How were monarchy, gender, and nationalism entwined? Through contextualized comparisons of selected case studies (two generations of royal women in four countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia/Yugoslavia), this article explores, in gendered terms, the instrumentalization of nursing as an evolving relationship between state building, warfare, welfare, and voluntary organizations. It argues that certain queens’ interventions in nursing successfully contributed to the “naturalization” of the ruling foreign dynasties in the Balkans and to the militarization of charity. Through such “soft power” they mobilized nursing in different ways to carve out an autonomous space and visibility in wartime as queen-nurses and in peacetime as queen-benefactors. In both cases, royal women personified the “curing” and “caring” dimensions of the modernizing state. Queens’ honorific leadership clearly linked the monarchy and the philanthropic sector but also discreetly expanded the power of the nationalizing state. Queens skillfully promoted a gendered culture of sacrifice, by representing women as caring “by nature,” and thus reinforced neo-traditionalist patriarchal regimes and weakened women’s effectiveness in pursuing their political and economic demands.

Drawing on articles from The New York Times and the New York Amsterdam News, this study analyzes reporting on the police killings of ten-year-old Clifford Glover in 1973, and twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell in 2006, in both instances by New York City Police Department (NYPD) 103rd Precinct officers in Jamaica, Queens. Using critical discourse analysis to study the differences in newspaper representations of police killings, this analysis follows Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s classic 1892 study Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases. Wells-Barnett’s framework of Black Press and White Press is applied to this contemporary comparison of news coverage, asking how Black Press and White Press challenge or accept official police accounts of encounters where police kill Black youth and adults, as well as how they engage community members in their account of events leading to fatal police contact. The study historically contextualizes the localized relationship between police violence, media, and protest by focusing on depictions of two separate, publicized police killings and subsequent officer acquittals in the same neighborhood and precinct, thirty-three years apart. Studying the history of policing and rebellion in one neighborhood provides critical insight into representations of localized police violence by Black Press and White Press over time. The findings of this study function together to explain racialized discourse on police, victims, and communities in the wake of historic police violence and officer acquittals.

Oecophylla spp. are used as biocontrol agents for many types of insect pests. A large and stable population is essential for effective control of pests. Colonies of Oecophylla spp. can be transplanted from wild habitats into orchards. Transplanted colonies can only survive in the presence of egg laying queens. It is difficult to locate nests with egg laying queens in large colonies that may sometimes contain more than 100 nests. Therefore, the need to explore and develop methods for rearing newly mated queens in nurseries may not be over emphasized, hence the current study. In the first experiment, we tested three rearing methods on queen survival and colony establishment. In the second experiment, we compared feeding techniques of different weaver ants on young colony growth. We observed that queens were best reared under continuous, indirect access to water. The first workers emerged earlier (32 days on average) in indirect and direct continuous access to water methods than on limited access to water (sprinkled) (38 days on average). Moreover, rearing mated queens under continuous indirect access and continuous direct access to water methods saved labour and time, because of limited attendance to the colonies. Availability of water, sugar solution and different sources of protein throughout improved the growth of young colonies. Likewise, the number of workers increased rapidly. Therefore rearing mated queens in nurseries is possible and would minimize hustles in hunting for the colonies and their queens in the wilderness.