Word: blackout
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...brief power failure darkened Eliot House entries. A through H last night for two hours. It was the house's first blackout of the year...
...megabits per second. Although designed as Spacelab's main link with the ground, it still has not fully recovered from a faulty launch last April and is now capable of sending only a fraction of its ground-to-orbit capacity. These difficulties were compounded by the brief blackout of a tracking station in White Sands, N. Mex., and the failure of an electronic relay on the shuttle. The device was supposed to collect data from the pallet experiments and pipe them into Spacelab's computers...
...wide-screen TV. Some 75 students, many of them munching pizza, filled a TV room at Emory University in Atlanta. At the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, nuclear-freeze activists reserved a set for Spanish-speaking viewers and provided a translator. In an unnerving coincidence, a blackout darkened 3,000 homes in Gloucester, Mass., just as the mushroom cloud filled the screen. Power was restored shortly, but not before hundreds of residents felt the chill of their worst imaginings...
Indeed, the press was by no means of one like mind on the blackout. "Rather than mount ing a constitutional soapbox," said the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "the press might better spend its time contemplating why it was not informed and in vited." The St. Louis Globe-Democrat volunteered a blunt explanation: "... the television networks' antidefense bias." Declared conservative Columnist Patrick J. Buchanan: "If senior U.S. commanders running this operation harbor a deep distrust of the American press, theirs is not an unmerited contempt...
That justification for an unprecedented news blackout instantly raised a furor. Major news organizations fired off stiff protests. The American Society of Newspaper Editors formally complained that the exclusion went "beyond the normal limits of military censorship." Two more days passed before the first handful of reporters were escorted to Grenada...