What does FTE stand for?

All point to the President's stalled initiative to revive the Middle East peace process, to his failure to extract even a suspension of Israeli settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories -- the most basic precondition for any resumption of talks; they point to the fact that one of his first decisions as Nobel Peace laureate may be to order more American troops into Afghanistan; to the realisation that, for all his overtures, the Iranian nuclear showdown remains as frightening as ever.

But his failure to extract even the smallest concession from the iron-fisted regime plays into the hands of critics, who warned him against visiting at the same time as Aung San Suu Kyi faces an internationally condemned trial.

But his failure to extract even the smallest concession from the iron-fisted regime plays into the hands of critics, who warned him against visiting while Aung San Suu Kyi faces an internationally condemned trial.

There are three approaches to torture: 1) an absolute ban as required by the Geneva Conventions, which laid out the international standards for the humane treatment of prisoners of war and enemy civilians; 2) some kind of principle of proportionality that would permit different degrees of ill treatment depending on the deleterious consequences of doing nothing--the so-called "ticking bomb" justification where failure to extract information would result in failure to discover a bomb set to go off imminently (although in the real world the bomb is rarely ticking); 3) the view that suggests that if the military command states that there is a valid military goal, all rules can be ignored.

Failure to execute the order of an executive may not result in a job loss, but failure to extract bribes and share the loot will.

But his failure to extract even an apology from Prescott was seen as a sign of his weakening authority.

The failure to extract useful information quickly from suspects under the rules laid down in the US Army Field Manual led Mackey and his fellow interrogators to look for ways round those rules: methods of interrogation which could be construed as narrowly conforming to the letter, but not to the spirit, of the Army Field Manual.

Strong and well organised, Cheltenham are never an easy side to overcome but their failure to extract more than a single point from their visits to Halifax, Macclesfield and Carlisle in the last six weeks has cost them dearly.