NATIONAL NOTES

February 2001 Table of Contents

NATIONAL NOTES

Charges Dropped: No charges will be brought by the Attorney General's Office against primary school teacher Roslyn Astwood who had been charged on 29th November 2000 of contributing to the death of a student by aggravating his pre-existing health conditions by applying corporal punishment.

What the XXX? The national telecommunications provider BaTelCo was justly proud at having produced its 2001 telephone directories in house by the first working day of the year. Pride turned to consternation when someone spotted www.xxx.com on the cover of the Nassau edition. This was the URL of a sex site. Distribution of copies was halted while BaTelCo employees wielded Magic Markers. Perhaps the nuisance of sexually oriented websites was first brought to BaTelCo's attention when they tried to set up their domain. They found that www.batelco was already taken - by a sex site. This led to BaTelNet. Three different telephone directories are produced by BaTelCo for Nassau, Grand Bahama and Abaco.

Smile, Please... Driver's licences in The Bahamas will feature a colour photograph of the holder in future. The licences will have a bar code that contains information about the holder that is linked to a central electronic databoard. The licences will also have a holographic overlay of the coat of arms of The impossible. New photographs will be taken every five or six years.

Shop at Home : Abaco Markets Ltd chief executive Reginald Sands, in an address the the Rotary Club of Freeport, said that Bahamians shopping in Florida were hurting the economic growth of the country. He encouraged the government to remove customs duties and other tariffs and in their place raise revenue throug keep Bahamian money in The Bahamas and provide "jobs and a better standard of living for countless Bahamians who are today on the unemployed list."

February 2001 Table of Contents