Word: torpid
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Singapore: Raffles Hotel, early 1942. The colonial swells are having a party--black ties, a ricky-ticky dance band lulling them with torpid tunes. As they swill their bubbly, they mutter contempt for the advancing Japanese army in smug racist terms...
Earthquake Recriminations The Japanese government's torpid response to the Jan. 17 catastrophe in Kobe (5,090 dead, 29 still missing and about 300,000 homeless) has led to intense criticism of Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama--even from members of his own Socialist Party. Offers of assistance from 60 countries, the U.N. and the World Health Organization poured in, but some were subjectedto endless bureaucratic wrangling. Examples: foreign doctors were rebuffed at first because they did not have Japanese licenses; Swiss sniffer dogs were threatened with quarantine by the Agriculture Ministry. Conditions in the stricken port city, however, are improving...
...when, after leaving her family and her village, she arrives in Saigon to be the servant girl in a middle-class home. Here the mother still mourns the death of her daughter, who would have been Mui's age. The father luxuriates in a torpid guilt. Upstairs Grandma intones prayers for the family dead. Downstairs the couple's three boys make mischief. The youngest taunts Mui with merciless glee; he is just about the only sign of wayward life in this house-and-garden mausoleum...
Energetic new dining hall management has revived the torpid presentation of provisions, say Snow and other students...
Last week's forum was especially illuminating because the current recovery is such an odd, torpid one. "Of all these panels I've attended, this one was the best," says senior writer John Greenwald, who helped organize the session and wrote one of the cover stories. "Sometimes discussions of economic issues get bogged down in minutiae that can be eye-glazing." To its credit, the TIME panel provided a sweeping analysis of the troubled economy and of what's right and what's wrong about the candidates' programs...