Conferees are tackling the less fractious issues first.

In keeping with legislative custom, Congress is suddenly moving on a variety of other fractious issues as next week's planned adjournment for the year approaches.

But Mr. Gibbons's colleagues worry that he lacks the fire and political muscle of Mr. Rostenkowski to hold a majority together in an unruly committee on a fractious issue like health care.

He said yesterday that the United States and Japan were close to an agreement on the fractious issue of Motorola's entering the Japanese cellular telephone market.

The new bare suits arrive when bikini-wearing can still be a fractious issue between adults and the teenagers in their charge.

Or are Americans, as Mercy Warren feared in 1798, "too selfish and avaricious for a virtuous republic" and too divided by religion on fractious issues like abortion, school prayer and creationism?

"Migration is the most fractious issue between these two countries," said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, director of the international migration policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Deadlines have been broken before over this fractious and arcane issue.

The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories.

A fractious issue emerging from weeks of negotiations on the academy is the lack of a desegregation timetable.