Definition
Fractious means irritable and quarrelsome, tending to be easily agitated, unruly, or hard to control. It is used to describe people or groups who are often difficult to manage, especially in situations where they feel confined or restricted.
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Excerpts from News Articles
The "Windsor Framework" announced by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen followed a thaw in relations since the fractious stand-off during the premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
These sorts of representations created a fractious context locally: one produced by sending asylum seekers, many with devastating pasts, to a vastly different region of the world from their intended destination.
His first task will be to reunite the party after a fractious contest. Mr Yousaf indicated that Ms Forbes and Ms Regan will be given jobs in his cabinet.
Cristian Stellini, Tottenham’s acting head coach, defended Harry Kane against accusations of cheating after they were levelled at the England captain during a fractious 1-1 draw at Everton.
CF: I didn’t start out looking for similarities between then and now, but the farther I went in my reading the more the similarities became impossible to ignore—issues like racial and economic inequality, fractured and fractious politics, the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl, the threatening rise of fascism around the world, the deeply political Supreme Court. I’d say I was more energized than motivated by the similarities.
It is clear that manosphere language is contributing to an increasingly politicised and fractious form of gender relations. By understanding this language, we can better counter it.
Worse still, you start to think such a conclusion is actually possible, because in the world of celebrity hosts debating against straw men, it is! When it’s a couple of well-paid political operatives posturing away at one another, it’s usually not so tidy — something that’s probably a better takeaway if the goal is understanding this fractious republic of ours.
The first openly gay person to lead the American Medical Association takes the reins at a fractious time for U.S. health care.
Unlike the 2021 collapse of the US-backed Afghan government, the 1992 collapse of the Soviet-backed regime resulted in a chaotic civil war. While the Taliban are a firmly united movement with a defined chain of command, the anti-Soviet Mujahideen were a loose coalition of fractious militias.
Because, as we move elegantly between the characters’ anxieties – Michael’s career insecurities, Avril’s questions about her body, Alice’s guilt at reneging on wifely duty, Adel’s hardships as a single mother – we see that all are struggling to find a reassuring sense of home within themselves and their families. Indeed, as people of colour, following scandals such as Windrush and Grenfell, which revealed “the cold … machine at the centre of the nation’’, it is difficult also for Evans’s characters to unequivocally feel at home within our fractious and often hostile nation. But this generous novel, with its porousness and fluidity, makes space for them all.
On his first presidential visit to Northern Ireland, Biden stressed that American investment can help fuel economic growth — especially if the fractious politicians in Belfast resolve a stalemate that has put their government on pause.
Thanks again, cable news and social media! (Just a hunch.) Your assets are yours. You are free to bequeath them however you like. Many parents opt for equal treatment of children — even amid fractious relationships or economic disparities among siblings — to underscore the equal love they feel for them.
But the PLA drills — which included the deployment of the aircraft carrier Shandong — were of shorter duration and less disruptive to regional air and marine traffic than those that followed then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit in August. That could mean Beijing is trying to balance its indignation against a desire not to worsen an already fractious U.S. China relationship.
There’s an implicit message of tolerance around such gestures that does matter, and is needed now as much as ever, given the fractious and charged nature of so much of national life – the so-called “culture wars”.
But unions and the opposition warned that months of fractious debates and protests on the pension bill, which the government pushed through parliament without a vote for lack of a majority, will not go away quickly, even if it gets the council’s approval.
Many GOP lawmakers and aides admit it is not even clear whether their emerging plan can actually attract 218 votes — the number needed for passage — at the time of its introduction. The uneasiness reflects persistent divisions in a fractious conference with 222 votes, a four-vote advantage, which struggled only three months ago to elect a House speaker.
But what really made Dominion v Fox extraordinary were its revelations ahead of the trial. The lawsuit laid bare—through the release of damning emails, texts and depositions of Fox staff and management—how America’s most popular cable network’s coverage of the news is shaped by a desire to tell its audience what it wants to hear and also by what its competitors are up to. And the case shed light on Fox’s fractious relationship with the politician beloved by many of its viewers, Donald Trump.
Some Capitol Hill denizens suspect Mr. McCarthy remains disgruntled about his messy speaker’s race, during which, The Times noted, Mr. Arrington reportedly floated Mr. Scalise’s name for the top job. Whatever their origins, such tensions risk exacerbating Republican leaders’ struggles to rally their fractious , scrawny majority around legislative initiatives.
McCarthy leads a fractious caucus that holds a narrow 222-213 majority, including a sizeable contingent of hardline members who want sharp spending cuts and dismiss the risks of failure to act on the debt ceiling. So far House Republicans have not produced a proposed budget of their own, a move that Biden contends would be a necessary starting point for negotiations on spending.
But what really made Dominion v Fox extraordinary were its revelations ahead of the trial. The lawsuit laid bare—through the release of emails, texts and depositions of Fox staff and management—the extent to which America’s most popular cable network’s coverage is shaped by a desire to tell its audience what it wants to hear and also by what its competitors are up to. And the case shed light on Fox’s fractious relationship with the politician loved by many of its viewers, Donald Trump.
But already the lawsuit has laid bare—through the release of damning emails, texts and depositions of Fox staff and management—how America’s most popular cable network’s coverage of the news is shaped by a desire to tell its audience what it wants to hear and also by what its competitors are up to. And the case sheds light on Fox’s fractious relationship with the politician beloved by many of its viewers, Donald Trump.
Republicans generally have supported McCarthy’s strategy, believing it could put new political pressure on Biden, who has called on lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling without conditions. But early, internal schisms still emerged around the unresolved, finer details of McCarthy’s plan, complicating its path to swift passage in a chamber where his fractious party has only four votes to spare.
In effect, McCarthy will set up a severe test of his leadership since there’s no guarantee that he can pass the measure in a House where he can only lose four votes and in which there are few signs the fractious GOP can agree on what programs to cut and by how much. And even if the measure does squeeze through the House in the coming weeks, it will likely be an idealized Republican product on which Biden and the Democratic Senate will never bite.
Yet Libyans still remember their democratic instincts, even though a decade has passed since the 2011 revolution, with the country remaining fractious and unstable, having suffered through two brutal civil wars.
The package was swiftly embraced by leading Republicans as McCarthy has worked intently to unite his often fractious majority. A vote in the House is expected in a matter of days, in hopes of pressuring Biden to respond.
McCarthy has insisted he can marshal the votes to pass his proposal. White House officials have privately been skeptical that’s the case given the fractious dynamics of the conference.
It's unclear whether McCarthy can pass his budget framework in the House, where fractious Republicans have a slim majority. If he does, that could put pressure on the Democratic-controlled Senate — and the Biden White House — to come to the negotiating table.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister will travel to India next month, the most senior-level visit in seven years in what is a major diplomatic breakthrough between two nuclear-armed neighbors with a long history of fractious relations.
Biden’s supporters have argued that, given the stakes, the party can ill-afford a fractious primary or newbie nominee. So, despite the concerns about Biden’s durability and still-lingering disquiet among some progressives, the Democratic tribe will likely rally behind its aged but tested chief as their best bet to stop Trump again.
Newton says while his novel could be read as dystopian he’s more optimistic than negative about AI as it moves from automation to cognition. He says that when he wrote the novel in the fractious lead-up the 2020 election it was reasonable to wish for rational leadership.
The Economist magazine recently devoted its cover to the U.S. economy as “a marvel to behold.” Allowing the fractious politics of an unstable House GOP caucus to tank it would be unconscionable.
Asked about McCarthy’s call to seek his chief sponsorship of the debt bill, Arrington downplayed any fractiousness with McCarthy: “No, no, no, no. Look, he and I are both focused on the mission,” he said. “And the mission is to rein in the spending, reduce our debt, grow our economy, and save this country from a debt crisis.”
Nevertheless, a whole cohort of academics, commentators, intellectuals, policy experts and would-be thought leaders began building up the case for their desired realignment. They founded journals, wrote essays, recorded podcasts, organized open letters to no one in particular, and hosted many, many conferences where overlapping groups of people gathered to give each other awards. And as intellectuals do, along the way they engaged in fractious , embittered and largely pointless personal feuds.
McCarthy has found himself presiding over a fractious caucus with disparate views on everything from fiscal issues to border security. As his conference stares down a pending deadline to raise the country’s borrowing capacity, McCarthy now needs to unite members around a plan they all — or at least 218 of them — can support.
Still, he has presided over a sometimes fractious party. Generating enthusiasm among young voters and party liberals will be essential. He has fenced with the liberal wing of his party throughout his presidency; that flank will continue to push him to adopt more and more of its agenda. In the end, however, its members will be with him.