Vox Sentences: Facebook for everyone in India? Not so fast.
By Dara Lind and Dylan Matthews Feb 8, 2016, 8:00pm EST
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Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty
India blocks Facebook's attempt to bring (some of) the internet to everyone; North Korea's rocket launch has everybody nervous; a black Bill Gates in the making.
Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.
Free Basics in chains
Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images
Regulators in India have banned Facebook's program to provide free minimal internet on mobile phones, called Free Basics.
[The Verge / James Vincent]
Free Basics, which reached 19 million people around the world as of January, allows access to some basic services (like job listings and weather reports) as well as access to, of course, Facebook.
[Wired / Jessi Hempel]
The ruling isn't specifically against Facebook. It's against all "zero-rated" internet services: mobile plans that cap users' data, but make exceptions for certain sites.
In the eyes of Indian regulators, this violates net neutrality. Similar concerns have been voiced about US programs, like T-Mobile's "Binge Now" feature which allows free TV streaming.
[Center for Internet and Society / Barbara van Schewick]
But in India (as well as Egypt), protests against Free Basics have taken on an ideological tone: railing against "poor internet for poor people."
[Boing Boing / Cory Doctorow]
Free Basics is part of Facebook's larger Internet.org project, which seeks to bring some form of internet to as many of the world's people as possible.
It's not the only service trying to do this. There are a few other platforms in India alone trying to provide universal minimal internet.
[Hindustan Times ]
So about that South Korean missile shield...
Han Myung-Gu/Getty Images
North Korea launched a long-range rocket Saturday. Ostensibly, it was to place a satellite into space.
[Reuters / Ju-min Park and Louis Charbonneau]
But it's been condemned by the UN Security Council as a further step in the development of a North Korean missile program.
[The Guardian / Justin McGurry and Damien Gayle]
Even China, North Korea's foremost ally, has expressed annoyance with the launch.
The US has a standing offer to help South Korea build a missile defense system. After the rocket launch, South Korea is formally starting talks to take them up on it.
[BBC]
That's unlikely to please China, which has warned South Korea not to invite American military influence that directly.
[Bloomberg / Sam Kim]
Slay.
Matt Cowan/Getty Images
Beyonce won Super Bowl weekend. First, she dropped a surprise new single and video, "Formation," on Saturday.
[Beyoncé via YouTube]
Then she stole the Super Bowl halftime show, in an outfit inspired by Michael Jackson and with backup dancers in Black Panther berets.
[Vox / Caroline Framke]
The "Formation" video is being celebrated for its politics as much as its art: it is unapologetically black, Southern, and black Southern.
[The Guardian / Syreeta McFadden]
It opens with footage of Hurricane Katrina — taken from a documentary whose creators claim they didn't give her permission (though it appears that permission was granted at some point).
[NYT / Jon Caramanica, Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham]
Of course, the combined punch of the video (which is being called "anti-cop") and the Black Panthers references in the halftime show has pressed the predictable buttons of Fox News pundits.
[The Daily Beast / Matt Wilstein]
Why does pessimism sound smart and sophisticated, while optimism sounds simple-minded? [Motley Fool / Morgan Housel]
Psychologists are increasingly moving into moral philosophy, claiming to approach the topic objectively. But their moral convictions are as strong as anybody's — just much more poorly defended.
[NY Review of Books / Tamsin Shaw]
When geriatrics researcher Bill Thomas stocked a nursing home with dogs, cats, hens, rabbits, parakeets, a garden, hundreds of plants, and a daycare facility, he broke state law. But it reduced the number of prescriptions residents needed by half, cut the death rate, and made residents start leaving their rooms and eating again.
[Washington Post / Tara Bahrampour]
The Zika outbreak in Brazil is made much worse by the fact that is has some of the strictest abortion laws in the world.
[NYT / Debora Diniz]
Truly one of the finest headlines of our time: "Wife crashes her own funeral, horrifying her husband, who had paid to have her killed."
[Washington Post / Sarah Kaplan]
"One of the strangest things about the anti-Shkreli argument is that it asks us to be shocked that a medical executive is motivated by profit. And one of the strangest things about Shkreli himself is that he doesn't seem to be motivated by profit—at least, not entirely." [New Yorker / Kelefa Sanneh]
"Somali authorities now believe that they know who carried the bomb onto the plane and detonated it: A man who was then sucked out of the hole in the fuselage and became the attack's only fatality."
[Slate / Ben Mathis-Lilley]
"Not long after President Barack Obama ordered U.S. airstrikes in Libya in 2011, his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, trekked to Capitol Hill to brief Democratic senators. After a few minutes of discussion about the military operation, Bernie Sanders took the floor. To talk about the economy."
[Politico / Michael Crowley]
"That New Hampshire is 98.8 percent white links it in some minds with the tradition of English freedoms, and resonates in the darkest caverns of an America that still defines moral and political attributes in terms of race or national ancestry."
[Washington Post / Henry Allen]
"[Ted] Cruz was said to have run the wrong way and was later seen naked and banging against the window of a locked dorm in an attempt to gain entrance. Numerous as the secondhand accounts were, we were unable to confirm the nude-lockout incident. However, we did establish that the following spring, Cruz, who was a member of the Campus Safety Committee, appeared in at least five separate issues of the Daily Princetonian as a staunch opponent of the concept of locked entryways."
[Jezebel / Ellie Shechet]
The NFL's magic yellow line, explained [YouTube / Joss Fong, Estelle Caswell, Gina Barton]
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