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| Catalonia rules out snap election amid threat of direct rule from Spain | Catalonia rules out snap election amid threat of direct rule from Spain |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Catalonia's president says he will not call a regional election that could have defused tension with Spain. | |
| Carles Puigdemont said he had considered calling a snap election, but was choosing not to because he had not received sufficient guarantees that the government's "abusive" moves to take control of Catalonia would be suspended. | |
| In a hastily-called address from his palace in Barcelona, the separatist leader said the regional parliament now will decide how to respond to the Spanish authorities' takeover plan. | |
| The unprecedented measures are set to be approved on Friday in Madrid and will lead to the first direct intervention by central authorities in the affairs of one of the country's 17 autonomous regions. | |
| Spain's conservative government had offered to halt the extraordinary measures if a new election was to be called in Catalonia, but later backtracked. | |
| Mr Puigdemont also said it was now up to the Catalan parliament to move forward with a mandate to split from Spain following an independence referendum that took place earlier this month. | |
| The issue has led to Spain's deepest political crisis in the four decades since the country restored democratic rule after General Francisco Franco's dictatorship. | |
| Mr Puigdemont has said the referendum, which was outlawed by Spain's constitutional court, gave him the mandate to declare independence, but he has stopped short of proclaiming a new republic, saying he wants to give the Spanish government a chance to negotiate. | |
| Those who voted were overwhelmingly in favour of independence, but less than half of eligible voters went to the polls. | |
| Madrid insists it cannot negotiate secession, and prime minister Mariano Rajoy is seeking to activate constitutional powers that will allow the government to take over control of much of the autonomous region's affairs. | |
| The Spanish Senate is scheduled to approve the plan to trigger Article 155 of the constitution on Friday. |