17 February 21
Unfortunately We Must Change Course
With fundraising overall at an abysmal level we must turn our attention away from critically important stories that badly need everyone’s attention and focus on obtaining the little funding the organization needs to function.
This is the last thing we ever want to do.
Motivating this group to contribute is now job one.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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17 February 21
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Bess Levin | Behold the Many Ways Trump Is Still Legally F--Ed Post-Impeachment
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "Unfortunately for the ex-president, unlike the U.S. Senate, real juries are not comprised of sycophants terrified to piss off his supporters."
onald Trump likely heaved a very big sigh of relief over the weekend when, despite literally siccing a fascist mob on the U.S. Capitol to burn down democracy in his name, he escaped any and all responsibility for his actions. That sigh was presumably extra heavy given that (1) his crack legal team basically started the trial by suggesting the DOJ should arrest him and (2) he is now free to torment the country with threats to run again in 2024. Unfortunately for Trump, he is far from out of the woods legally speaking, he’s very likely guilty of numerous crimes, and unlike the U.S. Senate, actual courts of law are not comprised of juries of sycophants terrified to piss off his supporters.
On Tuesday, the ex-president got a taste of what’s to come when the NAACP, on behalf of Mississippi representative Bennie Thompson, filed a federal lawsuit against him and Rudy Giuliani, accusing the duo of conspiring to incite the January 6 riot. The suit, which seeks compensatory and punitive damages and also names the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers as defendants, alleges that Trump, Giuliani, and members of the far-right groups plotted to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election, which the NAACP says violates the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. (The Act was designed to protect the rights of newly freed slaves as well fight attempts to terrorize elected officials, which Trump and his right-wing mob clearly tried to do.) “January 6th was one of the most shameful days in our country’s history, and it was instigated by the president himself,” Thompson said in a statement. “His gleeful support of violent white supremacists led to a breach of the Capitol that put my life, and that of my colleagues, in grave danger.” Asked how he plans to prove Trump incited the attack, Thompson told MSNBC: “The Trump administration encouraged people to come to Washington on January 6 saying it will be wild…. it’s clear that in his speech he directed the people at the Ellipse to go to the Capitol and let your feelings be known, and that’s what they did. They had no permit to go. He directed them to go, and they followed him, and the subsequent actions from that, we all saw it play out before our very eyes.” (Obviously, if he needs other evidence, the House’s impeachment managers have plenty of it.)
Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio told The Wall Street Journal that the suit is frivolous but looked forward to the attention it will bring him. Neither the Oath Keepers nor Rudy Giuliani responded to requests for comments. Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump, told the Journal, “President Trump has been acquitted in the Democrats’ latest Impeachment Witch Hunt, and the facts are irrefutable. President Trump did not plan, produce or organize the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse. President Trump did not incite or conspire to incite any violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.”
Thompson’s lawsuit, though, is just one of many that Trump will likely be facing in the coming days, weeks, months, and years, at a time when virtually no one wants to represent him, hence the the personal injury lawyer who specializes in dog bites. Other legal issues he’ll probably be dealing with include but are not limited to:
- The call he made to Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, who Trump pressured to “find“ enough votes to overturn the election results and seemingly threatened, saying failure to do so would be a “criminal offense” and “You can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you.” Earlier this month, Georgia officials announced investigations into the call, one of which is a criminal inquiry. “Anyone that violates the law will be prosecuted, no matter what their social stature is, no matter what their economics are, no matter what their race is or their gender. We're not going to treat anyone differently,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said last week.
- A pair of New York state investigations into alleged bank and insurance fraud by the Trump Organization, being pursued by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James, the latter of whom has questioned Eric Trump under oath. (Ivanka Trump, who does not appear to have been deposed nevertheless is extremely testy about the suggestion anyone in her family committed fraud, calling the inquiry “harassment pure and simple” and “100% motivated by politics, publicity, and rage.”)
- Possible state and federal charges related to the January 6 insurrection (in the days after the riot, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine said Trump could face prosecution and that his office was working with federal prosecutors on the case).
- A separate lawsuit by Racine’s office, which has accused the Trump Organization and Presidential Inaugural Committee of “grossly overpaying“ to use space at Trump’s D.C. hotel for his 2017 inauguration. (Ivanka was deposed in that case and similarly claimed the whole thing is a witch hunt, which, you might have noticed, is sort of a theme with these people.)
- A defamation suit by by author E. Jean Carroll, who alleged Trump raped her in a department store in the 1990s, which he claimed was a lie, as he often does when accused of sexual misconduct. (Trump attempted to use the Justice Department to try and kill the suit, which is obviously no longer an option.)
- A defamation case from Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos accusing Trump of lying about sexual misconduct. Trump’s lawyers previously claimed the Constitution gives him immunity from civil suits filled in New York state an argument that, again, he can no longer hide behind.
- A claim by his Mar-a-Lago neighbors he’s in violation of an agreement promising not to live there full-time.
- Who knows what else!
Anyway, it’s a pretty inopportune time to be a guy known for stiffing his lawyers on legal fees, among other things!
'Stone-cold capitalism does not demand a minimum wage any more than it demands child labor laws or workplace safety.' (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The Federal Minimum Wage Has Been $7.25 Since 2009. This Is Indefensible
Hamilton Nolan, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Raising the wage is a moral issue. How is it legal to pay a full-time employee working 40 hours a week less than $15,000 a year?"
he minimum wage is a moral issue masquerading as an economic one. Stone-cold capitalism does not demand a minimum wage, any more than it demands child labor laws or workplace safety. Rather, we demand a minimum wage, due to the belief that there must be a floor on human dignity. The public debate on the issue should always happen on those terms, lest we allow it to slide into the insincere wasteland of “What’s best for small business,” where all ideas good for working people go to die.
America’s federal minimum wage today sits at $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2009. In that time we have been through an economic crash, a slow, decade-long recovery and another economic crash, and after all of that it is still legal to pay a full-time employee working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks less than $15,000 a year. Our nation’s billionaires have gained more than a trillion dollars in wealth in the past year, but there are full-time workers who have lived with the same poverty wage since before Barack Obama had any grey hair. Anyone who is not actively trying to raise the minimum wage is asserting that this sickening juxtaposition is OK. It’s not.
When the Fight For $15 movement began demanding “$15 and a union” for fast food workers in 2012, it was viewed by even those sympathetic to it as a bit of a pipe dream. Now, as Democrats in Congress work to include a national $15 minimum wage in the pending coronavirus relief bill, that movement’s goals are closer to becoming a reality than they have ever been. Of course, that is not a completely happy story – one reason the number sounds more realistic today is because $15 is not worth what it was in 2012. If you want to grasp how hard the Fight For $15 has been, consider the case of Terrence Wise, its single most famous rank and file leader. He has been profiled in countless media outlets. He has traveled the country for marches and rallies. He has even visited the White House to appear with President Obama. And after all of that, he makes $14 an hour working at McDonald’s. If his movement succeeds, he is still in line for a raise.
Even if the Democrats succeed on this issue, either in the relief bill or with the standalone “Raise the Wage Act” that has also been introduced in Congress, it could take until 2025 before the $15 minimum wage is fully phased in. Meanwhile, we know that if the minimum wage had kept up with rising worker productivity over the past 50 years, it would be more than $24 an hour today. A victory will not really be a victory. It just puts us less far behind.
To the extent that there is any genuine opposition to raising the minimum wage on economic grounds – rather than on the pure winner-take-all greed of the investor class, which is in fact what drives the vast majority of opposition to working people making more money – it is misplaced. Mainstream economists now recognize that raising the minimum wage does not in fact have the automatic job-destroying effect that Econ 101 textbooks assumed. Its biggest effect is making it slightly less miserable to be someone who works a job that society has deemed to be both wholly necessary and also unworthy of respect.
It is really not that hard to understand why America has a class war. It is because the rich have chosen it. The rest of us, and in particular the poor, are just being swept along in the storm. No issue crystallizes the many lies behind the class war like minimum wage. It affects not some mythical lazy people without the drive to succeed, but rather the people who work harder than anyone, in the jobs that nobody else wants, but which we all know must get done. There is not a billionaire in the world who works as hard as a full-time fast food worker. The morality tale at the heart of the minimum wage debate is not about a benevolent society deciding how much of a kindly helping hand it will extend to those at the bottom of the economic ladder; it is actually about a merciless, cutthroat society arranged to funnel wealth upwards deciding how far down it can press the weakest parts of the labor force before they break. One thing that all opponents of a higher minimum wage have in common is that they would never dream of valuing their own time as cheaply as they think millions of other, lesser people should be forced to.
Democrats must force the $15 wage through Congress while they control it, even if that means they all have to gang up on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the lunchroom. But even more important, they have to recognize that they have a lot of catching up to do. What morality really demands is not a minimum wage, but a living wage. The Fight For $25 begins on the day after the current battle is won.
Afghanistan. (photo: Reuters)
Weapons Contractors Bankroll Experts Pushing to Keep US Troops in Afghanistan
Eli Clifton, The Daily Beast
Clifton writes: "The Trump administration negotiated a May 1 withdrawal date, but pressure is building on Biden to stay."
arlier this month, a study group established by Congress recommended that President Joe Biden extend the May 1 deadline for withdrawing troops from America’s longest war. It’s a strategy that many experts say runs the risk of abrogating the U.S.-Taliban agreement and potentially setting back the potential peace process in Afghanistan—or even dooming it to failure.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a striking similarity in the backgrounds of the individuals involved in these critical recommendations, which are likely to influence whether Biden maintains a “conditions-based” U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan. Two of the group’s three co-chairs and nine of the group’s 12 plenary members have current or recent financial ties to major defense contractors, an industry that soaks up more than half of the $740 billion defense budget, and stands to gain from protracted U.S. military involvement overseas.
There was more diversity in views and financial interests among the 26 “senior advisers” that the group consulted. At least three of these advisers have warned publicly that the suggested troop withdrawal extension may pose significant risks. But the study group’s plenary is deeply intertwined with the military-industrial base—the group's co-chairs and plenary members have received nearly $4 million in compensation for their work on the boards of defense contractors.
Of course, the recent Taliban offensive on key cities in Afghanistan has created a greater incentive for U.S. policymakers to keep troops in Afghanistan, even at the expense of prolonging a two-decades-long conflict with no clear end in sight.
“This is a good example of the fox guarding the henhouse,” said Mandy Smithberger, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight. “One of the problems in our foreign policymaking is that all of the advice is heavily dominated by people with financial stakes in continuing war.”
For example, Ret. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford was a co-chair of the Afghanistan Study Group. Dunford served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2015 to 2019, commandant of the Marine Corps, and commander of all United States and NATO forces in Afghanistan in 2013.
He led the group alongside Kelly Ayotte, who represented New Hampshire in the Senate from 2011 to 2016, and Nancy Lindborg, the president and CEO of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Dunford and Ayotte have also used their expertise not just to advise the Biden administration on the Afghanistan War but to cash in with major defense contractors.
Since 2017, Ayotte has served on the board of BAE Systems Inc., a subsidiary of the U.K. defense giant BAE Systems plc. Dunford, for his part, joined the board of Lockheed Martin last year. SEC filings show Dunford holds approximately $290,000 worth of stock as part of the “Lockheed Martin Directors Equity Plan,” a scheme to award stock to directors in order to “further align their economic interests with the interests of stockholders generally.”
Nine plenary group members also maintained deep ties to the weapons industry.
Susan M. Gordon, the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence from 2017 to 2019, collected $26,250 in cash from defense contractor CACI for her partial year’s work on its board in 2020 and reported holding approximately $160,000 in CACI stock.
Stephen J. Hadley served as deputy national security adviser during George W. Bush’s first term, a role from which he offered his resignation due to his part in allowing faulty intelligence about Iraq’s pursuit of alleged nuclear weapons material from Niger to be included in the president's 2003 State of the Union Address. Bush denied Hadley’s resignation request and Hadley went on to become national security adviser in 2005, leading a 2007 campaign to promote the troop surge in Iraq.
After the Bush administration, Hadley cashed in, joining Raytheon’s board in 2010 and receiving nearly $2.6 million in cash and stock awards over the following nine years.
Margaret O’Sullivan, who served as deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, also serves on the board of Raytheon, which has a $145 million contract to train Afghan Air Force pilots. She received $940,000 in cash and stock from the defense contractor between 2017 and 2019.
The nearly $4 million in compensation from Lockheed, CACI, and Raytheon for Dunford, Gordon, Hadley, and O’Sullivan is clearly traceable due to their role as board members at publicly traded companies, but other financial ties to the weapons industry for study group plenary members are slightly more opaque.
Former Senator Joe Donnelly is a partner at Akins Gump, which received $240,000 from Raytheon for lobbying services in 2020.
Michele Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy under President Barack Obama, was also part of the ASG’s plenary group. She co-founded WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm that was revealed to have conducted advisory work for Boeing when Antony Blinken revealed a portion of the firm’s client list as part of the nomination process to become Biden’s secretary of state. Lisa Monaco, also a plenary group member, previously served as Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser. She is listed as a “principal” at WestExec, and O’Sullivan is a “senior adviser.”
In fact, only one co-chair, Lindborg, and three plenary group members—International Rescue Committee President and CEO David Miliband, McCain Institute Executive Director Mark Green, and RAND Corporation fellow James Dobbins—are without clear institutional or fiduciary ties to the weapons industry.
“This shows the government is not getting a diversity of perspectives,” said Smithberger. “It speaks to the capture of our foreign policy by the defense industry.”
Neither the United States Institute of Peace, which hosted the group, nor any of the co-chairs or plenary group members responded to requests for comment about the potential conflict of interest between the outside work undertaken by group members and their policy recommendations about the Afghanistan War.
The Afghanistan Study Group did consult with experts who supported the May 1 pullout or had concerns about what an extension might entail, as Jonathan Schroden—a special operations program director at the Center for Naval Analyses and a senior adviser to the group—noted.
“The group of senior advisers was a pretty diverse group of people with really deep expertise on Afghanistan and the various functional areas that would be of importance to think about in the future of Afghanistan,” said Schroden. “They really did a good job of bringing together a group of senior advisers who could speak to all of the issues and do so from a U.S.-interests perspective.”
But Schroden took issue with the group’s ultimate conclusions, noting, “The major issue is that the report overestimates the amount of leverage the U.S. actually has, especially when it comes to things like countering corruption in Afghanistan and getting the Taliban to, in some ways, bend to U.S. desires within the structures of the US-Taliban agreement.”
“If you take a view that the U.S. has less leverage than the report assumes, then I think you find yourself in a place of concluding that a unilateral extension of presence, as the report recommends, will likely result in the Taliban walking away from the peace process,” he added.
A similar critique was voiced by another group adviser, Barnett Rubin, a senior adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Obama administration, who told The Washington Post that a unilateral violation of the May 1 withdrawal deadline would be a mistake and urged the White House to negotiate a six-month withdrawal extension.
Rubin and fellow Study Group adviser Laurel Miller, who served as deputy and then acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2017, have both put forward proposals for a negotiated six-month extension in the withdrawal timetable, maintaining a clear time limit on a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, a limitation that the group did not adopt in its proposal for extending the withdrawal timetable.
Schroden, for his part, was clear that the policy pathway to an extension of the May 1 deadline might not be straightforward, an assessment that Miller shares as well.
“The Taliban have been very clear that if U.S. troops aren't gone by May they will view it as an abrogation of the deal,” said Schroden. “The only way an extension would work is if the U.S. negotiates an extension with the Taliban, which might require additional concessions from the U.S.”
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II appointed himself spokesman for all things immigration during the Trump administration. (photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick/NYT)
Homeland Security Officials Scrap Trump-Era Union Deal That Could Have Stalled Biden's Immigration Policies
Nicole Sganga and Camilo Montoya-Galvez, CBS News
Excerpt: "The Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday moved to scrap a contract signed at the tail end of the Trump administration that could have allowed a union of deportation officers to stall the implementation of certain immigration policy changes."
The agreement, signed the day before President Biden's inauguration by Ken Cuccinelli, the second-in-command at DHS at the time, gave a union representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation officers the ability to "indefinitely delay" the implementation of agency policies, according to a whistle-blower complaint filed by the Government Accountability Project.
The complaint, filed earlier this month, said the contract would effectively grant AFGE National ICE Council 118, a 7,500-member organization that twice endorsed former President Donald Trump, "veto authority" over certain policy-making at ICE.
"The agreements grant NIC 118 extraordinary power and benefits — far more than what DHS agreed upon with its other employee unions which did not endorse President Trump," the Government Accountability Project said in its complaint.
A DHS spokesperson said the Chief Human Capital Officer at DHS notified ICE and the union in writing that the agreement had been "disapproved."
"As part of routine process and provided for by statute, the Department conducted a review of the terms of the agreement and determined that it was not negotiated in the interest of DHS and has been disapproved because it is not in accordance with applicable law," the DHS spokesperson told CBS News on Tuesday.
"DHS will make policy decisions in accordance with the law and based on what's best for national security, public safety, and border security while upholding our nation's values," the spokesperson continued.
Under a federal law, an agency head has 30 days to review and approve or disapprove such an agreement once it is signed.
The whistle-blower complaint accused Cuccinelli of "gross mismanagement, gross waste of government funds and abuse of authority" over the labor agreement.
"This abuse of authority is shocking," wrote David Seide, a lawyer representing the whistle-blower, who is described as a current federal employee that "possesses information concerning significant acts of misconduct."
"We are gratified that the head of the agency disapproved before it was too late," Seide said when reached for comment on Tuesday.
The Office of the Special Counsel has opened an investigation into the whistleblower complaint, sources familiar with the case tell CBS News.
Cuccinelli, an outspoken defender of Mr. Trump's hardline immigration policies, was tapped to be the deputy secretary at DHS in late 2019 after leading U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. A federal court and the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, found that he had been unlawfully appointed to the roles.
"We resolved many long-lingering issues with the ICE union, and it was done with strong legal guidance all along the way from the Office of the General Counsel, so we know it was thoroughly legal," Cuccinelli told CBS News in response to DHS' decision to scrap the agreement. "If I was not confident that the contract was both legal and good policy for ICE, I would not have signed off on it."
Moving forward, the ICE union could appeal DHS' move to block its agreement with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, challenging the Biden administration to a prolonged legal fight.
CBS News reached out to the ICE union that signed the agreement with the Trump administration.
Vehicles seen Monday in Spring, Texas. (photo: David J. Phillip/AP
ALSO SEE: Major Winter Storm Leaves Millions Without Power,
More Than a Dozen Dead
A Texas Mayor Resigned After Telling People It Was Their Own Fault if They Froze When Power Went Out in the Deadly Winter Storms
Sinéad Baker, Insider
Baker writes: "The mayor of a Texas city resigned after telling people it was their own fault if they were suffering from the vast loss of electricity in the state this week amid a historic cold snap."
Tim Boyd, the mayor of Colorado City, accused his constituents of looking for a "handout" as power went out across the state. He encouraged residents with no water to "think outside the box to survive."
The outburst came in a since-deleted Facebook post that included numerous misspellings.
It said: "No one owes you are your family anything; nor is it the local government's responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink of swim it's your choice!"
He said later in the post: "I'm sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout! If you don't have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe.
"If you have no water you deal without and think outside the box to survive and supply water to your family.
"If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising.
"Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish."
Here is the full post:
At least 20 people had died in connection to the storms as of early Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.
Boyd resigned Tuesday. According to Fox News, he said in a Facebook post: "I would never want to hurt the elderly or anyone that is in true need of help to be left to fend for themselves.
"I was only making the statement that those folks that are too lazy to get up and fend for themselves but are capable should not be dealt a handout. I apologize for the wording and some of the phrases that were used!"
Freezing temperatures across many US states have left people battling ice and snow and have caused severe power outages.
Texas is seeing some of its coldest temperatures in more than 30 years, the BBC reported.
Millions of homes and businesses in Texas were without power Tuesday.
Some of the deaths were directly linked to efforts to try to get warm. The Houston police said a woman and a girl died of carbon-monoxide poisoning after trying to use their car to generate heat.
Justin Trudeau. (photo: Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)
Canada to Introduce 'Strongest in History' Gun Laws Which Give Cities Option to Totally Ban Firearms
Gustaf Kilander, The Independent
Kilander writes: "Canada has proposed letting municipalities completely ban handguns as it introduces new legislation to expand its nationwide military-style assault weapons ban from last year."
Proposed law would make it possible for government to create buy-back programme for around 1,500 assault weapon models
The amendments would also simplify the process for officials to revoke gun licences, and make it easier for friends and family to ask that weapons be removed from individuals when there's a fear of violence.
Remodelling a weapon to increase capacity would become a crime under the new law. The bill is expected to make it through Parliament in Ottawa, and comes after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised that changes be made after at least 20 people were killed in a mass shooting in Nova Scotia last year, The New York Times reported.
The proposed law would also make it possible for the government to create a buy-back programme for around 1,500 assault weapon models.
Mr Trudeau said in a statement on Tuesday: “One Canadian killed by gun violence is one too many. This is why our government has taken some of the strongest action in our country’s history against gun violence.”
Some members of the Conservative opposition are against the bill but other opposition parties look likely to support its passage.
After the assault weapons ban was put in place in May last year, a two-year amnesty period was started for those who own listed firearms to comply with the ban, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported. The amnesty period runs out on 30 April 2022.
At a press conference, Mr Trudeau said: "We are not targeting law-abiding citizens who own guns to go hunting or for sport shooting. The measures we're proposing are concrete and practical. And they have one goal and one goal only: protecting you, your family and your community. Because the victims are real. The pain of their families is real."
Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole said: "I think Mr Trudeau misleads people when he tries to suggest that buying things back from hunters and other Canadians who are law-abiding is somehow going to solve the problem of shooting and criminal gang activity in the big cities. It's ignoring the real problem and it's dividing Canadians."
Gun-control group PolySeSouvient said it was disappointed that the government didn't make the buy-back programme mandatory, like in Australia and New Zealand.
Suzanne Laplante Edward, who lost her daughter in a 1989 shooting which killed 15 at an engineering school in Montreal, said that it was a "betrayal".
She said: "My family and I have fought for three decades to ban these weapons. We thought we had won in the fall of 2019 when the Liberals announced with much pomp and circumstance that they would ban and buy back all of these killing machines."
Deforested land on Indonesia's Borneo Island. Activists are using satellites to monitor deforestation, but cloud cover sometimes hides it from view. (photo: Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images)
Pillagers of Tropical Forests Can't Hide Behind Clouds Anymore
Dan Charles, NPR
Charles writes: "The world continues to lose millions of acres of its most valuable tropical forests each year. But defenders of those forests have just deployed a new tool in their struggle to stop it - or at least alert the world when it's happening."
It's an upgrade of a system called Global Forest Watch, created by the World Resources Institute. The website makes it possible to monitor what's happening to distant tropical forests almost in real time through satellite imagery.
Mikaela Weisse, who helps run this site, demonstrates how it works. She zooms in on one small area of the Central African Republic. It looks a bit like Google Maps, except that this map is updated constantly. Behind the scenes, computers sift through a flood of images collected from satellites, day by day, using techniques devised by researchers at the University of Maryland and Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
When the software detects a change - when trees have disappeared from a particular spot since the satellite last looked at it — it issues an alert, and a color-coded spot shows up on the map where trees appear to have vanished. The satellites revisit each spot on the globe about once a week.
"If we can detect deforestation and other changes as soon as they're happening," Weisse says, "then there's the possibility to send in law enforcement or what have you, to stop it before it goes further."
There's some evidence the monitoring works, she says. According to one study, in places where people know they're being watched, there's been less forest clearing.
The system has had one big problem, though. When it's raining, or cloudy, regular satellite sensors can't see the forest. And in the tropics, it rains a lot. "In Indonesia, my impression is, it's the rainy season almost all the time." Weisse says. "There's almost always cloud cover."
That means deforestation doesn't come to light until weeks or even months later, when the weather clears. And Weisse says some loggers or ranchers have taken advantage of that, clearing land during rainy times of the year.
Last month, though, Weisse and her colleagues unveiled something new. Their system now collects images from an additional kind of satellite sensor, using radar, which sees right through clouds.
"Essentially, the satellites are sending radio waves to Earth and collecting how they come back," she says. The instrument is operated by the European Space Agency, and it delivers even sharper pictures than what Global Forest Watch had been getting.
"We can actually see these little patches that indicate where there's been removal of a single tree," Weisse says.
At that site in the Central African Republic, in front of her on the computer, the map shows dark pink lines and blotches where trees disappeared just within the past few weeks.
Anybody in the world can log in and see this. So local environmentalists, or even big food companies that have pledged not to buy crops grown on deforested land, can react more quickly.
