Word: prop
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...invest in U.S. dollars. The sell-off grew so heavy that the Tel Aviv stock exchange closed on Oct. 7. Three days later, government officials declared a 23.5% devaluation. When the market reopened two weeks later, the value of the stocks plunged 17% in a single day. To prop up their sagging shares, traditionally one of the most popular and profitable Israeli investments, seven banks pumped more than $1 billion into the stock market...
Sitting inches from the prop wash of his UH-1H ("Huey") helicopter, Salvadoran Army Colonel Julio César Yánez López stared with satisfaction at the thin plumes of smoke coiling across the scrubby landscape below. "We're fighting terrorists, not guerrillas with a noble cause," he announced as the chopper settled to earth alongside a cornfield crackling with flames. "We're going to integrate Usulután back into the economic life of this country...
Casually dressed in white shirt and blue trousers, he hurries down the aisle like a schoolboy late for the class-play tryouts, afraid the best parts may have already been cast. But when he mounts the bare stage-its only prop a battered chair that once had pretensions to the regal-a sense of awe seems to overcome...
Murray recalls one occasion when Victor Garber, portraying a lecherous real estate agent in Nothing On, inadvertently placed the prop wine bottle two inches away from its appointed spot: "This meant that Douglas Scale [the pixilated burglar] couldn't reach it. Doug brushed it, knocked it over. I reached for it, fumbled it and dropped it between us. We're talking a couple of inches, but that's crucial. The audience is suspended on a tightrope with us. If we stop, they lose their involvement...
...banner was in English, which probably reduced its readership in Kabul but certainly suggested something else: the broadcast was intended not so much to persuade Soviet audiences of U.S. perfidy as to distract Western attention from the historic day when nearly 100,000 Soviet troops rolled into Afghanistan to prop up a faltering pro-Soviet regime...