The Guardian: Facebook lures Africa with free internet - but what is the hidden cost?

Facebook has signed up almost half the countries in Africa – a combined population of 635 million – to its free internet service in a controversial move to corner the market in one of the world’s biggest mobile data growth regions.

Facebook’s co-founder and chairman, Mark Zuckerberg, has made it clear that he wants to connect the whole world to the internet, describing access as a basic human right. His Free Basics initiative, in which mobile users are able to access the site free of data charges, is available in 42 countries, more than half of them in Africa. [...]

It is not the first time Facebook has faced challenges to its initiative. In India, Free Basics was effectively banned after a groundswell of support for net neutrality – a principle affirming that what you look at, who you talk to and what you read is ultimately determined by you, not a business.

It was a blow for Zuckerberg, who was accused of acting like a digital colonialist: shouting about the right to the internet to mask true profit motives. [...]

In a competitive emerging market, giving away data for free may not seem like an obvious business choice, but Facebook has sold it to mobile operators on the basis that customers will eventually buy data.

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BBC4 Word of Mouth: Punctuation

Michael Rosen talks to Keith Houston about punctuation symbols and how they came to exist. Keith is the author of Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and Other Typographical Curiosities.

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Time: What West Germany Got Wrong About the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

In the summer of 1982, while he was still opposition leader in Bonn, future German chancellor Helmut Kohl expressed his concerns about the plans for a national Holocaust museum in the United States. Peter Petersen, a CDU member of the Bundestag, recorded what Kohl had said to a group of Bundestag parliamentarians about the museum, which “the Jews,” as Petersen put it, were building in Washington. In the early 1980s, he summarized Kohl’s statement: “What would a young German visiting the United States think when he passed the Holocaust Museum on the Mall? . . . What would he feel when he saw his country’s entire history reduced to these twelve terrible years? Was this the way in which the United States was going to treat its most valued European ally?”

Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, a network of mostly conservative West German officials and their associates in private organizations and foundations, with Kohl located at its center, perceived themselves as the victims of the afterlife of the Holocaust in America. They were concerned that public manifestations of Holocaust memory—for example museums, monuments, and movies—could severely damage the Federal Republic’s reputation in the United States. [...]

Through a series of behind-the-scenes interventions, a network of official and unofficial German emissaries attempted to integrate the history of German anti-Nazi resistance and of postwar West Germany into the exhibition concept. They aimed to show that not all Germans had been Nazis and that the Federal Republic had learned its lessons. For instance, they considered the country’s coping with the Nazi past, its model democracy and the alliance with Israel a success story, which should be told in the museum. For more than a decade, German intermediaries tried to convince the museum planners to design the exhibition accordingly, arguing that the museum would be incomplete without references to the “good Germans” that lived and suffered through the Third Reich as well as postwar West Germany’s accomplishments. As claimed in interviews and oral history transcripts with former museum representatives Michael Berenbaum, Miles Lerman, and William Lowenberg, they also offered a very large donation—up to $50 million—to make an even more convincing case in Washington.

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The Guardian: Man or beast: why is a pack of bronze wolves terrorising Berlin?

Though real wild wolves have been spotted again in Germany in recent years, these creatures warn against another creeping threat: racism. “I want to start a discussion,” says Rainer Opolka, the artist behind The Wolves Are Back. “What can we do so that people don’t need to hate anymore? In Germany, it looks like racism has now become standard. I don’t want people to get used to that.”

Opolka’s wolves appear in the aftermath of a week that left Germany reeling: an axe attack on a train near Würzburg; a mass shooting in Munich; a woman killed by a machete in Reutlingen; and a bomb detonated in Ansbach. Two of the attacks – carried out by asylum seekers and since linked to Islamic State – have sparked fears that events could be exploited by right-wing groups. Since Angela Merkel welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees into Germany, attitudes towards minorities have come under the spotlight. [...]

Since 2015, the Federal Criminal Police Office – or Bundeskriminalamt – has registered 1,031 “crimes against asylum accommodation” across Germany – from offensive graffiti to 94 acts of arson. It was the arson attacks that spurred Opolka to create his wolves. “Since Thomas Hobbes, the wolf has been a symbol for the inner social conflicts of men,” says the artist. “I remain in that tradition. I want to show those conflicts and use the wolf as metaphor.”

Racism in Germany extends beyond asylum seekers, something the Brandenburg-based artist has witnessed first hand. Opolka remembers watching drunk Germans attack a Turkish man in Hamburg. “Just because he was Turkish,” he says. “That shocked me.”

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Business Insider: 9 facts about cheating that couples — and singles — should know

Psychologists have spent years studying the science of infidelity, including what makes someone inclined to cheat, how your partner is likely to react after you cheat, and how to bounce back from cheating.

Below, we've rounded up some recent findings and how they might help you maintain a strong relationship. [...]

Recent research suggests that a person who is economically dependent on their spouse is more likely to be unfaithful — and that's especially true for a man who relies financially on a woman.

Interestingly, when women are the breadwinners, they're less likely to cheat. When men are the breadwinners — specifically, when they earn more than 70% of the total household income — they're more likely to cheat. [...]

In a recent study, university students reported that the average person of the opposite sex has about a 42% chance of cheating on their partner.

But when it came to their own partners, participants estimated that there was about a 5% chance that their partner had already cheated on them and about an 8% chance that they would cheat on them in the future.

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