He meanwhile manifested a genius for administration and set about thoroughly reorganizing the Florentine state and expanding its borders by military means.
The agreement came on the last business day of the Bush administration and set the stage for the Obama administration to play a more active role in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The rivalry for credit and control peaked in late September when city officials tried to go around the Pataki administration and set up their own meeting with the White House to discuss federal aid.
The ruling, by the US district court for the District of Columbia, is a blow to the Obama administration, and sets up a legal battle that will drag on for months, almost certainly destined to end up in the supreme court.
MOSCOW — In recent years, when public opinion turned against the Kremlin, there was one main way to find out about it — the Levada Center, a respected group of sociologists who broke off their relationship with Vladimir V. Putin's administration and set up the country's only independent polling agency.
ISTANBUL -- Turkey's foreign minister said Friday that the vote by a Congressional committee in Washington condemning the mass killing of Armenians early in the last century as genocide would damage ties with the Obama administration and set back reconciliation efforts between Turkey and Armenia.
The Beijing conference was the fourth U.N. conference on women, but more than the others it established concrete targets -- such as abolishing laws that discriminate against women economically or increasing the number of women in public administration -- and set timetables for measuring progress.
But David B. Rivkin Jr., an associate White House counsel under the first President Bush who is scheduled to testify at the hearing on Wednesday, said he planned to urge Congress not to move forward with that proposal, which he said would violate the rights of Bush administration officials and set them up for prosecutions by foreign courts.
It would repeal two Clinton-era tax provisions that limit the personal exemptions and deductions that wealthy taxpayers can claim; extend the lower tax rates on inherited estates rather than allow them to revert to the pre-Bush administration level; and set a 20 percent tax rate for the dividends and capital gains of households earning at least $1 million a year.
In the eastern city of Donetsk, where in recent weeks pro-Russian protesters had attacked peaceful "unity" demonstrators, killing three, activists stormed the local regional administration building and set up tire and razor wire barricades.
Ashton did not have an administration to rely on and setting it up was not an easy task.
