A performing arts school choir is set to get a one week trip to Costa Rica thanks to a series of fundraising events including a cell phone recycling scheme. The Women’s Choir at Schenectady High School’s John Sayles School of Fine Arts will be teaming up with the St Rose Women’s Chorale for a week long performance tour of Costa Rica. The tour, which will kick off from the sixth of March and carry on until the thirteenth of the month, will include concert performances at the University of Veritas in the capital city of San Jose, as well as at the Catedral Metropolitano and The Catedral de Gracia, where music workshops will also be held for young school children. The tour aims to ease the gap between high school and university while also expanding the students’ understanding of the world at large.

Great Lakes Christian High School in Beamsville in the United States is set to host its second electronic recycling event this coming Saturday. The first such recycling event, which was held in August last year, was a big success and is now set to be repeated on Saturday the twenty sixth of February. Local residents are being encouraged to drop off unwanted electrical goods, including old cell phones, computers, fax machines, keyboards and even televisions at the high school during the duration of the recycling event, which runs from nine o’clock in the morning to two o’clock in the afternoon.

The revolutions occurring across the Middle East are being pushed along by the advent of modern technological developments such as cell phones and social media websites on the internet. Cell phones have been used to record events on the streets in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt and Libya, which are then uploaded for the internet for other citizens and indeed the rest of the world to witness, with footage of violent government crackdowns on peaceful protesters only further fuelling anger and revolt against the authoritarian regimes.

The ban on driving while using a cell phone in the US state of Oregon has been a big success. However, officials fear that the ‘honeymoon’ could be coming to an end, as motorists slip back to their old ways, once police ease off the pressure.

The controversial decision made by Nokia to switch the operating system for its cell phones to the one made by software giant Microsoft caused shockwaves when it was announced last week and they are not dying down. The Helsingen Sonomat has said that such a move will cost hundreds of employees their jobs, forcing embattled Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop to again come out and defend this decision, this time implying that other roles will be found within the company for those employees who will be affected by the operating system switch.

Are cell phones dangerous to your health? That is the claim of a group of influential scientists who claim that wireless cell phones have been linked to cancer, infertility and numerous neurological diseases and that more needs to be done to protect people from the electromagnetic radiation being sent out into the world by cell phones, cell phone towers, power lines and wireless internet.

Somewhere between twenty and fifty million tons of electronic waste, including old cell phones, is generated worldwide each and every year, according to Greenpeace International, with more than four and a half million landing up in landfills in the United States alone, which makes the moves toward finding ways toward the recycling of used cell phones and other electrical equipment so important, particularly when the improper disposal of these items can lead to dangerous toxins such as cadmium, lead and mercury polluting both the air and the soil of the world around us.