How SENTINEL builds each edition

1. Collection and publishing

Each edition reads 47 sources: news feeds from 34 publishers (BBC News, Al Jazeera, Sky News, The Guardian, France 24, Deutsche Welle, Euronews, The New York Times and others), the official Bluesky accounts of 8 news organisations (CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, NBC News, Bloomberg, USA Today, Politico), public Bluesky posts matching incident keywords, USGS earthquake data and GDACS disaster alerts. Only items from the last 72 hours are used.

The free publishing path gathers and rebuilds about every five minutes via GitHub Actions (GitHub's minimum schedule; busy periods can delay runs). A Cloudflare Worker gatherer, if used instead, refreshes its snapshot every 15 minutes. A new edition is uploaded whenever something a reader would notice has changed, and at least once an hour as a heartbeat.

Separately, a watcher checks the wire services every minute and other major outlets on a short rotation (faster while a story is live). When one reports major breaking news or a new development in a live story, it starts a rebuild straight away — typically within a couple of minutes of the watcher seeing the post, plus the time GitHub takes to run the build.

Each outlet is tagged with an approximate editorial lean (Left, Centre-left, Centre, Centre-right, Right, Wire, State-funded or Official). These labels are a transparency aid drawn from commonly cited media-bias placements and public-broadcaster status. They are not accuracy ratings, and contested outlets are labelled conservatively. BBC is rated Centre as a charter public broadcaster; DW, France 24, RFI, ABC Australia and CNA are marked State-funded as government international services.

Stock market figures in the masthead come from Yahoo Finance and can be delayed by up to 15 minutes. Open indexes rotate first; closed ones still appear marked Closed.

2. Classification

Each headline and standfirst is matched against an explainable rule set that assigns a category, extracts reported casualty figures and sets a severity from 1 to 5. Retrospective items (anniversaries, trials, sentencing) are capped at severity 1. Commentary, sport and business stories are excluded. Strategic development covers significant space and science milestones (for example catching a returning booster) but not routine satellite launches or funding news. Public social posts that read as jokes or satire are dropped.

Suspected terrorism counts, the Global terror list and the diamond markers on the maps include only reports from news outlets and official sources. Unverified social posts, and coverage of past attacks such as anniversaries and trials, are listed separately at the foot of the Global terror page.

Latest headlines are the newest verified reports of severity 3–5. Most serious right now ranks by severity, so a grave but older story still surfaces there. The Latest updates list shows other severity-2+ reports, newest first, and never repeats a headline story. Long lede-style titles pasted into a feed (common on Bluesky cards) are shortened to a compact headline. Unverified social posts and look-backs that read as terrorism stay in Latest but are not counted as suspected terrorism.

Local uses the browser's location on your device to pick a country (microstate catchments and regional hubs, not a single world centroid), then loads that country's verified incidents. Coordinates are not sent to SENTINEL.

3. Location

Places named in the report are matched against a gazetteer of every country plus key cities and conflict hotspots. USGS and GDACS markers use exact coordinates; others sit on the city or country centre and are approximate. Cloud and IT failures described as worldwide or a global outage are labelled Global rather than pinned to a headquarters country. National aviation ground stops (for example an FAA halt) stay with that country.

4. Corroboration

Reports about the same event (same country, compatible category, within 36 hours, overlapping key terms) are merged into one incident. Independent coverage by several outlets raises confidence; social posts alone never do.

5. Breaking and live coverage

A story gets its own live page when coverage is developing: at least three outlets, four reports, and at least two distinct headline takes (not the same announcement restated). At least two outlets must have reported it in the last three hours (three, once a story is more than 12 hours old). After 12 hours, late re-reports of an old take — for example another “services restored” — do not keep it live; only a new development does. Reports are matched by their distinctive words and phrases, so follow-ups such as “flights resume” join the story even when they don't repeat its first headline. A report that shares only a couple of words with a story is added only if it appeared within a few hours of the story's main coverage. The most widely reported live story is marked Breaking and the others Live. If a new Breaking lead appears while the site is open, a full-screen notice fires once, then a persistent Breaking strip under the nav keeps the link visible. Open live pages pull new updates into the timeline without a full reload.

A live story's title is the newest straight news headline from the last two hours, preferring major outlets, so it follows events rather than the first report. Explainers, questions and video teasers are never used as the title. The updates timeline collapses near-identical headlines so each development appears once, prefers feed items that look like live blogs, and treats a standfirst that adds new facts (for example a rising death toll) as a new update even when the headline is unchanged. Every row links to the outlet's original report. SENTINEL reads public RSS and Bluesky feeds, not the outlets' live-blog HTML pages.

6. Regional threat index

Each incident contributes severity weight × category weight × evidence weight × recency. Severity weights are 1, 2, 4, 7, 11 for levels 1 to 5. Evidence weights are official 1, multi 1.25, publisher 1, social 0.25. Recency halves every 24 hours.

A region's score adds up its incidents, heaviest first, with diminishing returns: the second-heaviest incident counts at 88% of its weight, the third at 77%, and so on. This stops a high volume of minor stories from outranking a few severe events. Levels are relative: the index is the square root of each region's score divided by the most active region's score, from 0 to 100. The square root keeps one extreme hotspot from flattening every other region.

• High index ≥ 75 and score ≥ 14
• Medium index ≥ 40 and score ≥ 4
• Low everything else

The absolute floors stop a quiet news day from painting any region red. Because the index measures reported activity, regions with heavy media coverage can score higher than equally affected regions with less coverage.

7. Official travel advice

Region and country pages show the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and US State Department advice for each country in the news, plus every country the US rates Level 4, “Do not travel”. Both are read from the governments' own public feeds every six hours. A change to either government's advice is flagged on the country's page and listed under Latest updates. SENTINEL's threat levels compare news activity between regions and are not travel advice.

8. Limitations

• Classifications are automated keyword heuristics and will sometimes be wrong.
• “Suspected terrorism” reflects how events are reported, not an official designation.
• Casualty figures are the highest number cited and may be revised or double counted.
• This is not official advice. For travel and safety decisions use official government guidance.

Sources in this edition

Edition generated 15 Nov 2026, 14:16 UTC. 1220 reports scanned, 188 classified as incident reports, merged into 110 incidents.

Evidence labels

Official record

Published by an authority such as USGS or GDACS. Confirms the measured hazard, not every reported impact.

Multiple outlets

Two or more independent publishers describe a matching event. They may share upstream sources.

Single outlet

One established publisher reports it. Not independently verified by SENTINEL.

Unverified social

Public Bluesky posts. Heavily down-weighted; can never lead the headlines or cause a High rating alone.