Jimmy Carter met Assad in Geneva, in 1977, to explore prospects for a U.S.-Soviet conference on Middle East peace.
Priorities for the first round are to explore prospects for local ceasefires, enhanced efforts to fight Islamic State and improved humanitarian access to besieged areas.
President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made phone calls to Israeli and Arab leaders to explore prospects for halting the fighting.
In exploring prospects, a Republican lawmaker close to the president said the White House was looking for someone who is "an old Washington hand with the ability to re-engineer a huge bureaucracy".
De Mistura, the third UN envoy appointed to handle the Syrian war since it erupted nearly five years ago, plans to hold talks for six months, exploring prospects for ceasefires, action against Isis and improved humanitarian access.
More than 400 members of the European Parliament have asked the European Union's competition enforcers to investigate concentration in Europe's supermarket sector, arguing that a handful of retailers may be acting as "gatekeepers" between food producers and consumers, to the detriment of both.In the meantime, Tesco will be exploring prospects in financial services.
So for now, at least, Representative David E. Bonior of Michigan, the Democratic whip, is leading the political fight against the accord, while Mr. Gephardt assumes a behind-the-scenes role to keep his rank-and-file united and to explore prospects for a party-healing deal.
We explored prospects of economic and working-age population growth and implications for labour migration pressure.
The researchers employ stakeholder interviews to explore prospects for entertainment development in one rapidly changing Asia Pacific location, Macao.
Debates over the best vaccine strategies continue (see Zolla-Pazner, p. 167), while preclinical studies explore prospects for eradicating the latent viral reservoir and curing the disease (see Barouch and Deeks, p. 169).
