The Lib Dems are also unlikely to enjoy again as propitious a set of circumstances as those surrounding the last election.

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"This is a propitious beginning, " says Aswini Ray, a political scientist at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.

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R. 1530: Congressional action on the FY96 Defense authorization bill comes at a propitious moment.

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But here too, Mr Rato may have entered the scene at a propitious moment.

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March 9 was a propitious day to invest in stocks and commodities.

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The group was founded at a propitious time.

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You don't need an advanced degree in yajnopathy to recognize that the stars are aligned and the timing is propitious for the United States to establish a new national health care system.

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Newman's first propitious stumble was out of the business of renting minicomputers, a business doomed by the invention of the PC.

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The intense interest of that country's inhabitants in their genealogies, and the fact that they are descended from a small group of founders, means that conditions for linkage mapping are particularly propitious.

ECONOMIST: Human genetics