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Remembering king Redbad
Nowadays Friesland is just a province of The Netherlands. But long ago Friesland, or Frisia, was an area much bigger, stretching from what is now part of Belgium, a large part of The Netherlands, northern Germany, up to Denmark. One of the Frisian cities, Dorestad, was one of the most important and flourishing trading places [...]
25 years ago: Stanislav Petrov saves the world
It wasn’t his shift to monitor the Soviet Union’s early warning system, designed to detect incoming US ballistic missiles, but he swapped shifts with a colleague. Stanislav Petrov, lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense, arrived at a secret command bunker near Moscow for the graveyard shift, expecting to do some routine work by checking [...]
