Word: propped
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Tanzania's President Nyerere intrigued the group for two hours in his rambling, high-ceilinged statehouse in Dar es Salaam. He used his ivory-tipped chiefs staff as a stage prop, sometimes rapping it for attention, at other times pointing it at his listeners like a machinegun. Asked if he thought American business should pull out of South Africa or stay and try to help the blacks, he lifted his voice like a preacher: "Out, out, I tell you, leave that blessed land," a view directly opposite that expressed by black leaders in Johannesburg...
...most conscience-racked, Green's characters seem to need either a priest or an institution to order them to have faith. This may seem an almost sacrilegious thing to say about a man whose reputation is largely built on being a Catholic writer, but Catholicism for Greene is a prop. It's almost a gimmick, the straight man in a series of humorless, introspective routines. Want to introduce the possibility of belief into your characters' lives? Done--make them fallen or apostate Catholics. After that you don't even have to bother to flesh out the reasons for their guilt...
...work force) hides the fact that some 60,000 jobs are currently being supported artificially, many of them in companies that receive government subsidies to maintain operations. Some analysts estimate that the government has been spending more than $12 billion a year-one-sixth of the national budget-to prop up weak industries...
...forbade sale of short-term Japanese bonds to foreigners and cut the central bank interest rate to 3.5%, the lowest since 1946. Those measures failed to keep dollars from pouring into Japan, so the Bank of Japan bought up $500 million of greenbacks offered for sale. That did not prop the price, and at one point the dollar broke the 230-barrier on some exchanges...
...steadying at week's end, no one could be sure the improvement would continue. The bleakest aspect of the fall is that no measures designed to strengthen the dollar seem to work any more. The U.S. at the start of the year began buying unwanted dollars to prop up their price; that intervention, which Europeans insisted was too brief, accomplished nothing. The Swiss in the past two weeks have taken a series of drastic steps to stop the rise of the Swiss franc against the dollar; among other things, they lowered interest rates to as little as 1%, imposed...