Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Twenty days later, the blue-white earth has shrunk to a bright dot of light against the background of stars in the eternal night of outer space. Looking back, the crew members are filled with a sense of isolation, a feeling that will never quite leave them during the 280-day outbound leg of their journey. A busy schedule provides some distraction. The space travelers perform scientific experiments, practice taking shelter against solar-flare radiation, tend vegetables in their hydroponic greenhouses, exercise vigorously for several hours each day and tap into digital libraries for music, light reading matter and courses...
...takes a third approach: he calls himself a "multilateralist." In other words, he portrays himself as part of the once dominant bipartisan consensus that favored asserting American influence through alliances, treaty organizations, economic partnerships and the United Nations, and in accordance with international law. His world view reflects his background as a lawyer who has a reformer's faith in legal and governmental processes...
Crowe dismissed parallels between Sunday's accident and the Korean Air Lines disaster. The Iranian jetliner, he pointed out, had flown into a combat zone, unlike the KAL plane, which merely strayed into Soviet airspace. The admiral emphasized that the tragedy had to be viewed against the background of the growing hostilities in the gulf over the past two years. He cited the May 1987 engagement in which an Iraqi missile hit the U.S.S. Stark and killed 37 American seamen and the subsequent incidents in which the tanker Bridgeton and the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, a frigate, were damaged...
Such are the frustrations -- indeed, perils -- of panculturism. Blades is particularly articulate about them not only because of his fluent English and a rather startling academic background (he has a 1974 law degree from the University of Panama and a 1985 master's in international law from Harvard), but also because the problem weighs heavily on a heart that looks to a "society that will be more integrated and fair, where character will be the most important thing, where hearts don't require visas." He says his record wasn't an attempted crossover, but "more like a 'meet halfway.' People...
...field, he is erudite. "Howard Davis was middle class, wasn't he?" Tyson muses idly, referring to another Olympian on Spinks' team. "Davis was a real good boxer. You can come from a middle-class background and be a real good boxer. But you have to know struggle to be the champ." Without socks, robe or orchestra, wearing headgear as spare as a World War I aviator's, Tyson hurries out to demonstrate his point against an unsteady corps of clay pigeons with perfect names like Michael ("the Bounty") Hunter and Rufus ("Hurricane") Hadley. The slippery leather thuds reverberate through...