On May 20, five of the biggest banks in the world pleaded guilty to charges of interest rate manipulation and agreed to pay $2.8 billion in fines for the felonies they committed. Two of the banks, J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup, are U.S.-based. Each has a long rap sheet of recent settlements for their corporate misdeeds, and each has paid large fines and settlements -- nearly $35 billion in the case of JP Morgan Chase. But otherwise, these businesses go on with no reduction of rights or privileges and with no decision makers being sent to prison.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recent study on the connection between fracking and water contamination made headlines earlier this month, with environmental groups seeing it as proof that fracking threatens drinking water and industry using it to argue that fracking is safe.

UPDATE (June 24, 2015): Last week, the University of Texas at Arlington released a study finding widespread contamination of drinking water from fracking. The study examined 550 drinking water wells located near fracking operations on the Barnett shale in northern Texas.

For the past ten years, honeybees have been dying off at astonishing rates, drawing the attention of environmentalists and even the federal government. Bees are critical to a healthy environment because they transfer pollen between plants. This cross-pollination helps one-third of the plants our food system depends on to produce fruit and seeds.