The N.F.L.'s complex tie-breaking system further complicates the picture.
Shares in the engineering software maker Aveva have fallen by more than a third after it scrapped a complex tie-up with France's Schneider Electric that would have reduced the UK company's exposure to troubled oil and gas markets.
One Georgetown family had more complex ties to the South.
Mr. von Trier, who is Danish, has long and complex ties to Germany.
The four major commanders at the Battle of Mill Springs each reveal complex ties of loyalty, region and ethnicity.
The administration has not yet developed its plan, and Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday that finding a solution is complex, tied as it is to many different government entities and to advertising revenue.
Another view is that Hoover was obsessed with publicity, and he knew that the mafia, with its complex ties to politics and the police, would not give him the headline-grabbing victories that he desired.
Nor did fascism succeed in transforming a society with powerful and complex ties of patronage and loyalty to the monarchy, the church, and, above all, the family—"whose cast was as frequently local as it was Italian, let alone fascist".
Violence resulted from such diverse factors as the conflicting interests of ecclesiastical institutions, the complex ties of loyalty that bound men to one another and to the institutions of their society, and shifts in the distribution of power.
"I don't think that kind of thing is coincidental," Susanne Bier, the director and a writer of "In a Better World," which opens in New York on April 1, said when asked to explain the profusion of foreign films addressing aspects of the complex ties between the Western and Islamic worlds.
Yet even as both Mr. Brennan and Mr. Hadi, the Yemeni president, praise the drone technology for its accuracy, other Yemenis often point out that it can be very difficult to isolate members of Al Qaeda, thanks to the group's complex ties and long history in Yemen.
