Henrique De Castro is to be Yahoo’s new COO. The Googler, currently president of partners business solutions has held a plethora of posts at the Mountain View firm. Google is, of course, “grateful” to De Castro for all of his work, and wishes him “all the best” as he skates off to the purple Google-people eater.

Kara Swisher at All Things D has all the salary details, describing De Castro as the $56 Million Dollar Man. She also points to a clash between De Castro and Michael Barrett, Yahoo’s head of revenue, who have, according to sources, locked horns in the past.

And, on the subject of locked horns, Google and the EU are heading for a, hopefully, rut-free showdown (to continue the stag analogy ad infinitum) over the firm’s privacy policy. The announcement gives the firm three to four months to rectify March’s decision to combine private data from all sectors of its business in order to boost advertising revenue. All we can say here at the laid-back, lovin’-not-fightin’ Fast Company is this.

“Hey, dudes de la E.U., you’ve just won the Nobel Peace Prize for keeping the old continent all snuggly buggly for the past half century. So maybe you shouldn’t be locking horns with Google, because as well as being totally, like, non peaceful and all that, they might get aggressive and erase you from Google Maps. And then how would you know how to get to Oslo for the ceremony?”