Word: laggard
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...Even China, Asia's perennial pop-culture laggard, has hopped on the bandwagon. The upcoming The Ghost Inside?at $600,000, the country's most expensive scary movie?transplants the single-mom-in-a-creepy-apartment formula to an impersonal, rapidly modernizing mainland city. Despite the tight budget, its cast includes Beijing heartthrob Liu Ye and Taiwanese TV-drama princess Barbie Hsu. For now, though, the hotbed of Asian dread remains Japan, where Ichise presides over his assembly line of scares. In the next two years he plans to release at least four more Japanese ghost movies, including one each...
...largely a bricks-and-mortar company. The $18 billion behemoth owns Avis and Budget in addition to its real estate and hotel brands, markets time-share properties and organizes information for travel agents, and has a corporate-relocation operation. Prior to the Orbitz deal, it had only a laggard online travel presence with CheapTickets.com and Lodging.com Its main business by far is collecting franchise fees. Pre-Orbitz, online travel produced less than $200 million in revenue, or 2% of Cendant's $10 billion travel segment. Last week Cendant said it would divest its mortgage and fleet-leasing businesses, effectively giving...
...pollution emissions have dropped 7.8% since 2000, thanks mainly to enforcement of Clean Air Act standards passed before Bush took office. He did introduce rules to clean up off-road diesel-powered vehicles like farm tractors and bulldozers. Critics say the drop in water-quality complaints reflects laggard enforcement: criminal water-pollution prosecutions are down 28% since 2001. In 2002, Bush signed a law aimed at revitalizing abandoned urban industrial sites...
...year-old star of Hirokazu Kore-eda?s poignant Japanese drama ?Nobody Knows,? won the Best Actor prize. Best Actress went to Hong Kong?s Maggie Cheung for her role as a drug addict fighting to reclaim her young son in ?Clean,? a Franco-Canadian drama - and a rather laggard, predictable one - directed by Cheung?s ex-husband Olivier Assayas. Ironically, Cheung won over Zhang Ziyi, the star of ?2046.? Cheung had shot some scenes for that film, but was not evident in the print shown at Cannes. Success is the best medicine for disappointment...
...Even in more-developed places like Hong Kong and Beijing, hospitals have had to scramble to create discrete infection wards and procure enough respirators to treat SARS. Economically laggard cities like Hohhot simply can't muster the resources as quickly. "Facilities at Beijing hospitals pale in comparison to those at American hospitals," says Jia Xueyi, a deputy director of Inner Mongolia's propaganda department, "and facilities at Hohhot's hospitals pale in comparison to hospitals in Beijing...