Althouse

"The ruling is one of the most consequential judgments since the 27-nation bloc, home to roughly 450 million people, enacted a landmark data-privacy law aimed at restricting the ability of Facebook and other companies from collecting information about users without their prior consent.... The company includes language in its terms of service agreement, the very lengthy statement that users must accept before accessing services like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, that effectively means users must allow their data to be used for personalized ads or stop using Meta’s social media services altogether."

From "Meta’s Ad Practices Ruled Illegal Under E.U. Law/The decision is one of the most consequential issued under the E.U.’s landmark data-protection law and creates a new business headwind for the social media giant" (NYT).

From "EU throws gala party for ‘global gateway’ metaverse — and only a handful of people show up" (London Times). 

By "handful," they mean 6. The EU spent £332,500. So that's £55,417 per person.

"These are not noble gestures for which Ukraine should bow low. This is your contribution to the security of Europe and the world. Where Ukraine has been a reliable shield for eight years. And for eight years it has been rebuffing one of the world’s biggest armies. Which stands along our borders, not the borders of the EU.... And I hope no one thinks of Ukraine as a convenient and eternal buffer zone between the West and Russia. This will never happen. Nobody will allow that. Otherwise – who’s next? Will NATO countries have to defend each other?... I thank all the states that supported Ukraine today. In words, in declarations, in concrete help. Those who are on our side today. On the side of truth and international law. I’m not calling you by name – I don’t want some other countries to be ashamed. But this is their business, this is their karma."

Said Volodymyr Zelenskiy, quoted in "Ukrainian President Makes Historic Speech in Munich (English Translation)" (Kyiv Post).

Four people were fatally trampled in one eight-week period in 2009 alone. One of these unfortunates was a veterinarian out walking her dogs on the Pennine Way, another long-distance trail, in Yorkshire. This was a woman who understood animals and liked them, probably had treats for cows in her pocket—and they still trampled her. More recently, a retired university lecturer named Mike Porter was trampled to death by an angry herd—yes, angry—in a field near the Kennet and Avon Canal in Wiltshire, a place where I had been walking only the year before. “It looked like they wanted to kill him,” one eyewitness breathlessly told the Daily Telegraph. It was the fourth serious attack on walkers in five years just by this one herd. 

Scientists and archaeologists now believe... that the plague bacteria, which caused the medieval Black Death that killed up to half of Europe’s population, infected humans roughly 5,000 years ago in the Stone Age. The bacteria, after it had entered the bloodstream and likely killed the host, circulated into the pulp chamber of teeth, which kept its DNA insulated from millennia of environmental wear and tear. In the past decade, scientists have been able to extract and analyze that DNA. The Stone Age plague was, however, an ancestor with a slightly different genetic identity....

Kristian Kristiansen, a University of Copenhagen archaeologist and a co-author of the plague study, believes his group’s research illuminates the causes of a Stone Age demographic transformation, called the Neolithic decline, which archaeologists have long studied. Settlements at the time were disappearing faster than they were appearing, and within a few hundred years, most of the population had been replaced by migrants from the Eurasian Steppe. Researchers had only ever hypothesized that disease may have played a role in crippling the native population before it was overtaken, but now they have evidence, Kristiansen says.

“The steppe migrations would not have succeeded without the plague . . . and [those living in what is now Europe] would not all have spoken Indo-European languages,” Kristiansen said. “Later prehistory has been turned upside down to say the least.”