Word: stiff
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...future of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem. Jordan's King Hussein was in a frosty mood, principally because Congress has drastically chopped his request for $350 million worth of antiaircraft weaponry, including 14 batteries of Hawk missiles. In Damascus, Syria's President Hafez Assad was courteous but stiff; later Assad's Baath Party called the Sinai agreement "strange and disgraceful," and Assad pointedly refused to receive Egyptian Vice President Husny Mobarak when he appeared to explain the Egyptian view. In Israel, as she made a rare political appearance to vote for ratification at a Labor Party caucus...
Belatedly bowing to reality, Rodriguez in July fired his Natural Resources Minister and dropped the price of oil 43? per bbl., whereupon the companies began pumping again. Recently the President announced the imposition of a stiff 60% tax on imported luxuries. That drew howls of complaints from shopkeepers in Quito and their customers, but it may be enough to get Ecuador back in the black...
...encephalitis seems to have bypassed the young and hit hardest at the elderly. In Mississippi, for example, the median age for SLE victims is 70, and there have been relatively few cases in people under 40. SLE's younger victims usually suffer nothing worse than a moderate fever, stiff neck, severe headaches and some lassitude. The aged are more likely to run high fevers, have convulsions and, especially if already debilitated...
...unexpectedly brought his attorney to closings for additional intimidation. Ringer believes that these real estate techniques apply "to all phases of life." But the only non-real estate example he cites is marriage: A woman must learn to market a product (herself) and close the deal ("get the stiff to sign on the dotted line and hand over the ring"). Says Ringer: "The main reason I wrote the book was to make money, not to help people." By that standard, he appears to be a resounding success...
Edith Wharton has always been seen through a lorgnette darkly. The highest born of all major American writers, she usually emerges from the memoirs looking like a bejeweled dowager in a Peter Arno cartoon-stiff-necked, straight-backed and with all her stays grimly fastened. There is some truth to the image, but only part of the truth, and no such caricature of a woman could ever have written such brilliant novels as The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frame. The lady was indeed a snob, but, as R.W.B. Lewis' fascinating biography demonstrates, she also had a keen...