I presume CNN updated the headline after OP posted. It’s now

Poland blames Russia for firing missile into its territory as Moscow unleashes deadly attack on Ukraine

Things have got to be fucked up if you go bankrupt while your competition is being actively bombed

It doesn’t include the UK. It just sometimes also doesn’t include other areas, notably Sweden, Norway, and Finland. They’re not an island, but they are almost functionally an island in a European context because the land route to them (prior to the Denmark-Sweden bridge) is very long and has often included at least one hostile border

I don’t think it’s a firm enough concept that you’ll get one answer everyone agrees on. For me, personally, it’s a fuzzy-edged geographical concept that has a cultural basis. So it’s “that bit of Eurasia west of the Urals and Bosporus”, and we think of that as a meaningful category because a lot of the people here have a lot of shared identity and history

Russia is, in my mind, a part of that. Most of Russia’s landmass is east of the Urals, yes, but the origin of the country is within Europe and it was a major part of that shared history. Britain didn’t become less European when most of Britain’s landmass was in Africa, India, Australia etc. Belarus is just unambiguously European to me. It’s hardly the first time in history that European countries have been hostile with each other

The other ambiguously-European countries - Turkiye, the Caucasian countries, Greenland, I suppose arguably Kazakhstan as well since it does reach into the western side of the Urals a bit - are where the “fuzzy edges” come into play for me. These countries can be thought of as European in some contexts, not in others. Often it is going to be a matter of identity for those countries - as you say, they pick their sides. I can imagine futures in which Russia, Turkiye, Armenia, and so on pull away from Europe altogether and are thought of as entirely Asian. I can equally imagine futures in which they move the other way and become more solidly European. There’s little sense to me in trying to draw a strict and exact geographic line of where “Europe” starts and ends because the concept is too entrenched and useful to just abandon, but the lines that it became entrenched upon were never neat ones in the first place

They’ve got a quote from an Oxford uni professor of energy and climate policy in there who says it can store heat effectively for weeks. The manufacturer claims that it maintains about 80% of its “charge” if left for a month

One of the cool things about this design is that the bigger it is, the better it gets at storing heat. The square-cube law is in effect here, since heat can only be lost by leaving the silo at the outside whereas heat can be stored throughout the whole volume

It does do something important in the winter: smooth out the irregularities on renewables. It’s not like you charge it up in September and then just expect it to carry you through to March. It means that your renewables just have to cover the demand some time this week, not at the exact moment the town wants the power. If there’s a high-pressure front that means you’ve got minimal wind for Monday through to Thursday, it’s fine, you just extract power from the battery and then re-heat when the wind picks up at the weekend

Leaving the excavator underwater is going to make for some amazing unsettling photos in about twenty years

A diagram showing where the equivalent bones are in the three main ways that animals walk about from Wikipedia

I don’t think that the logic holds here. There absolutely are people who take the pro-Palestinian side not because they actually oppose what Israel is doing, but because they hate Jews and see it as an opportunity to “justify” that hatred

A good example is the former British National Party leader Nick Griffin. Thankfully, he is no longer active in politics and wasn’t very good at it when he was, but he makes for a good example. He was simultaneously anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim because he was just a massive fucking racist stain on society

It’s good that people like Griffin aren’t leading the conversation. They are out there, though, and we ought to be wary of them

That was great hahahaha

That cat saved Skyrim, she deserves respect

Antarctica is divided up into a whole bunch of wedge-shaped territories managed by different countries (plus an international treaty where everyone agreed to only use it for scientific purposes), and most research stations are near the coast. The Chilean, Argentinian, and British areas are in that area near South America. For the rest, starting in South America would mean you’d have to cross a big chunk or even all of Antarctica to get where you want to be

But Greenland’s resources ministry said that contrary to Price’s claim, there were “no actually active permissions for any exploration activity or permissions for preparations for these activities”.

Not Greenland, apparently. The executive chair of company’s comment is basically “we lied” in fancy dress. I assume one of two things is likely here: either they intend to just start anyway and rely on the American government to protect them by force, or they have no intention of drilling at all and this is functionally a photo op so that the American government can say “look at this deal we got”

The name derives from an old Irish one that means “little king”, so in that sense it’s pretty perfect for a cat

That is a full-force complaint right there. That’s going straight to your manager whether you like it or not

The GlobalEye looks like a regular airliner with some stuff glued on to it. The C295 with the super high-mounted wings and unusually-tapered fuselage that seems to have been designed to match the wingtips definitely looks weird even before the surveillance stuff gets attached

It’s like they can turn their bones off at will

He looks like a wonderful little guy. His eyes are very expressive

Seems like this is due to a corruption scandal with high-paying jobs in the Moldovan air traffic authority? I don’t know much about Moldovan politics and a lot of articles seem to be keeping things very vague here

Like Alaric the Goth! Naming a black cat after the wrong kind of goth seemed funny to me. Also “Alaric” means king of everything, which seemed about right for him. I am glad to hear that his Ostrogothic kinsman is faring well