Catalonia secession bid: Will a pause change the prospects?

The separatist leader of Catalonia stepped back from the brink Tuesday evening, postponing a much heralded unilateral declaration of independence and offering to open talks with the central government of Madrid.

“Today we are making a gesture of responsibility in favor of dialogue,” Carles Puigdemont, the president of Catalonia told the regional parliament. But the loudest applause greeted his insistence that “I assume the mandate for Catalonia to become an independent state in the form of a republic.”

That set the scene for further drama in