What remains of this salient is a patch of rocky, mountainous terrain with few settlements, difficult for rebels to hold, since Mr Assad has a monopoly of air power and heavy artillery.Yabroud's fall may prove to be a minor watershed.
For advocates of the Palestinian cause, the alternative to pressing for the two-state settlement, a difficult objective which still retains a decent amount of support, is to pursue a far more difficult objective that enjoys considerably less support.
All of this has made decisions on how to treat Jerusalem in a peace settlement extraordinarily difficult.
Yet this has been our policy, and it is the pursuit of democracy in this context that makes any settlement so difficult.
Calculating how much money each limited partner will receive from the tentative settlement is difficult because several different partnerships are at issue and not all partners invested the same amount.
The message from the states that they plan to take a harder line in the next phase of the Microsoft case promises to make reaching an out-of-court settlement more difficult.
Contract negotiations between City Hall and the United Federation of Teachers have yet to begin officially, but they have already descended into shouts and bluster that will make a reasoned settlement more difficult to reach.
Thus, parishes made obtaining legal settlement very difficult, to the point where newcomers would be allowed to stay only if they had a certificate guaranteeing that their old parish would take them back if they were unable to work; parishes had little incentive to give out such certificates.
One factor making a settlement more difficult, real estate experts said, is that Mr. Fishman is feeling pressure to secure a significant raise to help establish a standard for negotiations that the service employees' union is holding later this year for more than 60,000 workers in 15 other cities.
Rates of settlement are difficult to obtain in chemosynthetic environments (or anywhere in the deep sea) because sampling frequency is usually low, and over periods that are too long for the measurement of this process.
