There is no sign that the Assad regime currently intends to enter into a genuine political process.
If that really is the Syrian stance, it would force the regime's Russian ally to enter into a confrontation with the Syrian leadership, and Vladimir Putin will not accept, after having reached an understanding with Barack Obama, to appear weak, ignorant or powerless to implement the process of political transition he has agreed to.
In American policy circles, where the intensity of the latest North Korean tirades has raised some alarm, there still appears to be a prevailing belief that the regime is not sufficiently suicidal to enter a full-scale conflict.
Our failure to get involved sooner has strengthened the regime of Iran, encouraged Hezbollah to enter the conflict and seen the broadening of the war pitting Sunnis against Shiites, destabilizing the entire region.
The junta wants the money and supplies, but it doesn't want the foreigners with their helicopters and expertise, for the same reason that it doesn't allow journalists to enter Burma: the regime survives by smothering the truth, from its own people and from the outside world.
As a consequence of the high slenderness of this structural typology, pressure caused the panel to enter the postbuckling regime.
Beyond a critical stress, this system is found to enter a non-linear regime in which there is a plateau in the shear stress with increasing shear rate.
Therefore, if application of a small strain to the substrate is sufficient for the cells to respond to substrate mechanics, then 2 mg/ml fibrin and 70 Pa polyacrylamide gels will appear equally soft, but if the cells apply strains large enough to enter the strain-stiffening regime of fibrin elasticity, then they will respond to fibrin as a stiffer matrix than polyacrylamide.
The wiser course would be for Turkey to resist these pressures and to continue to work in concert with the Arab League to insist that the Syrian regime enter into negotiations leading to broad reform and an orderly transfer of power.
On Sunday, troops loyal to the regime entered the coastal town of Jableh, close to Assad's homeland.
