Web app · AI
Global News Map — live map of wars and conflicts in the news
A public 3D globe tracking armed conflicts worldwide, refreshed every 30 minutes. A self-hosted AI model turns reporting from established news outlets into conflicts, parties, developments and attacks, and every item is checked against the article it cites before it goes on the map.
Outcome: Live at globalnewsmap.org, updating itself every 30 minutes with no one at the keyboard, on an open-source codebase.
The full story
Global News Map answers a simple question — where is fighting happening right now, and what changed today? — on a spinning globe. Each conflict has a status (escalating, active, easing, ceasefire or frozen), a short summary, its latest developments and a page of its own, and every item shows how many independent outlets reported it.
Every half hour the pipeline reads a set of established news outlets and passes the articles to a large language model running on our own hardware, not a paid cloud API. The model pulls out conflicts, parties, developments and attacks. Then each new item is re-read against the full text of the article it cites and dropped if the article doesn't say it. That check is what keeps an AI news digest honest.
Around the core map sit data layers from public sources: GDELT actor links, occupied territory in Ukraine, military aircraft and ships (deliberately delayed), travel-advice shading, and separate cyber and weather modes. The basemap, relief tiles and fonts are all served locally.
The heavy lifting runs on a GPU machine that pushes a database snapshot after each refresh; the public server only serves the map, in Docker behind Caddy on a Hetzner host. Every page is server-rendered with its own Open Graph tags, structured data and sitemap entry, so individual conflicts can be found in search.
More work