Word: laggard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was a sleepless night in 1957 when the Soviets put up Sputnik and drunken Russians roared and sang in front of their Washington embassy. Science adviser Vannevar Bush sought refuge behind his closed door until he could figure out what to say about our laggard program...
...live off raw snakes and rats. Before each drill, they were made to bellow: "If you're caught, blow yourself up." Anyone who fell behind faced a beating from their guard-trainers. One recruit died in swimming endurance training, another fell off a cliff. The guards took one laggard into the ocean and nearly drowned him. Later they buried him on the beach with his head sticking out of the sand and left him there all night. Former trainer Lee Jun Young defends the brutal regimen: "They were going into North Korea. We had to make them as tough...
...cash withdrawals a minute in the first two hours of the new year. Two hundred Dutch post offices, which also function as banks for many small savers, weren't ready to open their doors on Jan. 2, the first business day of the euro era. The one real laggard appeared to be Italy, whose conservative government has been unusually cool toward the euro. Italians complained of a short supply of coins, and they used euros for just 3% of cash transactions on Jan. 2, compared with a rate of 50% in the Netherlands...
...dear reader. With ranking, the solution to this problem would be simple: who says that the top grade in the class must be an A? If a professor is disappointed with a lackluster bunch, just start with a B and count down to F—easily nipping laggard classes...
Mind-boggling incompetency" is how one American diplomatic source characterized Belgium's laggard cooperation with U.S. efforts to catch terrorists. Since Belgian police arrested two men two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, American officials have pleaded for hard information (phone numbers, addresses, travel itineraries) on one of the men, Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian citizen suspected to have been the designated suicide bomber for a planned attack on the American embassy in Paris. Belgian officials say the U.S. did not properly request the Trabelsi dossier until Sept. 27. It took weeks after that, they say, to scan the documents, which...