About GlobalEvents
GlobalEvents answers a simple question: what is going on in the world right now, and where? One map, one feed, everything normalised to a common schema — no accounts, no paywall, no tracking pixels.
What it does
- Collects events from public hazard, news and knowledge sources (685 events tracked, 85 countries currently in the feed).
- Renders them at exact coordinates when a source publishes a location, and aggregates the rest on the country marker — 480 of 685 events are drawn at point level.
- Keeps 123 scheduled events (elections, referendums, fight cards, races) in the same feed so you can look forward as well as back.
- Exposes everything through two JSON endpoints: /api/events.json and /api/countries.json.
Editorial rules
- Attribution first. Every event links to the publisher that reported it. Headlines are quoted as published, trimmed only for length.
- No invented locations. If a source gives no coordinates we do not guess a precise point: the event is placed on the country, and the card says so.
- No ranking of human suffering. Severity values shown for earthquakes and disaster alerts are the source's own measurements (magnitude, alert level).
- Corrections. Events are refreshed from source every 10 minutes (hazards) or daily (news, schedules); an updated record replaces the previous one under the same id.
Built with
Astro, React and MapLibre GL — a static site with a live JSON feed and no third-party trackers. The pipeline is Python, running on a schedule: a lightweight hazard sweep every ten minutes and a full source sweep every day. Reference geography comes from Natural Earth (110m countries), the country and city metadata in the gazetteer from GeoNames, and the world-atlas TopoJSON build.