The Strongsville Youth Commission (SYC) in Cleveland in the United States is big on recycling, particularly when it comes to recycling cell phones and other electrical goods. Katherine Nykiel, the leader of the Youth Commission, says that SYC members are passionate about the issue and about keeping such products out of landfills, and have formed a subgroup of the SYC, known as “Lean, Mean and Going Green”. The subgroup has itself recently joined forces with the city of Strongsville, Strongville’s Arborist Jennifer Milbrandt, and the RET 3 – a non profit organization devoted to recycling old cell phones and other electrical goods – to raise the issue’s profile with the local community, beginning with a “Recycle Your Electronics” event which was held on the fifteenth of last month at Strongville’s City Service Centre.

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The tenth of April will see the staging of the third annual EarthDay@Loudoun Family Festival, which is being mounted by the Broadlands Wildlife Habitat Committee and held at Clyde’s Willow Farm in Broadlands, VA. This year’s event, which aims to promote responsible trash disposal and the recycling of electrical goods such as old cell phones, even has corporate sponsorship from the likes of REHAU, Patriot Disposal and Verizon.

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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.

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On Friday, Nokia announced that it has teamed up Microsoft to make Windows Phone 7 the default OS for Nokia smartphones.

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I read an article this morning on Bloomberg saying that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, is reported to have sent a memo to staff warning that the company was on the edge of crisis. Engadget is cited as having broken the story, so I headed over there to learn more. I found a bit more information, as well as a copy of the memo. It’s quite lengthy, but it starts by telling a story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea when an explosion caused the platform to go up in flames. The man decided to jump. I think Nokia may be deciding to jump as well; although I am not sure to where.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I was reading an article in the Kansas City Star written on Tuesday. In it, the writer talks about a recent lunch she’d had with a friend. The friend had a BlackBerry which rang all through their lunch, which she kept answering. Finally, the writer asks her friend why she didn’t just put the phone away and enjoy the here and now. The friend replied, “It’s a company phone. I have to answer it.”

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Recycling cell phone batteries is the new gimmick at Recyclemania, a waste reduction competition held between universities all across the United States. The competing universities routinely watch and count the number of cans, cardboard and bottles that are offered up for recycling during the competition, and this year, old cellular phone batteries are now also being allowed and counted.

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