On the matter of settlements, there is no difference between the two [US] parties.
They are analyzing evidence handed to them by the celebrity publicist Max Clifford in the matter of a settlement he reached with Rebekah Brooks, then chief executive of News International, after he had initiated legal proceedings against the company in 2009.
Basically, he replaced the contentious issue of settlements with an even more contentious matter: boundaries.
Was "empire" itself a matter of land and settlement or, as he thought, of ports and islands and trading opportunities?
One reason for the stickiness of this subject is the whole matter of deciding when a settlement becomes a city at all – some argue when it abandons simple self-sufficiency and establishes trade, others when it develops plumbing.
Yet as the focus splinters in the final third – our mysteriously placed narrator taking the stage to deliver a gnomic coup de grâce – I most felt the novel's emotional clout in its portrait of a marriage with hints of past wrongdoing, forgotten in the fog or as a matter of convenience: a fragile settlement of its own, like love despite itself.
In some markets it's just a matter of sorting out the settlement infrastructure before the dollars start flowing in.
According to Steven Blum of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, "If it was widely understood that government agencies barred the tax deductibility of settlements as a matter of course or policy, it would strengthen their hand in the negotiation leading up to the settlement," Blum said.
"It's a matter of trying to reach a settlement that is within the bounds of the resources of the archdiocese, and without crippling the ability to do the other things the church needs to do".
This matters: cities have surpassed all other forms of settlement and, since 2008, have become home to the majority of humanity.
