had been tested for safety but were unlicensed, meaning that they had yet to achieve formal approval from drug authorities.

The first vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, has been given to 251,079 people, according to figures released on Wednesday.

Manufactured by the US laboratory Merck Sharpe and Dohme, the vaccine was licensed by the European Commission last week. It is being marketed under the brand name of Ervebo.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organisation announced it had "prequalified" Ervebo — an important regulatory procedure that will allow the drug to be quickly deployed in future Ebola outbreaks.

WASHINGTON — The top US diplomat in Ukraine, in gripping public testimony at the historic impeachment hearing into President Donald Trump, levelled a stark new accusation Wednesday about White House efforts to pressure Kiev to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden.

William Taylor, the acting US ambassador to Ukraine, told the House Intelligence Committee, which is conducting the hearings, that he was told Trump cared more about the probe into his likely 2020 rival than he did about Ukraine.

Trump is accused by Democrats in the House of Representatives of abusing his power by using US military aid to pressure Kiev into opening an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of an Ukrainian gas company.

Trump, who maintains he did nothing wrong, dismissed the impeachment inquiry as a "witch hunt" and said he was too busy to watch the first televised hearings.

Taylor, who testified in a closed hearing last month, said he had since become aware of a telephone call between Trump and Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the EU, that was overheard by a member of Taylor's staff.

Taylor said the staff member heard Trump asking Sondland about the status of the investigations. He said the staff member asked Sondland after the call what Trump thought about Ukraine.

“Ambassador Sondland responded that President Trump cared more about the investigations of Biden,” Taylor said.

In his opening statement, Taylor recalled his opposition to making US military aid to Ukraine contingent on Ukraine opening an investigation of the Bidens.

“Withholding security assistance in exchange for help with a domestic political campaign in the United States would be crazy,” he said. “I believed that then and I believe it now.”

Taylor said an “irregular policy channel” involving former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, was pushing for the Ukrainian probe into the Bidens.

‘Scorched-earth war’ 

Democrats who control the House plan to prove over several weeks of hearings that Trump abused his office by asking Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.

The investigation threatens to make Trump only the third US president to be impeached, after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998, although to be removed from office he would need to be convicted by the Republican-led Senate.

Neither Johnson or Clinton was convicted and removed. But in 1974 Richard Nixon resigned in the face of certain impeachment and removal from office for the Watergate scandal.

Opening the inquiry on Wednesday morning, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, the California congressman overseeing the probe, said “there are few actions as consequential as the impeachment of a president.”

“The questions presented by this impeachment inquiry are whether President Trump sought to exploit [Ukraine’s] vulnerability and invite Ukraine’s interference in our elections,” Schiff said. “If this is not impeachable conduct, what is?”

Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, hit back by accusing Democrats of waging a “scorched-earth war against President Trump” and a “carefully orchestrated media smear campaign”.

“It’s nothing more than an impeachment process in search of a crime,” Nunes said.

Taylor and George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, have already testified in private that Trump used US military aid to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into the Bidens.

“I do not believe the United States should ask other countries to engage in selective politically associated investigations or prosecutions against opponents of those in power because such selective actions undermine the rule of law regardless of the country,” Kent said in his opening statement on Wednesday.

Speaking minutes before the hearing, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, said the probe was necessary to show Trump he can’t do “whatever he wants”.

“That he is not above the law”, Pelosi said. “And that he will be held accountable”.

Slim majority favour impeachment 

Coming just one year before national elections, the hearings carry great risks for both parties and no certain reward, with a divided US electorate weary of Washington infighting.

Polls show a slim majority of Americans favor impeaching the president. 

But they also show that Trump’s sizable voter base, which delivered his shock victory in 2016, rejects the allegations.

Republicans have sought, in closed door depositions over the last six weeks, to refocus attention on Biden’s link, through his son, to Ukraine, and on the widely discredited theory Trump apparently believes that Ukraine assisted Democrats in the 2016 election.

Democrats have amassed evidence that Trump sought to leverage Zelensky’s desire for a meeting between the two leaders and for some $391 million in aid to get Ukraine to find dirt on Biden, who could face Trump in next year’s presidential election.

The key evidence is the official White House transcript of a July 25 phone call showing Trump pressuring Zelensky to open investigations into Biden and the 2016 conspiracy theory.

KABUL — At least 12 people, including three children, were killed when a minivan packed with explosives rammed into a vehicle carrying foreigners during Kabul’s morning rush hour on Wednesday, officials said.

Four foreign nationals were among those wounded in the attack that targeted an SUV belonging to a private Canadian security company, GardaWorld — in a crowded neighbourhood which is near the interior ministry and north of Kabul Airport.

“As a result of today’s attack in Kabul, 12 people, including three children, were killed and 20 were wounded including four members of Gardaworld,” Marwa Amini, an interior ministry spokeswoman, said. 

All those killed in the suicide attack were Afghan civilians, and the nationalities of the foreigners wounded were not confirmed.

Interior Minister Massoud Andarabi said that one of those killed was a 13-year-old child heading to school.

“The enemies of our people should know that our people are determined for peace, nothing can stop them from achieving peace,” he said.

A source at the interior ministry said the blast was detonated by a suicide bomber in the vehicle.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Both the Taliban and the terror group Daesh are active in the city, which is one of the deadliest places in the war-torn country for civilians.

The blast came one day after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani announced that Kabul would release three high-ranking Taliban prisoners in an apparent prisoner swap with Western hostages who were kidnapped by the insurgents in 2016.

The three Taliban prisoners include Anas Haqqani, who was seized in 2014 and whose older brother is the deputy Taliban leader and head of the Haqqani network, a notorious Taliban affiliate.

Ghani did not specify the fate of the Western hostages — an Australian and an American, both professors at the American University in Kabul — and it was not clear when or where they would be freed.

The two, American Kevin King and Australian Timothy Weeks, were kidnapped in August 2016 from the heart of Kabul.

They later appeared looking haggard in a Taliban hostage video, with the insurgents going on to say that King was in poor health.

Ghani noted in his speech that “their health has been deteriorating while in the custody of the terrorists”.

He also did not state when or where the Taliban prisoners would be freed. 

The Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told AFP on Wednesday that he could not confirm anything about the swap yet.

“When our captives reach their destination, the American University professors will be released,” he said.

Ghani said that he hoped the decision would help “pave the way” for the start of unofficial direct talks between his government and the Taliban, who have long refused to negotiate with the administration in Kabul.

Direct talks 

Over the past year, the US and the Taliban had been holding direct talks seeking a deal that would bring the insurgents to the table for peace talks with Kabul, and allow the US to begin withdrawing troops.

But President Donald Trump abruptly ended the negotiations in September, citing continued Taliban violence.

Most experts agree that there is no military solution in Afghanistan, and that talks will have to restart again eventually.

Until then, however, civilians continue to pay a disproportionate price in the long-running and brutal war.

Last month, the United Nations released a report saying an “unprecedented” number of civilians were killed or wounded in Afghanistan from July to September this year.

The figures — 1,174 deaths and 3,139 injured from July 1 until September 30 — represent a 42 per cent increase over the same period last year.

The UN laid most of the blame at the feet of “anti-government elements” such as the Taliban, who have been carrying out an insurgency in Afghanistan for more than 18 years.

MONTABON, France — The only traces of the six-month battle waged at the Montabon roundabout in northwest France are the French flag, a luminous yellow vest hoisted on a pole high above the ground, and a few empty food cans rusting in the mud.

This windswept junction in the rural Sarthe region was the local rallying point in the nationwide campaign against fuel taxes, which began in November 2018 and quickly ballooned into a full-scale revolt.

In an orchard next to the road, a group of struggling workers, pensioners, job seekers, drifters and dreamers erected a wooden shelter. There, they gathered each day to share a meal and strategise, swapping stories of hardship in an area squeezed by factory closures.

They celebrated Christmas, New Year and wedding anniversaries together, creating one of the most enduring of the hundreds of roadside camps set up by the yellow vests to protest policies seen as skewed toward well-off city-dwellers.

"It was like Noah's ark," said David Bruzzi, a 49-year-old mechanic who was one of the camp's leaders.

"It wasn't just about beating up on [President Emmanuel] Macron," Bruzzi told AFP during a weekly gathering with a handful of other roundabout "veterans" in a shed on the fruit farm that hosted the Montabon camp.

"It was about looking after people in the area and filling shopping bags" for hard-up protesters, he said.

 'We are here' 

This weekend, thousands of yellow vests will return to the roadside to mark the first anniversary of a rebellion which badly rattled the government, forcing Macron to revise his ambitious reform agenda.

Others will travel to Paris, Bordeaux and other big cities to take part in the 52nd straight week of street protests, several of which ended in scenes of looting and arson that made headlines worldwide.

Whether the anniversary can breathe new life into a movement whose turnout has shrunk from 282,000 protesters on November 17, 2018, to just a few thousand nationwide on recent Saturdays, remains to be seen.

For David's wife Vanina, a 44-year-old service station employee who spent six months at the barricades, the anniversary is the chance to say "We are here, we are not dead."

Around the world, participants in leaderless revolts from Hong Kong to Chile have cited the yellow vests as a source of inspiration.

But in France, the movement's gains are widely questioned by its own rank-and-file. Most of them dismiss the 10-billion-euro ($11 billion) package of measures for the working poor and pensioners announced by Macron late last year as "peanuts".

Sitting at a bench in a shed stacked with crates of apples, Vanina ventures that the yellow vests' biggest achievement was to spur other disgruntled groups, such as teachers and hospital workers, to take their grievances to the streets.

"We can always say that if we hadn't done it, things would be worse," said Jean-Jacques Brossay, a grizzled 63-year-old pensioner.

Evolution or revolution? 

Not everyone is convinced that history will be kind to the yellow vests.

Marco Beaulaton, a retired technician who took part in a 10-day blockade of a petrol refinery in the city of Le Mans, 45 kilometres north of Montabon, is among the sceptics.

Like David Bruzzi and the Montabon roundabout, 61-year-old Beaulaton remembers the blockade as an "unforgettable moment of solidarity and sharing", with birthdays celebrated "around a bonfire of burning pallets".

But as the days passed, the presence of far-left and far-right elements spoiling for a fight with the police grew, alienating many others.

Beaulaton, who pleaded for "Mandela and Gandhi-style" pacifism, is convinced that the movement shot itself in the foot by refusing to condemn the violence of a radical minority.

"What people want is evolution, not revolution," he argued. "The French already had their revolution and paid the price in blood."

Making politicians listen 

One of those on the receiving end of the protesters' anger was Damien Pichereau, a fresh-faced local man elected to parliament on Macron's centrist ticket in 2017.

A year earlier, newcomers like 31-year-old Pichereau, who grew up in a Sarthe village of 250 people, were being hailed as a breath of fresh air in a jaded political landscape.

But for the yellow vests, Macron's army of young devotees were objects of contempt.

Pichereau recalls one demonstrator telling him "You don't know how much I'd like to put a bullet in you". In February, his constituency office was smashed by hooded demonstrators during a yellow vest protest.

And yet like Macron, who told Time magazine in September that the yellow vests had been "good for me", Pichereau said he believed the movement was a force for positive change.

Pointing to three months of town hall debates organised by Macron last spring to try to tamp down the protests, Pichereau insisted: "We do politics differently now. There's more dialogue."

No amount of consultation, however, is likely to definitively bury the yellow vest movement.

Around 600 yellow vest delegates gathered in Montpellier last week, where they backed trade union calls for mass strike action on December 5 over the government's pension reforms.

"We'll see then whether it kicks off again," Vanina Bruzzi said.

MADRID — Venezuela’s former military intelligence chief has gone missing in Spain just days after a court approved a request for his extradition to the United States on drug trafficking charges, police said on Wednesday.

“They are currently looking for him,” said a spokeswoman for Spain’s national police, referring to Gen. Hugo Armando Carvajal.

Judicial sources said police had gone to his house in Madrid after Friday’s court decision but could not find him.

In mid-September, Spain’s national court had rejected a US extradition request, instead ordering the release of Carvajal, who served as intelligence chief under the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

His release followed five months in provisional detention after being arrested in Madrid in mid-April.

But the court reversed that decision on Friday after accepting an appeal from the public prosecutor’s office, although full details of the ruling have not yet been made public.

Speaking to AFP, Carvajal’s lawyer María Dolores de Arguelles said she had “not been informed” they were going to rearrest him, adding that she did not know his whereabouts.

She had also not received the full transcript of Friday’s decision, which court sources said would be released in the coming days.

Known as “El Pollo” [the Chicken], Carvajal was stripped of his rank by the administration of President Nicolas Maduro after coming out in support of Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s acting president in February.

He then fled by boat to the Dominican Republic before relocating to Spain.

Carvajal has long been sought by US Treasury officials who suspect him of providing support to drug trafficking by the FARC guerrilla group in Colombia.

In an indictment filed in New York in 2011, Carvajal was accused of coordinating the transport of more than 5.6 tonnes of cocaine from Venezuela to Mexico in 2006 that was ultimately destined for the United States.

If convicted, Carvajal could face between 10 years and life in prison, the US Justice Department said in April following his arrest.

Carvajal has denied any “links to drug trafficking and the FARC”, Spanish judicial sources said at the time.

PARIS — Pneumonia is the world's deadliest child killer, with a "forgotten epidemic" claiming one young life every 39 seconds, international health and children's agencies warned on Tuesday.

The disease is preventable but still kills more children — 800,000 under the age of five last year — than any other infection, they said in a statement to mark World Pneumonia Day.

"Every day, nearly 2,200 children under the age of five die from pneumonia, a curable and mostly preventable disease," Henrietta Fore, Executive Director of UNICEF, said in a joint statement.

"Strong global commitment and increased investments are critical to the fight against this disease... Only through cost-effective protective, preventative and treatment interventions delivered to where children are will we be able to truly save millions of lives."

The numbers make grim reading and compare with 437,000 under-fives dying last year due to diarrhoea and 272,000 to malaria.

Five countries accounted for more than half of the child pneumonia deaths — Nigeria with 162,000, India 127,000, Pakistan 58,000, the Democratic Republic of the Congo 40,000 and Ethiopia 32,000.

Pneumonia is caused by bacteria, viruses or fungi, and leaves children fighting for breath as their lungs fill with pus and fluid.

Children with weakened immune systems and those living in areas with high levels of air pollution and unsafe water are most at risk.

The disease can be prevented with vaccines and is easily treated with low-cost antibiotics if properly diagnosed.

"This is a forgotten global epidemic that demands an urgent international response," said Kevin Watkins, chief executive of Save the Children UK.

"Millions of children are dying for want of vaccines, affordable antibiotics, and routine oxygen treatment. The pneumonia crisis is a symptom of neglect and indefensible inequalities in access to healthcare."

In January, the agencies will host world leaders in Spain at the first ever Global Forum on Childhood Pneumonia.

WASHINGTON — The US Supreme Court hears arguments on Tuesday on the fate of the “Dreamers”, an estimated 700,000 people brought to the country illegally as children but allowed to stay and work under a programme created by former president Barack Obama.

Known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA, the programme came under attack from President Donald Trump who wants it terminated, and expired last year after the Congress failed to come up with a replacement.

Court challenges to the phase-out of the programme have now risen to the top court, whose justices will take stock of the issue during oral arguments.

A decision is not expected until next year, at the height of the US election campaign in which immigration is likely to be a hot button theme.

For the 700,000 DACA immigrants at the crux of the debate, the outcome could not be more personal.

“I am definitely afraid,” said Jose, a 26-year-old who came from Mexico with his parents at age eight and now works for Microsoft, which has filed an amicus brief in support of the Dreamers.

He was joined outside the Supreme Court by a fellow Microsoft employee, Juan, a Colombian-born 25-year-old who like Jose asked that his surname not be given.

“This is not only about us individuals, but also about our families, our communities,” he said.

“It should not be decided by courts, Congress should have passed a comprehensive and compassionate immigration policy.”

Trump, in a tweet on Tuesday, held out the possibility of a deal with Democrats if the court scraps the programme, but scorned many of the Dreamers “as far from angels”.

“Some are very tough, hardened criminals,” he wrote. “If Supreme Court remedies with overturn, a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay.”

If the Supreme Court fails to extend legal protection to the “Dreamers”, they are not expected to be automatically deported; most will probably slip quietly into the shadowy life of the undocumented, for whom working and studying is fraught with difficulty.

In the meantime “this is has been like a roller coaster”, said Angelica Villalobos, a 34 year-old Mexican mother of five who works in an auto repair shop in Oklahoma.

She said she and her husband, who also entered illegally as a minor, talk to their children about what might happen if the court ruling does not go their way and they might become unable to drive or work — “things that we’re doing right now that keep the family more normal”.

‘Bargaining chips’ 

Like them, hundreds of thousands of others “have been in the country for at least 12 years, become part of the fabric of our communities or institutions”, said Omar Jadwat of the American Civil Liberties Union.

He said the Trump administration moved to end DACA in order to use “Dreamers” as “bargaining chips” with the Democrats to achieve other immigration goals.

Indeed, Trump tried in vain to obtain congressional funding for his promised wall along the border with Mexico in exchange for new protections for the “Dreamers”, many of whom have little to no memory of the country in which they were born.

The vast majority are from Mexico, and smaller numbers come from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, South Korea, Brazil and other countries.

The courts have stepped into this case because of questions about the Trump administration’s motives for ending DACA.

The plaintiffs have said that the administration acted “arbitrarily or capriciously”.

Noel Francisco, the solicitor general who will represent the government before the Supreme Court, said in September that what it has done with DACA is “entirely lawful and rational”.

Besides the fate of the immigrants, the case is important because of what it means for executive authority, said Steven Schwinn, a professor of law at the University of Chicago.

He said the court could in effect extend the discretionary powers of the president by allowing him to do or undo policy without giving an explanation.

MADRID — Spain's Socialists faced tough talks to form a government on Monday after the party emerged on top but weakened from a repeat election which produced an even more divided parliament and propelled far-right Vox into third place.

Neither the left nor the right bloc are anywhere near an absolute majority in the 350-seat assembly following Sunday's polls, prolonging a political deadlock in the eurozone's fourth largest economy after a similar result in the previous general election in April.

The "elections did not solve the difficulties in achieving a governing majority. On the contrary, [they] worsened them", top-selling daily newspaper El Pais wrote in an editorial.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez triggered the repeat polls — Spain's fourth in four years — after his Socialists failed to reach an agreement with other parties to forge a parliamentary majority in April.

But his gamble resulted in the party winning just 120 parliamentary seats — three fewer than in April — while far-left Podemos party slumped to 35 seats from 42 the last time around.

Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias urged the left to unite this time and said he was willing to start negotiating with Sanchez. However, their two parties together would still need the support of several smaller parties to build a working majority of 176 seats in parliament.

The main opposition conservative Popular Party (PP) recovered from its worst ever showing in April, finishing second with 88 seats, up from 66, while Vox was the biggest winner.

It won 52 seats — more than doubling the 24 it took during its April parliamentary debut in the most significant showing by a far-right faction since Spain's return to democracy following dictator Francisco Franco's death in 1975.

'Practically impossible' 

The deepening Catalan separatist crisis played squarely into the hands of the right, which has vowed to clamp down aggressively on Catalonia's independence drive.

Catalonia was rocked by days of mass, sometimes violent, pro-independence rallies after Spain's supreme court on October 14 sentenced nine politicians and activists to jail for up to 13 years for their role in a failed secession bid in 2017.

"My hypothesis is it will be practically impossible to form a government in Spain... It will be harder than in the past," said Joan Botella, a political science professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

"All parties have a rival to their left, another rival to their right, and that blocks strategic options," he added.

Business-friendly Ciudadanos, which had been another option as a governing partner for the Socialists, suffered a drubbing, winning just 10 seats, down from 57.

On Monday, Ciudadanos leader Albert Rivera resigned, saying it was "the responsible thing to do".

'Change in criteria' 

The Socialist have hinted they would like to govern in a minority and have appealed for "generosity" and a "sense of responsibility" to allow it to do so.

"We ask for a change in criteria from everyone, of generosity in the interests of this country," Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo said in an interview with public television.

The Socialist Party is already pressuring the PP to abstain from voting during a confidence vote in parliament to allow it to form a government.

But Eurasia analyst Frederic Santini said that given the improved performance of the right bloc, the "PP's leadership will now likely be more comfortable with the idea of a new election... and therefore even more reluctant to back a Socialist government".

Oriol Bartomeus, another AUB political scientist, said the PP was "threatened by the rise of Vox, and as a result has much less incentive to join forces with the Socialists".

Spain has been mired in political paralysis for four years since Podemos and Ciudadanos entered parliament following a December 2015 election that shattered the decades-long hegemony of the socialists and the PP.