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Menzies Explains Jasmine Link Mix-Up
Thu, August 28, 2014
Last night, we told you about the embarrassment with Police Department's website linking to a porn site. As we showed you, the link is supposed to belong to belong Jasmine Alert, the organization which releases urgent bulletins to the nation for missing children. The Jasmine Alert was launched in 2012 in memory of Jasmine Lowe, who was brutally murdered in Cayo after being missing for several days.

The police department is one of organizations linked into the Alert system, so logically, a link to their website was posted on their official page. But, recently, when visitors clicked that link, jasminealert.com, it took them to a porn site. Of course, when it hit the news, it caused major embarrassment, but at least it prompted the website managers to pull it down.

The Executive Director of the Jasmine Alert, Patrick Menzies, has been put in the hot seat because of it. Today, taking a break from occupying Belmopan, he explained to us that indeed that link (jasmine-alert.com) which now takes web surfers to view porn, was once the web domain name for Jasmine Alert. The problem, he explained, began when the organization couldn't continue to pay the web fees to maintain it:

Patrick Menzies, Executive Director - Jasmine Alert
"I want to declare, the police website doesn't and what they have is a link to the Jasmine Alert web page or website. So the police doesn't run the Jasmine Alert website, I do. We've establish the website, we control everything and so when you use to go there up to last night you would be able to click on where it say click to go to Jasmine Alert, you'd go to www,jasminealert.com. That site, we lost the domain name this July because of funding. I didn't have the money to renew it, to be honest and but when we finally got some funds I try to get it back and the company I submitted a letter two weeks ago and they have not responded, but so I bought instead jasminealert.org. The problem is that yesterday the hacker also blocked it in the DNS server, so inside the computer in the United States, the company is well protected - but hackers got in, blocked it. So when you go to JasmineAlert.org up to yesterday you could get it, but now you can't even get .org, you can't get .com, it's all been taken over. We are planning on today with God's help get .bz and that way its control in Belize and I have a personal contact and get that resolve quickly. Again to be very specific, we lost it due to funding. Folks will be able to go after today hopefully to jasminealert.bz and get in contact with the site. The site is still up. The site is on another company's server."

Menzies is asking for the public's assistance and support of his fund raising efforts to maintain the new web domain name.

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