Eritera was warned by the US that it needed to stop supporting terrorist groups from Somalia that were further supported by Al Quaeda. Early in President Obama’s tenure, there were warnings of suicide attacks to be carried out by Africans living in the US. The US made it clear that they would not hesitate in taking action in Eriteria if attacks were linked back to the small state located on the Red Sea.
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.