Bullies who use cell phones or social media sites to target their victims will be the feeling the pinch themselves if the Georgia House Democrats have anything to do with it. Yesterday the party introduced the second of three legislative packages intended to provide an alternative to those of the GOP. This one, the Educational Opportunities package, includes an Act that allows parents to take leave in order from work in order to attend important school functions or to look after members of their family, an Act to repeal the taxpayer funded credit that is giving fifty million US dollars to private schools even though public schools remain chronically underfunded – and one, known as the End Cyber Bullying Act, which specifically targets those that use social media and cell phones to bully and intimidate their victims.

For most of us, our cell phones are a whole lot more than just something we make a call from. We use them as alarm clocks, as portable GPS, as our MP3 player, as a Twitter device, as a way to surf or update our Facebook page, as an e-reader or document editor – the list goes on. Because of this, and the constantly improving cell phone technology, Americans change cell phones a lot.

Smuggled cell phones inside prisons are becoming an epidemic in the United States, particularly in California where eleven thousand cell phones were seized from prisoners last year. Cell phones have been used to arrange attacks and extortions, and while cell phone jammers have been touted as a solution, they have the less than useful side effect of also jamming official emergency communications.

Cell phones are becoming essential items for catching criminals due to their own carelessness. Last week a man accused of killing his wife had the charge against him upgraded to first degree murder after it was found that in the process of committing the crime, he had accidentally sent a voicemail message to his wife’s cell phone which recorded the entire incident. Now a burglar has been arrested by police after accidentally dropping his old cell phone at the scene of the crime.

Nokia has stunned the cell phone industry by teaming up with Microsoft, agreeing to switch its current smart-phone software in favor of Windows Phone 7. The move was greeted with shock and dismay by many, resulting in Nokia’s stock falling by fourteen percent on Friday, but Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, who took over the company in September in what was seen as a way of “shaking things up” for the firm, has made no apologies for the decision, noting that Nokia is set to earn billions of dollars from Microsoft in return for using their cell phone software system. “This is something I don’t think was completely explained,” Elop says in response to some of the criticisms of the decision.

Cell phones are helping to breach the gap in terms of access to the internet between whites and ethnic groups such as African Americans and Latinos in the United States, according to a new study. The report from the Pew Hispanic Centre, suggests that Hispanics and African Americans are much more likely to access the internet from cell phones rather than from home computers, indicating that cell phones are helping to beat the “digital divide” in internet access, as it has been termed. The difference remains telling, however, with only two thirds of adult Hispanics and African Americans using the internet in 2010, as opposed to seventy five percent of Caucasians, but the gap is narrowing thanks cell phones.

A mix up of cell phones led to a brutal assault… just hours after the same people were involved in another brutal assault. Four men attacked a man and a woman in an Eastside neighborhood in Wenatchee about half past one in the morning on Saturday, when the man and woman were spotted walking in the middle of the street by a group of men in a car. When the inhabitants of the car indicated for the couple to move, the man responded with an obscene gesture, resulting in a violent altercation.

A cell phone has played a key role in catching a man who murdered his wife. Ronald Earl Williams stabbed his wife to death four years ago in 2007, but did not expect the crime to be recorded. It appears that during the attack on his wife, Mariama Williams, Ronald Earl somehow accidentally activated his own cell phone, which sent a voicemail to Mariama’s own cell phone… and literally recorded her own murder.