Word: propped
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Mudanjiang remains ready for war. The military airfield outside this northeastern Chinese industrial city of 600,000 lifts security restrictions just long enough for a twin-engine prop plane from Beijing to deposit its passengers. They are whisked past the barracks of a People's Liberation Army (P.L.A.) unit. It is shortly before sundown, and troops are playing soccer, basketball, Ping-Pong and open-air billiards on the edge of the runway, not far from a wing of 70 Chinese-built MiG-21 interceptors, each sheathed in canvas to guard against corrosion in the heavily polluted...
Punctuation, then, is a civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run-on sentence, its phrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.) Small wonder, then, that punctuation was one of the first proprieties of the Victorian age, the age of the corset, that the modernists threw off: the sexual revolution might be said to have begun when Joyce's Molly Bloom spilled out all her private thoughts in 36 pages of unbridled, almost unperioded and officially censored prose; and another rebellion was surely marked when E.E. Cummings first felt...
...interception, the only Air Force jets with the right type of radar to detect low-flying planes are supersonic; but if they slow to the 150 m.p.h. of the suspect prop planes, they will be near stalling speed. Even then they could do little but frighten the smugglers. The possibility of downing innocents almost certainly would preclude any shoot-to-kill orders to Air Force pilots...
...progress about 2,000 miles from the Kremlin on the dusty, sunbaked plateaus of northern Afghanistan. There a convoy of nearly 300 tanks, trucks and armored personnel carriers rumbled across the border into the motherland as the Soviet army began a retreat from its disastrous 8 1/2-year effort to prop up Afghanistan's tottering Communist government. The first phase of the withdrawal, involving 25% of the 115,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan, is to end May 29, which just happens to mark the beginning of the four-day summit...
Reagan thought OPEC was finished. The cartel began to self-destruct in the early 1980's when internecine squabbling and cheating on production quotas rendered it powerless to prop up oil prices. Combined with Carter-era conservation programs, excess production led to a world-wide glut. The price of a barrel of oil fell by one-third, ushering in the economic recovery of the Reagan...