Word: skies
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Under Andropov's direction, the KGB has made a concerted effort to catch up with Western intelligence services in the technology of espionage. The Soviets are still lagging behind the U.S. in developing spy satellites. Only two weeks ago, a runaway Cosmos 1402 Soviet spy-in-the-sky plummeted to earth, the second such event in five years. But Moscow has made significant advances in electronic eavesdropping. Operatives from the KGB routinely monitor Western communications from embassy outposts bristling with antennas or from offshore spy trawlers. Ironically, the Soviets have benefited from the telecommunications revolution in the West...
...like nothing else on earth. In Lake Okeechobee, the blue-and-purple water hyacinth was higher than our heads. On the coast, blue-and-green water, blue sky roofed with thousands and thousands of white birds overhead. You would be silent, and all you could hear was the wings rustling. One day we sat in our boats through such a sight, with the sun setting, then the moon, as the birds headed into their rookeries, like a bouquet of white flowers, before nightfall...
They proclaim the sun's highest and lowest point in the midday sky, on about June 22 and Dec. 22, (the summer and winter solstices), and signal the advent of a new season. Modern calendars ensure that there are no mistakes. But how did the pre-Columbian peoples foretell the seasons? Apparently, says a husband-and-wife scientific team, the Southwest's ancient inhabitants were skilled solar observers who used rock carvings to keep track of the sun's progress across the heavens...
...Force Cot. Robert O'Brien, a Pentagon spokesman, said U.S. observers on the island of Diego Garcia reported seeing a "40-second burn" in the sky at 5:15 EST, six minutes before the satellite's main hulk rammed fully into the dense atmosphere...
...Pentagon bosses a lease to play games that are not always strictly tied to military security. In one glaring example, the Pentagon went into a culprit-hunting mode a few months ago when somebody made public certain classified information: a budget figure, as it turned out, and a blue-sky one at that, interesting (and embarrassing) not because it endangered the nation's security but because it suggested that coming deficits would be much bigger than the Administration had yet admitted. More usual in the military's perennial game of hide-and-leak is the sudden declassification...