What happens to your Facebook account when you die? Sadly, my wife passed away in April.
Since then, I have made several requests to have her Facebook account turned into a memorial page. I would prefer this to deleting her account as it will provide a place for people to leave messages and memories – and especially for my sons, aged nine and 13.Whenever I fill out the Facebook form, it advises me that someone will be in touch with me soon, but I have never heard anything from them. I can’t see anywhere where I can get any help from Facebook with this problem.I have tried contacting Facebook via their feedback form, and on Twitter. Do you know of any way I can get Facebook to respond to my request?
Simon Perhaps having their lack-of-service highlighted by the Guardian will prompt somebody at Facebook to respond, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Facebook suggests that you provide “a link to an obituary or other documentation about the death”. Delete or memorialise If you choose memorialisation, Facebook changes a number of things: Thinking ahead. My adult sons haven't spoken to one another for over a year. I have four children.
The two youngest are boys, aged 33 and 29. The elder is married and has a very young son. The younger is in a serious relationship. When the older one got married, he treated his younger brother with anger and rudeness, even though the younger, as best man, knocked himself out to help and be supportive. When his wife got pregnant, he told us, his parents, and his older sister and brother straight away. All by myself: is loneliness bad for you? Perhaps I should feel more concerned about my wife's habit of apologising for me before I meet anyone she knows.
The truth is, I'm not even sure what she's apologising for, except that I'm occasionally not that chatty. And I fidget. And my eyes stray about the place when people are talking to me. And I sometimes ask questions that can come off as a bit direct. Why do so many Jamaicans hate gay people? Jamaica has a bad reputation for anti-gay prejudice.
This small island in the Caribbean has become notorious not only for its anti-gay laws, political rhetoric and murders, but also for its broad societal acceptance of severe sexual prejudice and openly hostile music. Most people remember dancehall star Buju Banton, who hit the scene when he was 15 with the hugely popular Boom Bye Bye. The lyrics go: "It's like boom bye bye / Inna batty boy head / Rude boy nah promote no nasty man / Dem haffi dead. " Hard to decipher for someone not familiar with Jamaican patois, but Buju is essentially describing shooting a gay man in the head – he doesn't want to "promote no nasty man". The CIA's cute 'first' tweet can't cover its bloody tracks. From teledildonics to interactive porn: the future of sex in a digital age.
When 35-year-old Jane first signed up to the dating website she has used for about a year, she says it was "quite overwhelming".
"I was inundated with winks, and messages, people trying to chat with me live online, all sorts. Some will send you detailed pictures of their penis, basically. What the hell? You've got a penis. Congratulations. " Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway's mass graves. The bodies of 796 children, between the ages of two days and nine years old, have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway.
They died between 1925 and 1961 in a mother and baby home under the care of the Bon Secours nuns. Locals have known about the grave since 1975, when two little boys, playing, broke apart the concrete slab covering it and discovered a tomb filled with small skeletons. A parish priest said prayers at the site, and it was sealed once more, the number of bodies below unknown, their names forgotten. Shock value: How Aamer Rahman's 'reverse racism' joke saved his career. Late last year, Aussie comic Aamer Rahman was considering giving up standup.
He and his partner Nazeem Hussain were disbanding their political comedy double act, Fear of a Brown Planet. Hussain had got himself a TV show, but, although the pair had been a hit at the 2011 Edinburgh festival, 31-year-old Rahman felt "at the end with comedy. I thought, my audience is small, what I'm doing is too niche. " Nepal's bogus orphan trade fuelled by rise in 'voluntourism' Like an increasing number of tourists visiting Nepal's mountain peaks, colourful markets and lush national parks, Marina Argeisa wanted to experience the latest must-do activity on the tourist trail: a volunteering stint at an orphanage.
What the 26-year-old Spaniard did not know was that her good intentions were unwittingly feeding an industry that dupes poor parents into sending their children to bogus orphanages in order to extract money from well-meaning foreigners. It is a business model built on a double deception: the exploitation of poor families in rural Nepal and the manipulation of wealthy foreigners. In the worst cases, tourists may be unwittingly complicit in child trafficking. Nepal's tourist sector comprises nearly 3% of its gross domestic product, and in 2012 more than 600,000 foreigners visited the tiny country. Volunteering, or voluntourism as it is sometimes known, is a rapidly expanding industry. Yet many of the occupants of these sites have at least one living parent.
Bilderberg Group at 60: still keeping the things that matter private. There was an eerie silence on Thursday morning in the press area outside the Bilderberg conference venue in Copenhagen.
All eyes, and a lot of lenses, were peering up Kalvebod Brygge, the long road to the airport, waiting for the limousines to start whooshing in with their precious cargo: a powerful mix of ministers and moguls, billionaires and business behemoths. We know George Osborne is due to attend; this year's conference in Copenhagen will be his seventh.
The most dangerous drug isn't meow meow. It isn't even alcohol ... Mephedrone, otherwise known as meow meow.
Photograph: Rex Features. 10 overlooked novels: how many have you read? Most novels come, have their day, and are gone. For ever. Most deserve their "do not resuscitate" label. Every so often, though, a novel rises from the grave to claim its belated fame. On 5 July last year, addressing the nation on the Today programme, Ian McEwan did a revival job on Stoner – a novel published to modest praise in 1965 and long out of print. John Williams's bleak, but exquisitely written, chronicle of a second-rate prof in a third-rate American university went on to become the 2013 novel of the year. Advice on stock market crashes, plane disasters and bad weather. Can you risk not reading this piece?
At 66, the moustachioed psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer exudes strapping good health – but that's not because he goes regularly to the doctor for checkups. "I follow the evidence," he says. "People who go to checkups: do fewer of them die from heart disease? From cancer? Or from any cause? How big-hearted babies turn into selfish monsters. A baby being fed a homemade meal, starting with cereals, vegetables and fruits, will need half as much as being weaned on ready-made food. Photograph: Jamie Grill/Getty If you've been planning a shopping trip with the kids for bank holiday Monday, you might not want to read any further, because teaching your children consumerism is helping to turn them into selfish, immoral creatures without a streak of empathy, according to a new study.
You may be making them just like stressed-out adults, whose potential as human beings is killed off as genuine altruism is suffocated by their greed and anxiety. In a new book which suggests that social changes and the shift towards an ever more unequal society are making us cold-hearted and mean, psychotherapist Graham Music says we're more likely to be born big-hearted and kind but then pushed towards being selfish and cold than the other way around. Music disputes the notion that children are born selfish. Dido Belle: the slave's daughter who lived in Georgian elegance. She wore the finest silks, lived in one of London's most desirable homes and studied in a library still regarded as one of the greatest achievements of the renowned 18th-century designer John Adam. Yet Dido Belle was the daughter of an unknown black slave woman so could not sit at the dinner table with her adopted family at Kenwood House in north London.
Belle, a film directed by Amma Asante and released in America this weekend, tells the story of the illegitimate young woman who found herself among the household of Lord Mansfield, one of the greatest men of the Georgian age. As lord chief justice, in 1772 he ruled that a master could not take a slave out of Britain by force, a judgment seen as a key stage in the eventual abolition of the slave trade. Atheists: The Origin of the Species – review. Google Tips, Tricks & Hacks. Lucy Mangan: My name is Lucy. I am an addict. If you'd asked me 24 days ago if I was addicted to anything, I would have laughed in your slightly-overfamiliarly-inquiring face.
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