But Washington can prepare for the possibility that Russia may again reverse course and resume the tortured path toward markets.

Landslides rattled down the nearby cliff, and trees near the tortured path creaked and swayed.

Most importantly, though, the papers here illuminate the tortured and confused path by which Einstein finally completed his long quest to extend the principle of relativity to explain gravity and the universe.

He had flesh and weakness, and his tortured path had somehow crossed mine.

Bouza says he tried "to strike a balance in a tortured path."

At a sometimes plodding pace that indulges redundancies, "Vulgar Favors" traces the tortured path toward Versace's killing, starting with Cunanan's youth in and around San Diego.

But to travel this tortured path with the astute Mr. Nunn would be to repeat our long history of allowing the remotest of possibilities to invent reality and drive policy.

"The California Supreme Court today discovered a tortured path to granting the gun industry a special immunity from legal accountability that has no justification in law or public policy."

I was thinking of all manner of things, and along what I like to refer to as the tortured paths of my mind, I thought of the duck-billed platypus.