Word: cushioning
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...Congo's latent disorder stems more than anything else from its stubborn attempt to throw a skein of nationhood over no fewer than 200 tribes. Even tiny Dahomey numbers more than a dozen tribes within its borders. Worse for national unity, tribalism is growing almost everywhere as a cushion against the shocks of transition into the 20th century. In Africa's multiplying ghettos, tribal "unions" or associations flourish as a kind of foreign embassy in the city for dazed tribesmen from the country. When things go wrong, the tribe itself remains, as Robert Frost said about home, the one place...
...Hovercraft is becoming less of a novelty and more of a serious mode of transportation. A vehicle that skims on a cushion of air over land, ice or water, the Hovercraft carried 370,000 passengers on brief trips along the St. Lawrence River during Expo 67 and proved to be one of the fair's most popular attractions. Now it is being used for such diverse purposes as ferrying passengers between British coastal resort towns and hunting down Viet Cong in the swamps of the Mekong Delta...
Last week the so-called air-cushion vehicle (ACV) got its biggest commercial test when a 165-ton SR.N4, the world's largest Hovercraft, was introduced on regularly scheduled passenger runs across the English Channel between Dover and the French coastal city of Boulogne. The thrice daily round-trip crossings, which will be expanded to six starting this week, are of crucial importance to the British Hovercraft Corp., which builds the SR.N4. "Our necks are on the chopping block," admits Richard Stanton-Jones, managing director. "Potential buyers will be here watching and riding...
Profits are still a long way off, but British Hovercraft is thinking big. Applying the hover principle to industry, the company is currently producing, mostly on an experimental basis, an air-cushion pallet called "Float-a-Load," which can be used to move industrial equipment weighing up to five tons. Its hopes are highest for the $4,000,000 SR.N4, whose potential market over the next ten years could exceed 100 orders if all goes well on its showcase channel crossings...
...country's war-wrecked industry still lay in ruins; the economy was torn by inflation, black markets, and such a food shortage that hungry city dwellers trekked to the country in hordes to barter their clothes and furniture for farmers' grain and potatoes. Neither gold nor a cushion of foreign exchange backed the infant mark. Yet its creation proved to be the essential underpinning of the Wirtschaftswunder that transformed West Germany into Europe's most prosperous power. By last week, as West Germans celebrated the 20th birthday of their postwar currency, the once lowly Deutsche mark...