World

MADRID — Mariano Rajoy was sworn in for a second term as Spain's prime minister on Monday, but his minority administration may struggle to govern effectively and heal scars left by 10 months of political deadlock.

The conservative leader took his oath of office before King Felipe at the Zarzuela Palace near Madrid after winning a parliamentary confidence vote on Saturday, giving Spain a fully-functioning government once again after two inconclusive elections and fruitless coalition talks.

Spanish government bond yields fell on Monday, but the slump was limited by lingering investor concerns over the country's ability to implement economic reforms and rein in public spending.

Rajoy, who has the weakest mandate in Spain's modern history, is working on a new Cabinet that must build cross-party support to pass reforms in a hostile parliament.

His team, to be announced on Thursday, will be scrutinised for signs he wants a fresh start by bringing in new faces, even if most are expected to come from his People's Party (PP). There were no immediate leaks on the new Cabinet to the Spanish press.

Rajoy, 61, governed with an absolute majority in his first term and was often disdainful of the opposition. Now he must convince opposition parties he is genuine about working with them.

Credit rating agency Fitch said the formation of a new government reduced political uncertainty but that significant risk remained.

It said the minority government would face a challenge securing support for its policy agenda, making substantial new structural reform unlikely, and there was also a strong chance that the government would not be able to complete a full term.

Spain suffered a severe recession during Rajoy's first term, when its banks needed a 41 billion euro ($45 billion) European bailout, but the economy is now recovering.

Public disaffection

The fragmentation of Spain's parliament arose from widespread disillusion with the political establishment and the emergence of new parties at a time of economic hardship, with unemployment peaking at 27 per cent, and anger over corruption.

Rajoy has said he is open to dialogue and negotiation but in an uncompromising speech before Saturday's vote, he urged opponents not to tie his hands, saying: "Spain ... needs a government that is capable of governing".

He will enjoy backing from the liberal Ciudadanos (Citizens) Party, the fourth-largest group in parliament, on a list of 150 previously agreed measures.

"Whatever government there is, there will be a change of direction and there will be reform measures," Ciudadanos lawmaker Jose Manuel Villegas told reporters on Monday.

But even with Ciudadanos' 32 votes added to the PP's 137, Rajoy lacks a majority in the 350-seat parliament. He faces hardline opposition from anti-austerity Podemos, the third largest party in the assembly.

The Socialists, the second biggest, are licking their wounds over their leaders' decision to permit a Rajoy government after earlier blocking him. The party opened disciplinary proceedings on Monday against 15 Socialist lawmakers who defied the party line and voted against Rajoy in Saturday's confidence vote.

The new government will be weak with every measure entailing "endless and draining" negotiations, Edoardo Campanella, an economist with Italian bank UniCredit, said in a note.

Rajoy will be confronted by urgent issues including setting a new budget for 2017 to appease the European Commission and meet next year's deficit targets, which will require either spending cuts or raising extra revenue.

Rajoy will also have to grapple with an independence campaign by the wealthy northeastern Catalonia region, which plans a referendum next year on breaking away from Spain. 

SEOUL — The woman at the centre of a South Korean political scandal begged forgiveness on Monday as she arrived to meet prosecutors investigating allegations she used her friendship with President Park Geun-hye to influence state affairs and gain benefits.

Choi Soon-sil, wearing a hat and scarf and covering her face with her hand, pushed her way through a scrum of journalists and protesters demanding her arrest and Park's resignation, losing a shoe in the melee, to enter the prosecution building in Seoul.

"I committed a crime I deserve to die for," said Choi, according to pool reporters who followed her into the building, using a Korean expression to convey deep remorse.

"Please forgive me."

Choi returned to South Korea early on Sunday from Germany, where she had been staying, and was ready to answer prosecutors' questions, her lawyer said earlier.

She had been under intense pressure to return as the political crisis engulfed Park over allegations that she allowed Choi to use her friendship to exert improper influence and reap benefits.

Thousands of South Koreans rallied on Saturday seeking Park's resignation over the scandal. They said Park betrayed public trust and mismanaged the government, and had lost a mandate to lead.

Opposition parties have demanded a thorough investigation but have not raised the possibility of impeaching the president.

Park is in the fourth year of a five-year term and the crisis threatens to complicate policymaking during the lame-duck period that typically sets in toward the end of South Korea's single-term presidency.

Resignations

In response to the scandal, eight of Park's aides including her chief of staff and three advisers who tightly controlled access to her, have stepped down, her office said on Sunday.

Choi's lawyer, asked if she was admitting guilt by asking for forgiveness, said she was just expressing her feelings, not stating a legal position.

"It wouldn't be right to take it as any kind of legal statement," the lawyer, Lee Kyung-jae, told reporters outside the prosecutors' office.

Park apologised last week for giving her friend access to draft speeches during the first months of her presidency but it did little to deflect demands that the president reveal the full nature of her ties with Choi and whether she enjoyed favours because of her friendship with the president.

Park, the daughter of a former president, Park Chung-hee, said she had consulted Choi with good intentions and Choi was someone "who gave me help when I was going through a difficult time".

Choi, in her first comments after weeks of reports about her ties with Park, told a newspaper last week she did get drafts of Park's speeches after Park's election victory but denied she had access to other official material, or that she influenced state affairs or benefited financially.

Choi's lawyer said she was in poor health and may be suffering from a heart condition, which he would discuss with prosecutors.

An unidentified man was taken into custody after dumping a container of what appeared to be animal dung at the door of the prosecutors' office after Choi went in, demanding that prosecutors undertake a proper investigation.

NORCIA, Italy — A powerful earthquake struck Italy on Sunday in the same central regions that have been rocked by repeated tremors over the past two months, with more homes and churches brought down but no deaths reported.

The quake, which measured 6.6 according to the US Geological Survey, was bigger than one on August 24 that killed almost 300 people. Many people have fled the area since then, helping to avoid a new devastating death toll.

The latest quake was felt across much of Italy, striking at 7:40am (0640 GMT), its epicentre close to the historic Umbrian walled town of Norcia, some 100km from the university city of Perugia.

Panicked Norcia residents rushed into the streets and the town’s ancient Basilica of St Benedict collapsed, leaving just the facade standing. Nuns, monks and locals sank to their knees in the main square in silent prayer before the shattered church.

“This is a tragedy. It is a coup de grace. The basilica is devastated,” Bishop Renato Boccardo of Norcia told Reuters.

“Everyone has been suspended in a never-ending state of fear and stress. They are at their wits end,” said Boccardo, referring to the thousands of tremors that have rattled the area since August, including two serious quakes on Wednesday.

Italy’s Civil Protection unit, which coordinates disaster relief, said numerous houses were destroyed on Sunday in the regions of Umbria and Marche, but either they were deserted at the time or most of the residents managed to escape beforehand.

“No deaths have been reported, but there are a number of people injured,” said Civil Protection chief Fabrizio Curcio, adding that just one person was in a serious condition.

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said Italy was living through extremely difficult times, but promised a massive reconstruction effort in the years ahead regardless of any possible objections from the European Union over the eventual costs.

“We will rebuild everything, the houses, the churches and the businesses,” Renzi told reporters. “Everything that needs to be done to rebuild these areas will be done.”

Local authorities said towns and villages already battered by August’s 6.2 quake had suffered further significant damage.

“This morning’s quake has hit the few things that were left standing. We will have to start from scratch,” Michele Franchi, the deputy mayor of Arquata del Tronto, told Rai television.

Experts said Sunday’s quake was the strongest here since a 6.9 quake in Italy’s south in 1980 that killed 2,735 people.

Artistic loss

The destruction of the Norcia basilica was the single most significant loss of Italy’s artistic heritage in an earthquake since a tremor in 1997 caused the collapse of the ceiling of the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, which is 80km to the north.

The frescoed basilica, which is the spiritual, historic and tourist heart of Norcia, was built over the site of the home where the founder of the Benedictine order and his Sister St Scolastica were born in 480.

The basilica and monastery complex dates to the 13th century, although shrines to St Benedict and his sister had been built there since the 8th century.

Benedict founded the Benedictine order in Subiaco, near Rome. He died in 530 in the monastery at Monte Cassino, south of Rome, which was destroyed during World War II. That monastery was later rebuilt.

A number of other churches were also ruined on Sunday, Italian media reported, including Norcia’s Cattedrale di Santa Maria, which was built in the 16th century, while the town hall belltower had deep cracks running through its walls.

However, most of Norcia’s homes appeared to have withstood the prolonged tremor, with residents praising years of investment by local authorities in anti-seismic protection.

In the nearby city of Rieti patients were evacuated from a hospital to allow experts to check on structural damage, while hillroads across the region were littered with fallen rocks.

Sunday’s earthquake was felt as far north as Bolzano, near the border with Austria and as far south as the Puglia region at the southern tip of the Italian Peninsula.

It was also felt strongly in the capital Rome, where transport authorities shut down the metro system for precautionary checks. Authorities also toured the city’s main Roman Catholic basilicas looking for possible damage.

Italy sits on two geological fault lines, making it one of the most seismically active countries in Europe.

Gianluca Valinsese, a scientist at Italy’s National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology, warned the latest series of quakes could continue for weeks in a domino effect along the central Apennine fault system.

Italy’s deadliest quake since the start of the 20th century came in 1908, when a tremor followed by a tsunami killed an estimated 80,000 people in the southern regions of Reggio Calabria and Sicily.

MIAMI — Donald Trump stepped up his attacks against Hillary Clinton, seeking to exploit the FBI’s decision to reopen an investigation into her e-mails, as America’s bruising election campaign heads into its final stretch.

Just 10 days before the country goes to the polls to elect either the former US secretary of state or the bombastic Republican billionaire, America’s top cop James Comey has been thrust centre stage. 

The FBI director wrote to lawmakers on Friday, announcing that his agents are investigating a newly discovered trove of e-mails, renewing an enquiry that the Clinton campaign thought ended in July.

Trump pounced. Campaigning in the western state of Colorado, which has been leaning towards Clinton, he denounced what he called his opponent’s “criminal and illegal conduct”, to chants of “Lock her up!”

 “This is the biggest political scandal since Watergate, and it’s everybody’s deepest hope that justice at last will be beautifully delivered,” Trump, 70, told a later rally in Phoenix, Arizona.

While his 69-year-old opponent remains on course to be voted in as America’s first female president at the ballot box on November 8, her campaign is furious that its momentum has slowed in the final straight.

Clinton campaigned hard in the key battleground state of Florida on Saturday, greeting thousands of supporters at a Jennifer Lopez concert in Miami after earlier demanding that Comey explain in detail why he had effectively reopened the inquiry declared complete in July.

“It’s pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election,” she said in Florida’s coastal town of Daytona Beach.

“In fact, it’s not just strange, it’s unprecedented and it is deeply troubling because voters deserve to get full and complete facts,” she added.

“So we’ve called on Director Comey to explain everything right away, put it all out on the table, right?” she declared, to rapturous cheers.

Never back down 

In reality, it seems unlikely that much progress will be made in the investigation before polling day and few observers expect Clinton to face criminal charges. 

But every day that she spends dealing with the fallout of her decision to use a private e-mail server as secretary of state is a day the media is not dwelling on the scandals dogging Trump.

On Saturday, a poll of polls by tracker site RealClearPolitics put Clinton 3.9 percentage points ahead of the Republican nationwide, down from 7.1 points just 10 days previously.

But despite narrowing polls, an election model published daily in the New York Times and based on various state and national surveys on Sunday gave Clinton a resounding 91 per cent chance of winning the presidential vote. 

Trump — himself dogged by scandal over alleged sexual misconduct and accusations from at least 12 women — has relished the e-mail probe.

“Hillary Clinton’s corruption is corrosive to the soul of our nation, and it must be stopped,” the real estate tycoon said in Arizona.

On Saturday he also received the public endorsement of the father of 26-year-old aid worker, Kayla Mueller, who was kidnapped in Syria in August 2013 and killed in a 2015 coalition air strike.

Across the country at the Lopez concert, Clinton embraced the hit singer on stage and accused her opponent of stoking fear, disgracing American democracy and insulting “one group of Americans after another”.

“Are we going to let Donald Trump get away with that? You’re right. We’re not,” she said. “No matter what they throw at us, we don’t back down. Not now. Not ever,” the Democrat said.

Trump vindicated?

But Clinton’s campaign has been overshadowed from the start by allegations she put US secrets at risk by using a private server based in her home for all e-mail correspondence as secretary of state.

According to The New York Times, The probe was renewed after agents seized a laptop used by Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her now estranged husband, Anthony Weiner.

Weiner, a disgraced former congressman who resigned in 2011 after sending explicit online messages, is under investigation over allegations he sent sexual overtures to a 15-year-old girl.

In July, Comey criticised Clinton’s handling of sensitive information but recommended no charges be brought. Clinton appeared to be in clear.

Trump was outraged, using it as an argument that the White House race has been “rigged” against him by a corrupt elite.

Media reports citing FBI insiders suggest agents do not yet know whether the latest batch contains any new e-mails or classified information.

But, in the febrile atmosphere of the closing stages of the race, the controversy could throw Clinton off her game and allow Trump to regain some of the ground lost to his own scandals.

Leading Democratic senators wrote to Comey and his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, urging them to make clear whether the new e-mails are pertinent to the investigation by Monday night.

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook sought to play down the impact of the revived e-mail scandal.

“We don’t see it as changing the landscape,” he said, boasting that Clinton supporters were if anything fired up by the battle.

SEOUL — Thousands of South Koreans took to the streets of the capital on Saturday calling for increasingly unpopular President Park Geun-hye to step down over allegations that she let an old friend, the daughter of a religious cult leader, interfere in important state affairs.

The evening protest came after Park ordered 10 of her senior secretaries to resign over a scandal that is likely to deepen the president's lame duck status ahead of next year's election.

Holding candles and signs reading "Who's the real president?" and "Park Geun-hye step down," the protesters marched through downtown Seoul after holding a candlelight vigil near City Hall. Police estimated that about 9,000 people turned out for the biggest anti-government demonstration in Seoul in months.

"Park has lost her authority as president and showed she doesn't have the basic qualities to govern a country," Jae-myung Lee, from the opposition Minjoo Party and the mayor of the city of Seongnam, told the protesters from a stage.

Park has been facing calls to reshuffle her office and Cabinet after she acknowledged on Tuesday that she provided long-time friend Choi Soon-sil drafts of her speeches for editing. Her televised apology sparked intense criticism about her mismanagement of national information and a heavy-handed leadership style that many see as lacking in transparency.

There is also media speculation that Choi, who holds no government job, meddled in government decisions on personnel and policy and exploited her ties with Park to misappropriate funds from nonprofit organisations.

Prosecutors on Saturday widened their investigation by searching the homes of presidential officials suspected of interacting with Choi and receiving their office files from the Blue House — the presidential office and residence. Prosecutors had previously summoned some of Choi's key associates and raided their homes and workplaces, as well as the offices of two nonprofit foundations Choi supposedly controlled.

The saga, triggered by weeks of media reports, has sent Park's approval ratings to record lows, and the minority opposition Justice Party has called for her to resign. The Minjoo Party, a larger opposition party that has refrained from calling for Park's resignation over fears of negatively affecting next year's presidential election, said Park's decision to shake up her secretariat was too little, too late, and called for stronger changes, including the reshuffling of her Cabinet.

Park's aides on the way out include Woo Byung-woo, senior presidential secretary for civil affairs, and Ahn Jong-beom, senior secretary for policy coordination. Lee Won-jong, Park's chief of staff, tendered his resignation on Wednesday.

Woo has been blamed for failing to prevent Choi from influencing state affairs and has also been embroiled in separate corruption allegations surrounding his family.

Ahn, whose home was searched by prosecutors on Saturday, is under suspicion that he helped Choi pressure South Korean companies into making large donations to the Mir and K-Sports foundations, launched in October last year and January this year, respectively. Choi reportedly masterminded the creation of the two non-profits, which managed to gather around $70 million in corporate donations over a short period of time, and is suspected of misappropriating some of the funds for personal use.

Park's office said she plans to announce a new lineup of senior secretaries soon.

Choi's lawyer Lee Gyeong-jae said that she was currently in Germany but would return to South Korea if prosecutors summon her. In an interview with a South Korean newspaper earlier in the week, Choi acknowledged receiving presidential documents in advance, but denied intervening in state affairs or pressuring companies into donating to the foundations.

Choi and Park reportedly became friends in the 1970s, when Choi's late father, Choi Tae-min, a shadowy religious figure who was a Buddhist monk, cult leader and Christian pastor at different points of his life, emerged as Park's mentor.

At the time, Park was serving as acting first lady after her mother was killed in 1974 by a man trying to assassinate her father, military strongman Park Chung-hee, who would be murdered by his own spy chief five years later.

DES MOINES, United States — Hillary Clinton embarks this weekend on the frenetic final 10 days of her White House campaign, determined to shake off renewed controversy over the FBI probe into her private e-mails.

The 69-year-old Democrat — vying to become America’s first female president — is still the frontrunner to win the November 8 election over her Republican rival Donald Trump.

Clinton has a clear lead in the polls, and voting has already begun in 34 of 50 states to choose a successor to President Barack Obama, who will hit the campaign trail again next week in defence of his onetime secretary of state.

But her momentum was threatened on Friday by a renewed eruption in a scandal that has long dogged her in the race: investigations into her use of a private e-mail server while at the State Department.

Trump gleefully seized on news that FBI agents are investigating a newly discovered group of e-mails sent to Clinton’s private address, to see if they exposed any US secrets.

The probe had been thought finished in July, when the FBI had recommended that no charges be filed against Clinton, although it found her to have been “extremely careless” in her use of a private server.

But FBI Director James Comey’s letter to US lawmakers announcing that inquiries had been renewed shocked the campaign and rocked world markets.

Clinton cried foul, demanding that Comey reveal more information about the probe, and declared herself “confident” that voters, and the FBI, would conclude that she had done nothing wrong. 

“The American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately,” she said. “We don’t know the facts, which is why we are calling on the FBI to release all the information that it has.”

Clinton’s defiant words came after Trump — himself dogged by scandal over alleged sexual misconduct — declared her unfit for office as a jubilant crowd of supporters in New Hampshire chanted: “Lock her up!”

 Concern that the renewed probe would damage Clinton’s formerly impressive momentum spooked the markets, with US stocks, the dollar and oil prices tumbling lower on the prospect of a close vote.

‘Appear to be pertinent’ 

Comey dropped his bombshell in a letter to lawmakers, revealing that “in connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of e-mails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation”, and would take “appropriate investigative steps”. 

Clinton’s campaign was outraged and implied that Comey’s intervention could be politically-tinged because, in Clinton’s words, the letter was only sent to “Republican members of the house”.

 “I’m confident, whatever they are, they will not change the conclusion reached in July,” she added.

According to The New York Times, the newly discovered e-mails emerged after agents seized electronic devices used by Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.

Weiner, a Democratic former congressman who resigned in 2011 after he was exposed for sending explicit online messages, is under investigation over allegations he sent sexual messages to a 15-year-old girl.

NBC News said the newly discovered e-mails were sent by Abedin to Clinton from a laptop used by Weiner, whose bid to become mayor of New York foundered over similar “sexting” claims in 2013.

 ‘Criminal scheme’

Meanwhile, Trump, trailing in polls both nationally and in the swing states he must win to secure the White House, seized triumphantly on the news.

“We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office,” the 70-year-old billionaire told cheering crowds at a campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire.

“I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made,” he added.

Republicans on Capitol Hill also seemed jubilant over Clinton’s latest travails. 

“Everything that has happened... is the natural, probable consequence of deciding you’re going to have a rogue e-mail system,” Trey Gowdy, chairman of the congressional committee that first uncovered the existence of Clinton’s private server, told Fox News late Friday.

Several leading newspapers on Saturday faulted Comey for being overzealous in announcing that the FBI will be scouring the newly-discovered e-mails.

“By revealing it, he inevitably creates a cloud of suspicion over Ms Clinton that, if the case’s history is any guide, is unwarranted,” The Washington Post wrote on its editorial page Saturday.

News of the probe took the shine off what should have been a good day for Clinton on Friday, with the Obama administration announcing stronger than expected economic growth numbers.

Clinton was due to campaign in Miami on Saturday in the most important potential swing state in terms of electoral votes, Florida. 

Trump was due to make stops in Colorado and Arizona before heading to Nevada for a Sunday rally in Las Vegas.

Next week, both candidates will continue to barnstorm battleground states.

Trump’s campaign was rocked this month by the release of 2005 footage showing him bragging about his groping women, followed by a string of accusations of sexual misconduct — which he denies.

As he faltered, Trump piled on the defiant rhetoric, claiming the allegations were part of a plot to rig the election, and threatening not to recognise the outcome if he loses.

CALAIS, France — Bulldozers cleared mounds of debris and tore down makeshift shelters at the “Jungle” migrant camp on Thursday, and authorities said 6,000 people had been evacuated from the squalid site.

Charities said, however, hundreds of migrants might have fled the camp rather than take part in a government programme to rehouse them across the country.

The Jungle, a ramshackle, overcrowded shanty town, came to symbolise Europe’s difficulty in dealing with record inflows of migrants from impoverished and war-torn regions of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, many of them bent on crossing the sea from Calais to Britain.

President Francois Hollande, facing an election six months from now, decided under local pressure to close the Jungle and relocate its inhabitants in towns and villages throughout the country pending examination of their cases.

“By next Monday, the camp will be no more. It is already gone but the [demolition] job will finished by Monday evening,” local government prefect Fabienne Buccio told reporters as earthmovers flattened the camp, where the evacuation started on Monday.

She said more than 6,000 migrants had signed up to be taken to other parts of the country as planned, and that matched the number of people that had been living there.

Police patrolled the camp and other parts of Calais, where dozens of migrants were wandering.

“Lots of children are sleeping outside. We had a group of Eritrean boys, 13 and 14 years old, last night, who slept outside,” said Dorothy Sang, a worker with the Save the Children charity.

“Other children fled. They lost faith in the system.”

 A young man from Sudan who said his name was Clinton told Reuters he had arrived overnight from Germany and was “here for England” as a final destination.

“But it is also okay if I can file an [asylum] request in France. It doesn’t matter where I sleep tonight,” he said.

Buccio said she wanted to make clear to any would-be new arrivals in the French port that the camp was shut for good and the rehousing exercise finished.

“It is not Calais’ role to receive all the migrants of Europe,” she said.

Back to Paris?

There were signs that some migrants might have fled from Calais to Paris to avoid being roped into official processing of asylum requests.

Heloise Mary, working to help migrants at a smaller camp under a bridge in north Paris, said numbers there had suddenly shot up.

“We’ve gone from 2,000 to 3,000 in two days with the closure of Calais,” she told BFM TV of the makeshift camp, where a railway bridge provides cover for hundreds of tents and mattresses.

The numbers of irregular migrants reaching Europe are sharply down on the 1.3 million who arrived in 2015. But more than 300,000 have made the hazardous Mediterranean crossing in 2016 so far, and many are likely to head for Britain for work, launguage and family reasons.

The British referendum vote this year to quit the European Union was in large part driven by worries over immigration, and stoked by scenes of the Calais migrants trying to force their way in.

Now that Britain is leaving the EU, right-wing French politicians with an eye on next year’s election want to tear up the agreement under which Britain’s border controls are conducted in France.

BEIJING — China’s ruling Communist Party on Thursday declared that President Xi Jinping is the party’s “core”, a title he had not previously had, putting him in a more powerful position ahead of a key congress next autumn.

A statement released by the party following a four-day meeting of top party leaders in Beijing, and carried by state media, referred to Xi as “core of the party centre”.

Xi is also head of the party and the military, as well as being head of state.

Late Chinese strongman Deng Xiaoping coined the phrase “core” leader. Deng said Mao Zedong, himself and Jiang Zemin were core leaders, meaning they had almost absolute authority and should not be questioned.

But Xi had yet to assume that mantle.

Since assuming office almost four years ago, Xi has rapidly consolidated power, including heading a group leading economic reform and appointing himself commander-in-chief of the military, though as head of the Central Military Commission he already controls the armed forces.

The plenum meeting which has just ended paves the way for a once-every-five-years congress in the second half of next year, at which Xi will further consolidate his power and could give a clue as to who may replace him at the 2022 congress.

A new Standing Committee, the pinnacle of power in China consisting at present of seven people, will be announced at the congress.

WASHINGTON — An e-mail released by WikiLeaks shows that a top Hillary Clinton adviser was dumbfounded that aides to the White House hopeful failed to disclose her use of a private e-mail server, suggesting “they wanted to get away with it”.

The e-mail from Neera Tanden, who currently helps run Clinton’s transition team, is dated March 2, 2015, the day The New York Times revealed that Clinton had used a homebrew e-mail server while serving as secretary of state rather than her secured government account.

While the FBI concluded earlier this year that federal charges against Clinton were not justified in the case, the issue has dogged her campaign to become America’s first woman president.

Tanden, the president of the liberal think tank Centre for American Progress, was trading messages with John Podesta, who was at the time preparing to chair Clinton’s campaign.

“Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy,” Tanden wrote.

Podesta responded: “Unbelievable”.

Tanden later wrote: “I guess I know the answer. They wanted to get away with it.”

Tanden suggested the decision to try to keep Clinton’s private e-mail use secret could be traced back to Cheryl Mills, a close aide at the time, calling it a “Cheryl special”.

“Know you love her, but this stuff is like her Achilles heal [sic]. Or kryptonite. she just can’t say no to this shit,” she wrote.

In a separate exchange released by WikiLeaks, Mills herself wrote to Podesta several days later, on March 7, 2015: “We need to clean this up — he has e-mails from her — they do not say state.gov,” referring to President Barack Obama.

In the exchange with Tanden, Podesta acknowledged that Mills, Clinton’s personal lawyer David Kendall and longtime aide Philippe Reines “sure weren’t forthcoming on the facts here”.

 The Clinton campaign has not confirmed or denied the authenticity of the stream of messages leaked by WikiLeaks, but has accused Russia of directing the hack of Podesta’s e-mails in an effort to tilt the election in favour of Republican Donald Trump.

Other messages published by WikiLeaks show Podesta and Tanden discussing potential weaknesses of the Democratic candidate.

“Her inability to just do a national interview and communicate genuine feelings of remorse and regret is now, I fear, becoming a character problem [more so than honesty],” Tanden wrote on August 22, 2015.

In September 2015, Podesta wrote about the hit Clinton’s campaign took as a result of the revelations on her e-mail practices, and how the candidate handled them.

“We’ve taken on a lot of water that won’t be easy to pump out of the boat. Most of that has to do with terrible decisions made pre-campaign, but a lot has to do with her instincts,” Podesta wrote on September 6, 2015.

“She’s nervous so prepping more and performing better. Got to do something to pump up excitement but not certain how to do that.”

Tanden then responded: “Almost no one knows better me that her instincts can be terrible. She does have to give time to allow new things to take hold.”

HERAT, Afghanistan — Gunmen in the remote central-western Afghan province of Ghor rounded up dozens of civilians and executed them on Wednesday in an attack that officials blamed on Daesh fighters retaliating for the death of one of their commanders.

If confirmed as the work of the Daesh terror group, it would mark a major departure for the radical group, which has hitherto been largely confined to the eastern province of Nangarhar since its appearance in Afghanistan at the end of 2014.

However there was no independent verification and the Taliban, who denied responsibility, said the killings appeared to have been prompted by ethnic rivalries fuelled by a clash over sheep-stealing.

The killings in any case underlined the lack of security across Afghanistan, prompted not just by the Taliban insurgency and Daesh violence but by a wider breakdown in law and order as government control has slipped.

Government security forces have long struggled to exert control in Ghor, a poor and mountainous province with sharp ethnic and tribal divisions and large numbers of illegal armed groups that operate with impunity.

The dead appear to have been Kuchi nomads and estimates of their number varied, with governor's spokesman Abdul Hai Khatibi putting the total at about 30, the Taliban saying 36 and some local people saying it was as high as 42.

"Afghan police killed a Daesh commander in Ghor province during an operation yesterday but Daesh fighters abducted some 30 civilians from near the provincial capital and shot them all dead in revenge," Khatibi said.

He said the killings followed a militant attack on Tuesday near Feroz Koh, the capital of the central western province.

Hundreds of people gathered in the town as bodies were brought in and prepared for burial and there were angry scenes as residents demanded government action.

"Our demand to the local and central government is to bombard and destroy the terrorist nests in this province," said protester Haji Abdul Samad.

"If the government doesn't pay attention to our civil movements, then we will use the power of our youth to destroy the terrorist nests." Amnesty International condemned the killings as a "horrendous crime" and called for an immediate investigation by the government.