In France, refusing to give a customer tap water can cost a restaurant €8,000. In Italy, a hotel recently refused to serve a guest tap water during dinner and Italy’s Supreme Court ruled the hotel did nothing wrong. In Germany, still water is priced like any other drink on the menu.
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Mallorca logged 47.2 million international overnight stays in 2023. The whole of Switzerland logged 27.7 million. Spain overall reached 329 million international overnight stays, more than double France’s 150 million, even though France had more total tourist arrivals.
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Greenland is 81% glacier, home to 56,000 people, with no roads between most towns. It also holds 25 of the EU’s 34 critical raw materials.
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38% of US adults hold a college degree. But among immigrants, the numbers go from 82% (India) to 9% (El Salvador), depending on where they were born.
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Seventy million years ago, no ice covered either pole, sea levels were about 170 meters (560 feet) higher than today, and large parts of what is now Europe lay beneath shallow seas.
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In 610 CE, a new faith emerged in Arabia and permanently altered the religious map of three continents.
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The Grand Duchy of Lithuania once covered most of modern Belarus, large parts of Ukraine, and pushed deep into Russia. Polotsk spent 570 years under Lithuanian governance. Minsk 462. And Odessa, of all places, more than Klaipėda, Lithuania’s own current Baltic port.
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At the height of its imperial power, Britain’s army was one of the largest on Earth. A century later, the same country fields fewer regular soldiers than Vietnam, Egypt, and dozens of others.
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The USDA Census recorded over six million agricultural data points across nearly two million American farms. Mapped county by county, hay and forage lead in roughly half the country, not corn and soybeans as you might assume. And the corn dominating the Midwest? About 40% of it feeds livestock and another 33% fuels ethanol. Less than 10% reaches a human plate directly.
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Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic occupy a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast today. Most people think of them as small, peripheral languages that have always been there at the edge of Europe, hanging on by a thread. But two thousand years ago Celtic was one of the most geographically widespread language groups in the world, running from Portugal to the Black Sea and beyond.
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