Thai soldiers fired live rounds on protesting groups, killing two. Amid this, the Thai Prime Minister claimed to the BBC that the protests were under control. Among other things, the unrest has caused the baht to fall.
Thai officials were forced to shut down a specific Asian oriented summit to respond to the global financial crisis when protesters supporting former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra broke through weak security and stormed the hotel. A state of emergency was declared as leaders were evacuated. In response, Shinawatra has called on followers to bring about a revolution.
Our first map was launched today on our main page. It is a DIY map that has been augmented with data from our model, currently to be updated every two hours, but potentially to be updated more frequently in the near future.
We’ll let you know if something like that happens.
Right now, the map displays the relative intensity of different countries compared to their base case, which is determined for one week’s worth of news stories. Current news getters are protests in Brazil, protests in Thailand and churn regarding the black market in Zimbabwe. Nothing incredibly out of the ordinary.
Some other bigger hits come from Morocco and Slovakia. Our hits from Morocco pop up regarding a story about a former GITMO detainee who was returned to the UK, but who had previously been secretly imprisoned in Morocco. He was accused, in part, of being interested in the construction of nuclear weapons. This could be seen as an erroneous hit, and indicates options for improving the model’s performance. In Slovakia, there was a bad bus crash.
We will continue to improve our model, offer more maps, and explore discrete events as they happen.