Italy bans cellphones in classrooms

With almost every cellphone these days featuring music ringtones, video cameras and text messaging, school officials in Italy have apparently had enough of all this mobile nonsense. The country has taken the rather drastic (or reasonable, depending on how you look at it) measure of banning schoolchildren from using mobile phones in class. In other words, all those class-disrupting ringtones and incognito cam and video shoots will now banished from all institutes of public education -- and with punishments for breaking the ban including phone confiscation all the way up to bans from taking final exams, the deterrent factor is reasonably high here.