An analysis of all these emails provides a less benign view of what editors face when entering this thorny debate.

Without consulting the 85-year-old artist, the officials had the sculptures moved, becoming another chapter in the thorny debate over who owns public artworks.

And it has reopened the thorny national debate on Title IX and the appropriate ways for institutions to comply with it.

"A thorny debate continues to plague the Writers Guild of America".

Mr. Mosbacher also became entangled in one of Japan's thorniest debates: whether the high prices here give American companies a chance to compete.

But the air-quality complaints have landed the 777 in the middle of a long-running and thorny debate over just how safe airplane air is.

The Supreme Court ruled against the so-called N.E.A. Four in 1998, punctuating the thorny debate over public financing of the arts.

It marked the first tentative steps by the Swiss to take a stand in thorny political debates without hiding behind the shield of its vaunted neutrality.

We believe that they offer a way forward in the thorny debate about the accounting treatment of goodwill and other intangibles.

(These network executives declined to be quoted by name because, they said, it would be tantamount to engaging publicly in a debate traditionally thorny for them.)