NEWSBYMEREDITH SLATER

After months of campaigning and a lot of hard work  from grassroots, local food organizations like Honeylove, California beekeepers received a big break. At the Mar Vista Community Council meeting last night, a motion was passed to allow for the implementation of a Beekeeping Pilot Program in Mar Vista, a neighborhood in Los Angeles.

The move came after more than 1,900 Change.org members signed a petition created by Mar Vista residents Chelsea and Rob McFarland, the founders of Honeylove. The request for a pilot beekeeping program will now move on to the Los Angeles City Council.

In the Community Council's own words: "The [Mar Vista Community Council] Board therefore recommends the implementation of a Beekeeping Pilot Program in [order] to test safety and develop best practices for future expansion. We urge the City of LA to adopt a policy that includes conditions relating to maintenance, location, registration and notification to assure for the safety of all residents which may result in the continued preservation of quality of life and preservation of single-family residential districts."

The Situation
Al Jazeera English (AJE) is an internationally-acclaimed news network that broadcasts to over 250 million households in 120 countries on 6 continents, yet it is available in only 5 places in the entire U.S. (Washington, DC; Burlington, VT; Bristol County, RI: Toledo, OH; and New York City, NY).

We believe that democracies need information to flourish. In light of uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, floods in Central America, crashing markets throughout Europe, and political protests across the U.S., now--more than ever--we Americans demand to know what's going on around us, both at home and abroad.

The Solution
Right now, Comcast subscribers in only a few select cities have full cable access to Al Jazeera: Comcast’s customers in other regions don't. This needs to change. As one of the largest cable providers in the U.S., it is time for Comcast Cable to get with the program and provide all of its customers with full cable access to Al Jazeera English.

Your Role
Tweet at Comcast here asking the company to provide its customers with full cable access to Al Jazeera English. You can write your own message or copy and paste this:

@comcastcares I want Comcast to start providing full cable access to Al Jazeera English around the country. http://www.change.org/petitions/comcast-broadcast-al-jazeera-english-now @change.org

Finally, if you like getting involved in this type of action, you should sign up to be a Change.org Human Rights Hero. We’ll send you an email every now and then with an action designed to make one of the petitions here on Change.org have even greater impact. You can sign up to be a Human Rights Hero here.

The petition is sponsored by Rethink Press, a grassroots group that is working to raise awareness about the state of the journalism and media in the United States.

Photo Credit: Casadelosninos.org

One backyard beekeeper is learning that when it comes to managing his hive, it's not the bees that are dangerous, so much as local regulations.

Forsyth County, Georgia resident Nicholas Weaver has been raising bees for the past 12 years, starting the hobby when he was just 13 years old. When he first started beekeeping, he and his family researched the legalities of beekeeping in their area: they checked local zoning codes; asked fellow beekeepers; and made sure that the neighborhood association didn’t have any prohibitions regarding honeybees. They couldn't find any laws against raising honeybees, and thus began Weaver's hobby.

Yet, in August of this year, Weaver had a zoning violation filed against him through the Code Enforcement Office. Upon further research, Weaver found that, despite this violation notice, bees and beekeeping are not addressed anywhere within residential zoning regulations of the Unified Development Code. What he learned was that in instances like this one in which an issue like beekeeping is not legislated about, it is up to the discretion of the Planning and Development Director of the Forsyth County Planning and Zoning Department to decide the legality of the practice.

Despite a lack of legislation about beekeeping, in Forsyth County, and in most Georgia counties, the majority of honeybees are in fact raised in residential areas by "backyard beekeepers." Without these local, sustainable beekeepers, the survival of the European honeybee would be at risk.

The Italian fashion house Giorgio Armani SpA has committed to ban the dangerous practice of sandblasting jeans, a technique used to give jeans a used look which is highly dangerous to workers.

The news comes after a series of campaigns on Change.org by by the Clean Clothes Campaign which is an alliance of organisations in 15 European countries that is dedicated to improving working conditions and supporting the empowerment of workers in the global garment and sportswear industries. Gucci, Versace, H&M and Levi have already responded to the campaigns by pledging to ban sandblasting, and Armani now joins them with a promise to eliminate sandblasting from their supply line beginning with their autumn/winter 2011-12 collection.

“In regard to the sandblasting finish applied to certain garments, the Armani Group wishes to make clear that this technique has been eliminated from our production processes starting from the autumn-winter 2011/2012 collection that is currently available in the stores worldwide,” Armani announced via Facebook and Twitter.

UPDATE 9/12/11: The Mar Vista Community Council pushed the vote to legalize beekeeping until October 11, 2011. That gives us even more time to ramp up support for this campaign! Please sign Chelsea and Rob McFarland's petition asking the community council to legalize urban beekeeping in the Mar Vista community.

Chelsea and Rob McFarland and their team at Honeylove, a non-profit, have been working tirelessly to make urban beekeeping legal in Mar Vista, a district on the West Side of Los Angeles. They will find out if their efforts come to fruition tomorrow, September 13th, when the community council votes on whether or not to sanction an urban beekeeping pilot program.

In the meantime, they're certainly garnering attention for their cause. Back in July, Honeylove led a flash mob at their local farmers' market, raising awareness about the issue of urban beekeeping among hundreds of shoppers. A few weeks later, they celebrated National Honeybee Awareness Day by dressing up in honeybee costumes and offering photo ops, information about beekeeping, and bee-related crafts for kids.

Now we're approaching the moment of truth: Following the successful completion of the district's feasibility study on urban beekeeping, the community council will finally vote on September 13th on whether or not to legalize a pilot beekeeping program. If approved, the program will pave the way for Mar Vista residents  to have the same basic beekeeping rights as their close neighbors in Santa Monica, as well as residents in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Denver, Spokane, Atlanta, Chicago, Toronto, and Vancouver.

McDonald’s is the largest customer of the largest pork company in the world, Smithfield Foods. And lately, Smithfield has been proving itself to be one of the food industry's biggest lying liars.

Back in 2007, Smithfield said it would phase out the use of gestation crates by 2017, a decision that was lauded by McDonald's. Some producers use gestation crates to house pregnant sows, and the enclosures are so restrictive and unsanitary that pigs can't even move around without hurting themselves.

In McDonald’s 2008 Corporate Responsibility Report, the company notes that “McDonald’s has long supported suppliers that choose to move away from sow gestation crates and tethers.” It goes so far as to quote Smithfield’s CEO in saying "...when McDonald's and other customers told us they believe group housing to be more comfortable for animals, we listened."

Unfortunately, Smithfield seems to have forgotten what it welcomed with open ears just a few years ago. In 2009, Smithfield went back on its promise to phase out gestation crates by 2017, claiming economic difficulties. Though the company recently boasted record profits, it still hasn't re-committed to phase out gestation crates. Even after 12,000 activists on Change.org asked the company to tell us why it won't get back on track to phase out gestation crates, Smithfield remained frustratingly silent.

Dolce & Gabbana deleted Facebook wall posts as soon as Change.org members led by the Clean Clothes Campaign wrote on the luxury Italian fashion house’s wall, demanding that they stop using a highly dangerous garment production method which gives Dolce & Gabbana jeans a ‘worn’ look

LONDON – The Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana deleted posts on its Facebook wall after Change.org members posted messages demanding that the company ban sandblasting, a technique used to give jeans a used look which is highly dangerous to workers.

The move comes after more than 25,000 European and American activists have joined a campaign on Change.org demanding that the company ban sandblasting.

The Situation
Sandblasting, which gives jeans a 'worn' or used look, is known to kill workers in garments producing countries like Turkey and Bangladesh where jeans sandblasting is done manually.

When workers fire sand under high pressure at jeans, dust then enters the environment, exposing workers to silica, which causes silicosis in the lungs. Eventually, workers die because they cannot breathe properly anymore.

The Solution
Dolce & Gabbana needs to follow in the footsteps of other brands including Versace, Levi's, H&M, C&A and Gucci and publicly ban sandblasting from their supply chain.

We just got Versace to ban sandblasting thanks to your hard work, so let's make Dolce & Gabbana next!

Your Role
Leave a message on Dolce & Gabbana’s Facebook wall here and here asking them to ban sandblasting from their supply chain. Note that you’ll have to click “like” Dolce & Gabbana to comment, but you can unlike them after you post a message. You can write your own message or copy and paste this:

Killing workers isn’t sexy. Please ban sandblasting because there is no need for someone to die to make good looking jeans. http://www.change.org/petitions/dolce-gabbana-stop-the-killer-jeans

Back in the day when the real Bob Evans was around, he and his wife, Jewell, raised their six kids in a large, brick farmhouse that they affectionately called "Homestead." It was here that the family opened a sausage shop in their front yard and later went on to open the first Bob Evans Restaurant and General Store.

This story, along with snapshots of the original farmhouse, are the pictures that the Bob Evans restaurant chain paints for you when you visit the company's Web site. The company even boasts that by eating at its establishments, you can "discover farm-fresh goodness."

So you may be shocked to learn that the eggs Bob Evans uses in its food come from hens who don't roam freely on a farm. Rather, the chain sources its eggs from hens that are crammed inside teeny cages, forced to live their lives in a space no bigger than an 8x10 sheet of notebook paper.

As the national interest in urban beekeeping grows, cities like Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Seattle have joined the movement and legalized the practice. These cities recognize just how important bees are to the future of our way of life.

Yet, as bees are quickly vanishing due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), some cities like Los Angeles have yet to legalize urban beekeeping. In the Mar Vista community of L.A., a group of activists is ready to change that. Chelsea and Rob McFarland recently started a petition on Change.org asking the Mar Vista Community Council to support beekeeping in the region and work to repeal Los Angeles Municipal Code 50.03, which makes beekeeping illegal.

Working in collaboration with the Mar Vista Community Council Green Committee and Backwards Beekeepers, the McFarlands started honeylove.org to raise awareness and gain support for the legalization of urban beekeeping in Mar Vista and Los Angeles as a whole. After speaking in front of the Mar Vista Community Council, Chelsea and Rob gained unanimous approval of a feasibility study on legalizing beekeeping.