DATA_SOURCES, the README's layer and key tables, CURRENT-STATE and the
changelog describe the News layer as it now is: a configured news server,
or Core's own reading of GDELT (no key), Liveuamap (optional) and World
News API (Local, free plan backlink credited). .env.example gives the
download sizes and the daily read budget; KNOWN-ISSUES lists what machine
coding gets wrong and which disputed areas are named as themselves.
With GEV_NEWS_ORIGIN unset, Core answers the News layer's routes itself.
Conflicts need no key: the last 24 h of GDELT 2.0 event exports, physical
violence only (CAMEO 18-20), one report per story (copies of one agency
story merged), placed where GDELT put it, a town the article's own words
name winning over a bare country, and titled by the article's page title
from the GKG export of the same quarter hour (the newest 3 h), else by its
address words. GDELT's actor coding is never shown. Exports are read up to
the newest GDELT lists; one that cannot be read is given up on without
holding the rest back, and an outage of two hours answers 502 rather than
an empty feed. With LIVEUAMAP_API_KEY, Liveuamap's mapped items join them.
Local reads World News API by the source country at the view centre
(WORLDNEWSAPI_KEY, at most WORLDNEWSAPI_DAILY_READS a day), with the
Conflicts reports placed inside the area. Disputed areas (11 from Natural
Earth, bundled) and territories without a country code are named as
themselves and read from no country's outlets; a country's outline leaves
them out.
Categories, relevance and severity come from shared rules; keyed answers
are cached and served while they refresh, and no key or address is logged.
Local reads the area at the view centre (`/outline?at=`) and asks the feed
for its reports (`at`): the area is outlined faintly on the globe and named
at the top of the section ("News from Kazakhstan"; within 500 km at sea).
A disputed area is named as itself. A read that a newer look replaced, or
one left behind by a switch to Conflicts, is dropped, and a server without
the area route is asked once.
A section read from a key the server lacks says which key it needs
(503 `no_key`), that the key was refused (`key_rejected`) or that its
daily allowance is spent (`key_quota`); the other section keeps reading.
Liveuamap and World News API join the key registry.
Cards name the service a report came through ("via GDELT Project"), and
Liveuamap and Natural Earth are credited once their data shows. Economy is
a category of its own. Disputed-area labels are smaller and show the name
only; outlines keep up to 300 parts.
A feed card shows its event's picture whatever the number of sources, so a
lone Telegram post opening with a video gets its preview; the globe's
picture cards still need two. An event picture may carry its post's clip (an
HTTPS MP4 or WebM file): the card marks it with a play sign, and opened, it
plays with controls and sound, loading nothing before. An expired link drops
the clip.
Conflicts is the hotspots' significant news, on the map whenever the layer is
on. Local lists every report within 500 km of the view centre below 3,000 km,
and the map shows those instead while it is chosen. The section replaces the
"Include minor news" and "Show event cards" toggles: picture cards are always
on, and Local is what reads minor news. The Conflicts feed reads the same
whichever section is shown.
The panel's window label becomes a choice of the server's window and each
shorter one. The feed and map filter to it locally; the hotspot counts are
read again for it (/api/news/hotspots?hours=N, now on the allowlist). A
server names the longest window it serves as maxWindowHours.
Outlines move to geometry version 4: the news server now follows Natural
Earth's own border vertices instead of a coarse grid, and the new version is a
new cache entry. A severity a reviewer set (severityBy 'label') is kept as such
instead of reading as the rules'.
A host may serve fewer hours than the day. The hotspots answer may name its window
(`windowHours`, a whole number from 1 to 24); the layer keeps reports, the
feed, In view and the chosen event inside it, and the panel says
"Last 12 h" or "Last 24 h" accordingly. Without a window named, or with one
out of range, the layer keeps the full day as before.
The news layer brought its own ColorBrewer yellow, orange and red, solid
coloured marker discs, a coloured edge on every card, an amber developing
ring and pink disputed areas, which read as foreign next to GEV's cyan glass.
Severity now uses colours GEV already has (dim and primary text, the military
layers' amber, the Cockpit's emergency red), drawn as GEV's dark disc with a
severity rim and icon; attestation is still the rim's form. Cards lose the
coloured edge and name significant and major events in a mono badge;
attestation chips follow the status badge; outlines stay in the accent family
with disputed areas dotted in the primary text colour.
From review of the news layer:
- An event's other sides older than 24 hours (or undated) are no longer
listed, and a report dated more than 15 minutes ahead is outside the
window, as in the regional brief.
- Picture cards are one canvas per event in a bounded cache (24), repainted
in place when the age changes, with each card's picture dropped with it;
the age in the key had made a new canvas every minute.
- The feed list drops reports that leave the window and is capped at 600.
- "In view" is filtered from the reports the layer already holds; it reads
the feed only with minor news on, once per refresh, never per pan.
- Infinite scroll restarts after a filter change or a failed read.
- The two filter selects stack, so "Significant and above" is not cut off.
- The timeout tests hold the event loop until aborted, so they pass on
Node 22 as well.
`./server/providers/news` (node) with its own package boundary, so a host composing its own local providers can serve /api/news from GEV_NEWS_ORIGIN as Core's standalone server does.
Events ▸ News draws the last 24 hours of reports from curated hotspots
(Ukraine–Russia, Israel–Gaza–Lebanon, Iran–Hormuz, Yemen–Red Sea, Sudan,
Sahel) and developing situations elsewhere, from any server that answers the
`/api/news` read routes.
- Globe: one marker per merged event, clamped to the ground and culled at the
horizon; one beacon per hotspot when zoomed out and a pulsing beacon for a
developing situation; hotspot outlines with disputed areas dotted and
labelled by who administers and who claims them; picture cards for at most
ten major or fast-growing events with two or more sources, never
overlapping, switchable off.
- Panel: hotspot chips, a severity filter (significant and above by default),
categories, minor news off by default, and a scrolling list of event cards
with picture, headline, place, sources, age and the sides that reported it.
"In view" lists what is near the map below 3,000 km once the camera
settles. A card flies the globe to its event and opens it with a link to
the publisher. Reduced motion stops the pulse and the flights.
- Core serves no news itself: the local server proxies GEV_NEWS_ORIGIN when it
is set, and answers 503 unavailable otherwise, so the layer reads "not
configured" once instead of retrying.
- Share token 9 (enabled-only); voice stays off for this layer.
The pure half of a news layer: validated records for a news server's
`/api/news/hotspots|feed|outline` contract, a presentation model and canvas
markers and picture cards, and a fetch client.
- Colour carries severity only (0 no physical event, 1 minor, 2 significant,
3 major), never a side; the category is the icon, the rim is attestation
(confirmed, a claim, one side's own press), size grows with sources and
markers fade with age.
- Cards say "Reported by {side} sources" and mark official channels; a
machine-read English headline is labelled as such.
- `createNewsSource` reads same-origin routes with a 15 s timeout, a 4 MiB cap
and record-by-record validation; `NEWS_API_PATHS` and `newsQueryAllowed`
let a host proxy exactly what the client sends. A 503 marked unavailable
means "not configured": no retries.
- Exported as `./layers/news/source`, with its own package boundary.
Regional News showed "REGIONAL NEWS UNAVAILABLE" above populated rows and a
static "RECENT" footer over months-old articles. The status banner kept
`display: grid` when hidden, every non-empty answer carried the unavailable
text, and nothing limited or sorted articles by age.
- One window (regionalNewsWindow.js, 24 h): the local proxy asks Google News
with `when:1d` and GDELT for 24 h, drops undated, older or future-dated
articles, sorts newest first, and reports newsWindowHours/newsFetchedAt.
- The Cockpit labels four states: fresh (banner hidden, "LAST 24 H"),
kept after a failed refresh ("CACHED · REFRESH FAILED"), no news in the
window, and unavailable. The footer lives in the news state, so it
survives page and tab changes, and the client drops out-of-window rows.
- `.cockpit-brief-status[hidden]` now hides the banner.
From 550 to 1,000 km of range the camera's -5° limit lies past the place's own horizon. The swing ran into its 150 m clearance, let go of the pivot and tilted the rest in place, which lifted the crosshair onto the sky (28 to 63 km up from 600 to 900 km), and a return to top-down then landed hundreds of km from the place.
The swing now hands over to an in-place tilt only where the clearance is what stops it (within about 17 km). Farther out it stops with the camera 0.5° above the place's horizon, still pivoting: a tilt to an angle reports the angle it reached with a note, a continuous tilt stops there, and a further tilt up is refused as at the limit. Tests check that the crosshair stays on the place, frame by frame for a continuous tilt, and that top-down returns over it.
With main merged, the Overpass prompt measured 55,549 against the 55,500 ceiling. The pitchDeg and direction descriptions now read 'Absolute; -89 top-down.' and 'Needed for pan/rotate/tilt steps', bringing it to 55,497. The schema pin and the measured-size note follow.
Riding an aircraft now adopts its layer the way a direct selection does, and
Contacts gives up a dependency the user adopts, so ending Contacts mid-session
(one of its layers off, or Contacts itself) no longer turns off the ridden
layer and ends the Cockpit. When Contacts goes off, Live Signals drops the
rows built from its snapshot instead of leaving stale distances marked
CURRENT, and the feed-off warning is no longer duplicated.
Recent community wildlife observations, as a new Wildlife group in the
layer panel.
- Server: keyless iNaturalist proxy (v2 observations with only the
projected fields; undocumented v1 UTFGrid density tiles, decoded on the
server) sharing one paced queue (burst 4, ~1/s, 60/min, 8,000/day budget,
up to four in flight), in-memory caches and upstream-only cooldowns;
Acartia Salish Sea marine-mammal feed rounded to 0.01 degrees with
comments dropped.
- Layer: grid counts drawn as a soft view-ranked density glow; real sampled
sightings as taxon badges at their true positions with ambient photo
thumbnails and labels; obscured records stay privacy cells; a clicked
sighting stays pinned through camera moves and refreshes.
- Anchored photo card per selection with the single iNaturalist link;
attribution in the layer row and the Data attribution popover.
- Filters (CONFIRMED, taxa presets) round-trip in share links with token 9.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
Name each Rio feed in its credit instead of repeating the licence, drop the
deprecation history from the bus note, list Rio among the feeds with a
route-name table, and shorten the route-table header and test comments.
The Transit prompt said "Fly below 3,000 km", but the closed gate opens at
2,850 km; it now names the enter threshold, as Bike Share does. When the
camera changes coverage, Transit and Bike Share ask the Layers panel to
repaint instead of leaving the old prompt up until the next 15 s / 60 s tick.
The callout now asks for the opacity its own card paints with this frame,
keyhole fade included, and fades out as the card fades in. A card faded out
at the keyhole rim leaves the callout readable, and a card fading out after
leaving its source still hides it. The vessel card id is cached on the
record, and the allocation gate covers the lookup.
foldPlaceName drops a leading "the", so "The Hague" over upstate New
York accepted Hague, NY as an exact nearby match. Split the script-aware
fold into foldPlaceText and use it for keyless toponyms; foldPlaceName
keeps its behaviour for the packs and street matchers.
Also: changelog fragment credits #1585, folding test pins the Latin
letters NFD does not decompose (ß, ø, ł), and CURRENT-STATE notes that
non-Latin names match only when spelled with their marks.
Denis Groshev