Much, then, is riding on the success of a plane that Boeing dismisses as a white elephant.
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They point out the "ghost town" of Kilamba in Angola, a grandiose project often labeled as a white elephant.
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There will be endless promises to ensure that there is a positive legacy of London 2012, that we are more sporting as a nation, more inclusive and that the Olympic Park revives east London and does not become a white elephant.
It is a great white elephant, held back by the feeble condition of Cuba's economy.
Indonesians have come to cherish their local freedoms, with good cause even if it means a white-elephant stadium or three.
However Fife Council has insisted it would not become a white elephant.
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To counter the 787, Airbus is offering a white elephant called the A350, which has been widely derided as out of step with the changing times.
Add in the likelihood that the rate cap leads to escalating subsidies, and no wonder that some Brazilians wonder whether an all-too familiar species has re-emerged in the Amazon: a white elephant.
Dick Durbin assure us, not because they want to use federal money to indemnify their home state for a white-elephant prison Illinois taxpayers should never have built, but because Guantanamo Bay simply must be closed.
Hence, in turn, our own notion that a white elephant is a valuable possession which cannot be disposed of, even though the expense of maintaining it is out of all proportion to its usefulness or worth.
But there are many here who now fear the high-speed rail network may turn out to be a white elephant, too expensive, saddled with massive debts that it will never pay off - a wealth destroyer not a wealth generator.
The escalator, originally built to ease traffic on the narrow street, was initially criticized by the city's director of audit as a costly "white elephant" because it overshot its budget by 153% and failed to reduce traffic.
In some ways, then, the expression "white elephant" carries with it in Thailand a very different meaning from that which we associate with it in the West.
That master of hype once wooed more people to pay to see an elephant he'd painted white than a rival circus master attracted with a real snowy one.
The recipient of this vengeful act of royal generosity was thus confronted with the high costs of looking after the white elephant, and as often as not went broke as a result.
The plan initially is to import elephant, white rhino, warthog, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest and a range of antelope.
Big and dark and looking slightly weary, his white tusks flashing in the sun, the elephant walked towards our table with a steady gait, moving with a dogged, fatigued determination.
Enough of a common mind-set remains that when Rudolph Giuliani (another pro-choice Catholic politician) last year denounced a painting of the Virgin incorporating elephant dung, his approval rating jumped from 60% to 80% among white Catholics.
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