Russian Naval Officer Who Likely Saved Your Life (& Many More)

Temperament matters.

Especially when nuclear weapons are involved and you don’t—you can’t—know what the enemy is up to, and you’re scared. Then it helps (it helps a lot) to be calm.

The world owes an enormous debt to a quiet, steady Russian naval officer who probably saved my life. And yours. And everyone you know. Even those of you who weren’t yet born. I want to tell his story …

It’s October 1962, the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and there’s a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that’s been spotted by the American Navy. President Kennedy has blockaded Cuba. No sea traffic is permitted through.

The sub is hiding in the ocean, and the Americans are dropping depth charges left and right of the hull. Inside, the sub is rocking, shaking with each new explosion. What the Americans don’t know is that this sub has a tactical nuclear torpedo on board, available to launch, and that the Russian captain is asking himself, Shall I fire?

This actually happened.

The Russian in question, an exhausted, nervous submarine commander named Valentin Savitsky, decided to do it. He ordered the nuclear-tipped missile readied. His second in command approved the order. Moscow hadn’t communicated with its sub for days. Eleven U.S. Navy ships were nearby, all possible targets. The nuke on this missile had roughly the power of the bomb at Hiroshima.

“We’re gonna blast them now!”

Temperatures in the submarine had climbed above 100 degrees. The air-conditioning system was broken, and the ship couldn’t surface without being exposed. The captain felt doomed. Vadim Orlov, an intelligence officer who was there, remembers a particularly loud blast: “The Americans hit us with something stronger than the grenades—apparently with a practice depth bomb,” he wrote later. “We thought, That’s it, the end.” And that’s when, he says, the Soviet captain shouted, “Maybe the war has already started up there … We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not become the shame of the fleet.”

Had Savitsky launched his torpedo, had he vaporized a U.S. destroyer or aircraft carrier, the U.S. would probably have responded with nuclear-depth charges, “thus,” wrote Russian archivist Svetlana Savranskaya, understating wildly, “starting a chain of inadvertent developments, which could have led to catastrophic consequences.”

But it didn’t happen, because that’s when Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov steps into the story.

He was 34 at the time. Good looking, with a full head of hair and something like a spit curl dangling over his forehead. He was Savitsky’s equal, the flotilla commander responsible for three Russian subs on this secret mission to Cuba—and he is maybe one of the quietest, most unsung heroes of modern times.

What he said to Savitsky we will never know, not exactly. But, says Thomas Blanton, the former director of the nongovernmental National Security Archive, simply put, this “guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”

Arkhipov, described by his wife as a modest, soft-spoken man …

read more, watch PBS vid —> http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/

Dancing On The Ceiling – Moscow, Russia

Elektrozavodskaya Metro Station in Moscow, Russia

courtesy of:  http://news.distractify.com/

Top 10 Places To Discover Fall Foliage Around The World

Temple garden with pond in autumn, Bishamon-do.

1)  Sonoma County, California

www.sonomacounty.com/  With leaves on both tree and vine, fall foliage is doubly intense in Sonoma County. Drive through Sonoma Valley along Arnold Drive, lined with multicolored canopies of oak and maple. Continue through the Russian River Valley, where vineyards paint the ground with sun-fire hues and wines are paired with the October squash harvests.

2)  Northern New Mexico

www.enchantedcircle.org  In a state mischaracterized as a one-season desert, New Mexico’s northern tip—which brushes the foot of the Rocky Mountains—beats to a seasonal rhythm. Drive the 83-mile (134 km) Enchanted Circle stretching from Taos to Red River, a diverse and scenic landscape of verdant valleys, cottonwood forests, and aspen-rimmed mountain lakes that turn to gold in late September and October.

3)  Holmes County, Ohio

fallinamishcountry.com  In the heart of central Ohio’s Amish Country, maple, oak, and the iconic state tree, the buckeye, hang over narrow roads that meander through wavy fields of corn. Drive under the boughs of bright reds and yellows, sharing the road with horse-drawn carriages of the Old Order Amish and stopping at roadside farm stands along the way.

4)  Gaspé Peninsula, Quebec, Canada

www.tourisme-gaspesie.com  Along coastal Quebec, maple leaves turn reds reminiscent of the leaf on Canada’s flag. On the Gaspé Peninsula, the trees have the blue waters of the St. Lawrence Gulf as a backdrop. Hike the mountains of Parc National de la Gaspésie, or leaf-peep while whale-watching in Forillon National Park, where seven types of whales visit through October.

5)  Douro Valley, Portugal

www.dourovalley.eu/en/  Autumn transforms the Douro River Valley, which slices across northern Portugal, into a sea of red, orange, and yellow as the terraced vineyards that slope along the riverbanks prepare for winter. Take a cruise along the 125-mile (200 km) waterway, fortifying yourself against the autumn chill with a glass of the region’s famed local port.

6)  Bavaria, Germany

www.romanticroad.com  Southern Germany is saturated with Alpine forests that pop with color against snow-dusted mountains. Meander along the 224-mile (360 km) Romantic Road, beginning in the Franconia wine region—where local wine festivals punctuate the autumn calendar—and heading south through centuries-old towns such as medieval Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Dinkelsbühl. Crowded with tourists in summer, fall offers more relaxed tempos for leaf-peeping.

7)  Transylvania, Romania

www.romaniatourism.com  Autumn breaks Count Dracula’s spell in Transylvania, a place steeped in legend and imagery of sepia-toned medieval castles and hazy moonlight. Challenge yourself on the Transfăgărășan, a 56-mile (90 km) drive through the Fagaras Mountains full of 90-degree turns, hairpin curves, and spectacular vistas of autumn’s finest foliage.

8)  Moscow, Russia

mgomz.comMoscow is defying its stereotype as a forbidding gray, Soviet-era metropolis and converting the estates of former tsars into public parks that paint the city with autumn hues. Try Kolomenskoye, where whitewashed palaces and blue, onion-shaped church domes punctuate a forest and rows of apple orchards.

9)  Jiuzhaigou Valley, Sichuan Province, China

whc.unesco.org/en/list/637  The Jiuzhaigou Valley hosts some of the most diverse flora and fauna in China. Autumn whips up a colorful competition between the dramatic red-orange leaves, rainbow-hued prayer flags of Tibetan villages, and emerald-tinged lakes that dot the landscape.

10)  Kyoto, Japan

www.japan-guide.com  In Japan, the leaf-viewing tradition—called koyo—mirrors its spring cherry blossom customs. One of the best spots for koyo is Kyoto on the island of Honshu, where vivid leaves frame sloping temple roofs, remnants of the city’s many centuries of imperial history. Nighttime illuminations pierce the translucent, heavy branches at their colorful height from mid-November through December.

courtesy of:  http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/

World Famous FREE Museums Around The Globe! (St. Petersburg, Russia)

Hermitage Museum

from Foursquare

St. Petersburg, Russia – Free on the first Thursday of every month

courtesy of:  http://www.pinterest.com/ottsworld/free-museums-around-the-globe/

NatGeo: Skiing Kamchatka, Russia

 

Skiing Near Tolbachik Volcano, Kamchatka, Russia

Photograph by Fredrik Schenholm

Getting the Shot

For some photographers getting a particular shot can become an obsession. That was the case for Fredrik Schenholm, who made numerous attempts over years to get this shot of Oscar Hübinette skiing down a mountainside at night in Kamchatka, Russia, with an erupting volcano in the background.

In 2008, Schenholm and a friend were on Mount Cotapaxi in Ecuador when a neighboring volcano began to erupt, and it was then that the idea for the image came to him. “I knew right then and there that it would be possible to capture an image combining both skiing and a volcanic eruption.”

To get the shot an immense amount of preparation and luck would be needed. The image he had in mind would require an eruption and both Schenholm and a skier being ready to hop on a plane at a moment’s notice. But volcanoes don’t always cooperate, and predicting when they will erupt is tricky.

“Every morning and every evening I checked all the volcano blogs and volcano-monitoring websites available. This gave me a pretty good clue of the volcanic activity around the globe,” says Schenholm, who attempted to get the shot at Iceland’s Grimsvötn and made several attempts at Italy’s Mount Etna. “But the volcano Tolbachik started its eruption in November of 2012—two weeks after Oscar and I bought our plane tickets to Kamchatka. That was a nice welcome gift. I was really worried [that] in the coming months the eruption would stop. But it didn’t, and we were finally able to get the shot.”

courtesy of:  http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/

RUSSIAN HACK ATTACK TODAY, WHAT TO DO!

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

Russian criminals have stolen more than 1.2 billion Internet usernames and passwords, and the odds are decent that some of yours might be among them.

There’s no need to panic at this point — Hold Security, the firm that discovered the theft, says the gang isn’t in the business of stealing your bank account information. Instead, they make their money by sending out spam for bogus products like weight-loss pills.

That means you need to stay on your guard. If you see strange messages being sent from your email or social media accounts, you might be among those affected.

Here are a few things you can do to protect yourself:

Change your passwords and make them smart: When it comes important services, including email, banking and social media, you’ll want to change those passwords. As a rule, create different passwords for different services,and change them every six months or so.

There’s a lot of debate about what makes for the best password. Some experts recommend using a password manager — a single service that you log into which then generates random passcodes for all your accounts.

But the danger with password managers is that they create a single point of failure:  if the password manager itself is compromised [hacked], all your accounts become vulnerable.

Another solution is to use long sentences or phrases. The more characters you add to a password, the more difficult it is for a computer program to crack — even if your password is a simple sentence that’s easy to remember (“I Need 2 Spend Less Time On Social Media”).

Be careful what you store electronically: Never email your Social Security number, because it’ll stay in your archives. Erase old messages with your bank account information and credit card numbers. And never keep a saved document that serves as a master list of passwords. For hackers, that’s a treasure map.

Use protection: While they’re not foolproof, there are a number of tools available to improve your digital security. Download antivirus software. Be diligent about software updates. Whenever possible, use two-factor authentication, a system available on many services that requires both a password and a one-time code generated by a mobile device.

Lastly, when connecting to any website that uses your personal information, make sure you’re using a secure, encrypted connection. Here’s how to spot it: Look at the address bar above. Does the website URL start with HTTP or HTTPS? There’s a difference. The added “s” stands for “secure.”

Make a throwaway email address: In this latest hack, the Russian gang gathered their trove of digital credentials from websites that make you register with a password and username (often an email address).

For accounts that you wouldn’t be concerned about having hacked — say, your profile on a news site that you don’t read often — you can make a throwaway email address and password that you use strictly for registration purposes.

Reusing this password shouldn’t be a problem, provided you limit it to services from which you won’t be getting any important communications, like personal messages or details of financial transactions. Then you can focus your mental energy on securing the accounts that really do matter.

Don’t be stupid: Much of protecting yourself online comes down to using your common sense. If you can use the Internet well enough to read this article, you probably know the basics: Don’t download files from unfamiliar sources. Check where a link will take you before clicking on it. Don’t respond to wildly ungrammatical emails offering access to Viagra or secret Nigerian bank accounts.

None of these tactics are completely fail-safe, but taken together, they’ll make you a much less attractive target to scammers online.

SEE MORE —> http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/06/technology/security/russian-password-safety/index.html