The leaders reaffirmed support for establishing an office in Qatar to aid in talks with Taliban delegates there, and set a six-month deadline for progress, officials said.
It is not unusual for talks to go on for hours or even days past the deadline if progress is being made.
The West has proposed a deal whereby Iran would send uranium abroad for further enrichment to feed some reactors for medical purposes in the country, but the government is nigh-certain to miss the end-of-year deadline for progress.
By then, if there is to be any chance of meeting the Doha deadline, substantive progress will have to be made on a wide range of contentious issues, including intellectual property, services and investment, as well as farm trade.
Though many residents on Sunday said they believed that a deal would be reached before the deadline, little progress was made during contract negotiations over the weekend, said Matt Nerzig, chief spokesman for Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union.
"Considering the high rate of approvals over the past 12 years, this unprecedented scale of development affecting or potentially affecting the property poses serious concerns over its long-term conservation," stated the Unesco report, which gave the Australian government a 1 February deadline for progress or risk endangering the reef's coveted World Heritage listing.
Despite this make-or-break deadline, considerable progress still has to be made on a variety of trade issues.
Dr Haass, who was brought to Northern Ireland with co-chair Prof Meghan O'Sullivan in July by the first and deputy first ministers, said that while a final agreement had not been reached by the New Year's Eve deadline, "significant progress" had been made and there was a "basis" for change.
He announced what he described as "detailed and permanent monitoring," with a series of regular deadlines for progress reports, the first March 16 and the second May 16.
While QPR remain favourites to land the 30-year-old, Stoke remain in the hunt and could look to hijack any deal as deadline day progresses.
