How we source and score events

Where events come from

• Headlines are pulled from open news indexes (GDELT and Google News search feeds) plus a registry of wire services, public broadcasters and official institutions used by the daily briefing.
• State-run, military and party-controlled outlets are blocklisted, as are outlets with a record of fabrication. Their claims may still appear when independent outlets report on them.
• Wikipedia, social media posts and anonymous aggregators are never used as a source.
• Events older than the live window drop off the map but keep their permanent page.

Confidence labels

• confirmed

  Carried by three or more independent outlets.

• developing

  Reported by one or two outlets and still moving.

• disputed

  Sources disagree, or a party to the event denies it.

Labels are assigned by counting independent outlets and detecting explicit denials — not by a language model.

How severity is determined

• High

  Deaths, mass casualties, missile or air strikes, invasion, major earthquakes and tsunamis.

• Medium

  Armed clashes, strikes without reported deaths, large protests, sanctions, floods.

• Low

  Everything else: statements, routine politics, scheduled talks, economic data.

Severity is a triage signal for the map, not a judgement of importance. It is derived from the reported facts in the headline.

Geolocation

Each event is matched to the most specific place named in its headline — a city beats a country. When several stories share one place, markers are offset in a tight ring so they stay clickable without drifting from the real location. If no place can be identified with confidence, the event is dropped rather than guessed.

Refresh cadence

• Live map: refreshed every few minutes; each event page shows its own last-updated time.
• Daily briefing: source ingestion every three hours, one published brief per day.
• Corrections are logged rather than silently overwritten.