To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee . . .Emily Dickinson

Why are bees dying? The U.S. and Europe have different theories.

The mysterious collapse of bee colonies around the world has turned into a real crisis. In the United States, domesticated bee populations have reached a 50-year low and keep dwindling. The situation is just as dire in many other countries.

And that’s bad news for all those crops that depend on bees. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that “out of some 100 crop species which provide 90% of food worldwide, 71 of these are bee-pollinated.” Around the world, these crops are worth at least $207 billion.

EU Bans Pesticides Thought Harmful to Bees…

EPA does Nothing…

† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice, is contributing editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

DNA “Evidence”, Privacy, and Racialized Dragnets
by nancy a heitzeg

DNA. Big Science – with a capital “S”. We are blinded by the seeming certainty of it,  a notion reinforced by endless variations of CSI -like crime shows and the growing number of Innocence Project exonerations that rely on the power of the double helix. The so-called “Fingerprint of the 21st Century”.

Deceptively simple, the key word being deceptive.

The role of DNA in criminal investigations increasingly raises critical questions – most immediately surrounding the right to privacy and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. This issue is the central matter in the current Supreme Court case Maryland v. King.

But there is much more at stake than privacy rights. DNA collection under the auspices of criminal injustice raises questions about accuracy and efficacy, and at rock bottom, risks for the renewed reification of “race”, all wrapped in the guise of “race-neutral” policy.

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Credit: Colorlines.com

From Racialicious:

Richards tweeted a picture of two men near her who joked about “dongles” and “forking repos” during the conference. She informed conference staff, she said, after seeing a picture of a girl who took part in a coding workshop during the event made her worry about the environment created by the “forking” jokes.

The situation degenerated when one of the two men — neither of whom she identified — was fired by his company. As TechCrunch reported, the unnamed employee apologized for the original joke on Hacker News, but also noted Richards’ platform:

Adria has an audience and is a successful person of the media. Just check out her web page linked in her twitter account, her hard work and social activism speaks for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility. As a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.

Shortly thereafter, Richards was the target of a string of personal and professional attacks against Richards, including the posting of her personal information onine, death threats, slurs, accusations of “misandry” and even attacks against her employer, Sendgrid.

Later, Sendgrid CEO Jim Franklin announced that the company had terminated Richards, saying, “her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite.” The original incident was glossed over, and the attacks against both the company and its own employee were not addressed at all. Franklin closed comments on his post on Monday.

The conference also altered its Code of Conduct to forbid public shaming, requiring future disputes to be reported to PyCon staff. There is no mention, however, of what happens if there are conflicting accounts of an incident, or if convention staff disagrees with a person’s assessment of something as offensive or triggering. Is what happens at PyCon supposed to stay at PyCon from now on?

From Colorlines:

By now you’ve probably heard at least one version of the story about Adria Richards, the black technology evangelist who was fired from her job at SendGrid last week for tweeting a picture of two white guys who were sitting behind her making sexually charged jokes at a major tech conference.

Richards’s tweets from PyCon, which bills itself as the largest annual gathering of Python programmers and users, immediately drew the ire of trolls and their attacks intensified after the “big dongles” jokesters were canned.

Individual social media-related firings always make news, but the bigger story here is how Richards became the target of a very particular kind of harassment. Social media trolls repeatedly called Richards the n-word and threatened to rape her. Some scoured the Internet for her personal information and put it on blast (“doxxing”). One particularly disturbed individual even tweeted Richards a photo of a dead woman’s decapitated body laying on a bed. (Thankfully, Twitter intervened, the image has been deleted, and the account in question was suspended.)

So far, the onslaught of hate has had the intended effect on Richards. At press time, the technologist—usually a prominent online voice—hasn’t tweeted since March 20 and her popular blog, But You’re a Girl, is silent. She emailed VentureBeat’s John Koetsier a simple message on March 22: “I’m staying safe.”

The Richards incident is a reminder that the tech world is very similar to the outside world when it comes to calling out sexism or racism. It’s a frightening and often thankless task.

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Sequel”, NY Times

Last week, scientists sequenced the genome of cells taken without consent from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was a black tobacco farmer and mother of five, and though she died in 1951, her cells, code-named HeLa, live on. They were used to help develop our most important vaccines and cancer medications, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, cloning. Now they may finally help create laws to protect her family’s privacy — and yours.

The family has been through a lot with HeLa: they didn’t learn of the cells until 20 years after Lacks’s death, when scientists began using her children in research without their knowledge. Later their medical records were released to the press and published without consent. Because I wrote a book about Henrietta Lacks and her family, my in-box exploded when news of the genome broke. People wanted to know: did scientists get the family’s permission to publish her genetic information? The answer is no…..

The publication of the HeLa genome without consent isn’t an example of a few researchers making a mistake. The whole system allowed it. Everyone involved followed standard practices. They presented their research at conferences and in a peer-reviewed journal. No one raised questions about consent.

In the three years since my book about HeLa was published, the Lacks family and I have spoken to audiences by the thousands about these issues. Public response is overwhelmingly consistent and in line with several studies: the public supports the science and wants to help it move forward. But that support is dependent on consent and trust.

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From Slashdot:

Twitter’s second transparency report reinforces what many already know: governments want online user data, and to yank select content from the Internet.

“It is vital for us (and other Internet services) to be transparent about government requests for user information and government requests to withhold content from the Internet,” Jeremy Kessel, Twitter’s manager of Legal Policy, wrote in a January 28 posting on the official Twitter Blog. “These growing inquiries can have a serious chilling effect on free expression—and real privacy implications.”

Twitter’s first two transparency reports cover the entirety of 2012, so there’s not a deep historical record to mine for insight. Nonetheless, that year’s worth of data shows all types of government inquiry—information requests, removal requests, and copyright notices—either on the increase or holding relatively steady.

Governments requested user information from Twitter some 1,009 times in the second half of 2012, up slightly from 849 requests in the first half of that year. Content-removal requests spiked from 6 in the first half of 2012 to 42 in the second. Meanwhile, copyright notices declined a bit, from 3378 in the first half of 2012 to 3268 in the second.

The United States was responsible for 815 of those 1,009 requests in the second half of the year. Japan came in second with 62 requests, followed by Brazil with 34.

From Slate:

As part of [Monday's] festivities, a site called InternetFreedomDay.net was launched. One of the several organizations behind the effort, Fight for the Future, tried to make a point about copyright law by posting a video that included footage of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Why? Because, as Fight for the Future’s video explained, King’s speech is still under copyright—and therefore sharing it is an act of civil disobedience that honors both Internet Freedom Day and Martin Luther King Day this Monday. Fight for the Future’s video also explained that SOPA would have made streaming the film a criminal offense—a crime like kidnapping, bank fraud, and downloading too many JSTOR articles in violation of terms of service.

Yet just after 1 p.m. on Friday, the video had been removed from the video sharing site Vimeo, presumably at the request of EMI, which, with the King estate, holds the rights to the speech. You may not realize it, but, as Vice’s Motherboard explained, “You’d be hard pressed to find a good complete video version on the web, and it’s not even to be found in the new digital archive of the King Center’s website. If you want to watch the whole thing, legally, you’ll need to get the $20 DVD.”

This winter solstice is unique and special — it occurs December 21, 2012 at 11:11 UTC (6:11 EST). It marks the end of a 26,000-year cycle, and the beginning of another — some say the Age of Aquarius. In that spirit, we wish you a Happy Solstice and here’s to the dawn of a new age!

From Humanity Healing:

We have finally arrived at the End of the Mayan Calendar and the start of a New Era. It is not the end of something, but the beginning of a new mentality for humanity, with new seeds of thoughts that will pull our planet and all its beings to a new level and culture. Many changes will take time to manifest, as physical changes are not immediate, but as everything starts with a thought, an inspiration; we prepare ourselves through a Soul commitment to align our thoughts and actions accordingly with a new code of Being.

We all want a new world, a New Paradigm of living, one more consciously and in peace. Our Humanity now realizes that we need to reinvent ourselves, to leave circular thought patterns and to spiral up, in a quantum leap of sorts.

Humanity Healing is sponsoring 24 hour vigil, starting today, but note, this will not be an internet event, nor a physical event. It will take place inside of our Soul Temples. We will connect energies and intentions, and we will support each other this way.