Not mandated by law, but practically speaking it's a must. You won't bring your desktop pc while you're travelling or at work, and so on. In a messaging solution you want to be reachable and want to reach people on the go, for which mobile is the way to go.
For better or worse, it is required.
Project Veritas (James O'Keefe): prime example of what journalists should be like. https://www.projectveritas.com/
Don't think for a second that medical R&D is only done in the US. There is a lot of research going on in EU as well. If the price of the US drugs go up in EU, they might just switch over to EU drugs which means less sales for drug companies overseas. The market will figure it out, but it's a rather complicated issue not as simplistic as you suggest.
They're the gateway to Europe from Asia. Historically had to fight and push back a lot of foreign invaders who wanted to reach the west. More recently they all got fucked pretty hard by the communist Sovet Union and/or nazi Germany as a consequence of WW2. The bad times are still remembered by the majority of the population I guess
Peer-to-peer sounds good on paper, but it involves a lot of different and complex issues than the current setup, whatever the specifics may be. Serving (nearly) static content is easy, but if the content changes as fast as with a site like this (eg: posting new comments), it's quite tricky to keep everything in sync and up-to-date, so you can see the comments that were posted 5 seconds ago. Especially if you want to be able to display a page fast, so users don't have to wait until all the necessary data is gathered from the peers and served. Not to mention dealing with the login information in a decentralized and still safe way.
I haven't dealt with p2p networks for a couple of years now to be honest, but as far as I'm aware they're efficient in distributing content from a single ultimate source (like video/music streaming, distributing a software release, etc.), but once there are multiple sources like in case of TD.W, they suffer greatly performancewise.
Wouldn't be surprised if it were planned:
Poor tiny white girl agitates the crowd, while the scouts take pictures of everyone they can.
At the first "aggression" the agitator let the scouts know what happened, calls the police, and makes a scene.
Scouts of course converge and listen what she says, so they are ready to corroborate the story and show pictures of the attacker.
We all saw the result: guy gets taken away, agitator and scouts almost jumping with joy while walking away, probably going to suck each others dicks later.
While I'm quite curious myself, I prefer they didn't share any information about (ex)hosts.
Any piece of information could be used by bad actors to track them down, and given what has been happening with conservative voices recently, I think it would be a bad idea.