Word: torpid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bono is a hero. Not because he's a rock star, but because he's a rock star who is willing to spend time on things that are tedious and boring--like long sessions with Senators and Administration officials and meetings at the World Bank and the IMF on torpid Washington Saturday mornings...
...activist Savior ("If I'm not back in five minutes, call the Pope") who kicks beaucoup d'ass. He's closer to a standard Mel Gibson hero than to the hero of the new Mel Gibson movie. But the comedy is slack, the song lyrics feeble, the pace torpid. Note to cultists: A movie may be incompetently acted and amateurishly shot. That doesn't mean you have to like...
...honor that 82.6% of the electorate turned out to vote - they paid their respects by participating, not by agreeing with her. Their anti-euro sentiment is shared by many in the U.K. Two key factors drive that opposition, and prevent Tony Blair from calling a referendum: the torpid pace of economic growth in the euro zone, predicted this year to reach just 0.4%, and the prospect of ceding even more power to Brussels. Neither Sweden nor the U.K. are hurting because they kept their own coins; indeed, both are growing more than the euro zone. But the euro...
What was once the center of the world now seems to lie on the remotest margins. It's hard to believe that this torpid, sand-colored town, with its bored Indian shopkeepers sitting outside foodstuff-and-luxuries stalls and camels grazing outside the (largely empty) Hilton Hotel, was once the Dhofar that Zheng He's ships (though not, it seems, the admiral himself) sought out, in 1432 on their seventh voyage. The Salalah Holiday Inn slumbers near the spot where old Chinese coins were once discovered. The classified section of the Oman Daily Observer reports that someone named Zou Shichui...
...declining in 2042, according to U.N. projections. In China's cities, the one-child policy has morphed into a no-child philosophy. In Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, the population would be shrinking if not for an influx of migrants from the countryside. The news has stirred China's usually torpid parliament, which has proposed amending the one-child policy this summer so that some urban couples can have a second child. Each province would decide which birth-control procedures best suit its circumstances. "A one-size-fits-all family-planning policy just doesn't work," says Zhao Baige, a director...