Word: bent
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...Sakamoto's success is also the root of the publishing mandarins' ire: he took their most potent weapon?their ability to fix prices?and turned it against them. One of the most stubborn vestiges of the Japanese government's protectionist bent is its 89-year-old saihan law, which makes it illegal to sell new books at a discount. The law's defenders spout a host of muddled rationales for preserving it, arguing variously that it promotes literacy or protects copyrights or maintains the intellectual integrity of the nation's literary output. This in a country where...
...celebrations. The parade marched by, circled the block and marched by again, the children bouncing their trash-bag puppets and their cardboard boats and waving their Chinese dragon. We clapped and they grinned at us, proud. Seen in the light of day, or by anyone with an ironic bent, the cardboard boat and the puppets and the dragon would have seemed bedraggled, pathetic—but on New Year’s Eve, under streetlights blurred by a scrim of drizzle, their innocence made them seem vulnerable, like the first blades of grass to pierce the mud in early spring...
...Prize for Literature. What was your crime?" Mauldin moved to the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962 and stayed there 30 years. Skillful as he was with captions, sometimes his art required no words at all. After the assassination of J.F.K., Mauldin portrayed the statue of Lincoln in his Memorial, bent over, head in hands. --By Paul Gray
...hard-line nationalism of the Likud and its likely right-wing coalition partners that these people want, and Foreign Minister Netanyahu is the man they think best suited to sell the tough policies of that government to the world. A smiling old man in a black yarmulke bent to kiss Netanyahu's hand. Back in the Suburban, Netanyahu pondered the coalition options of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The 74-year-old Likud chief professes a desire to revive the "unity government" he had with the Labor Party, but Labor's leaders say they're unwilling to re-enter a partnership...
...give diplomacy a chance. Secretary of State Colin Powell refused even to call the situation a "crisis." But with each new North Korean gambit, that official insouciance sounds more off-key. Seemingly overnight, the U.S. begins the New Year eyeball to eyeball with a paranoid, ruthless regime hell-bent on obtaining nuclear weapons to complement an army the Pentagon rates among the most formidable in the world. And so, despite their stoic miens, White House officials are grasping for some way to yank North Korea back from the precipice and return everyone's focus to that other spoke...