Acta

Acta — the record. Plain-language patch notes for the notable changes to the brief, the site, and the method, newest first. Small fixes and daily editions aren't listed; the daily record lives in the archive, and factual errata in the corrections log.

Date	Type	Change
2026-08-1119:52 UTC	Changed	New podcast voices: episodes are now narrated with OpenAI text-to-speech — a brighter, more natural-sounding Livia and a deeper, more deliberate Marcus — replacing the previous Google voices. Past episodes are unchanged.
2026-07-3116:19 UTC	Added	Launched The Confiscata, a monthly review of the foreign seizures and arrests the daily brief flags — an email, a podcast episode, and an archived issue at /confiscata/<date>.html, alongside the standing ledger at The Vault.
2026-07-2018:09 UTC	Fixed	The Tabularium (the forecast scoreboard) is now sortable on mobile — a 'Sort by...' select (due date, issue date, call number, verdict) replaces the column-header sort that mobile's card layout had hidden.
2026-07-1401:34 UTC	Added	New page — Itinera (the smuggling corridors), under Record. It reads the Vault's seizures by route: where contraband was bound (arrivals) and where it came from (departures), each endpoint linking to its country or region desk. Corridors are exactly as the source reported them, never inferred; the view fills out as more seizures carry a route.
2026-07-1401:26 UTC	Added	Desk pages now show what changed since their last read, and the Conspectus carries a 'What changed this week' roll-up of desks whose state-of-play shifted in the last seven days. Each desk still opens with its current 'state of play'; the new line names the shift, not just the standing picture.
2026-07-1401:16 UTC	Added	The Conspectus world map is now a time-lapse: a scrubber under the map replays the trailing-7-day activity picture week by week, so you can watch where the world's border-security signal has shifted over time. The map opens on the latest week as before; drag back to see earlier weeks.
2026-07-1320:55 UTC	Changed	The Conspectus is now a weekly briefing, not just a map: below the world plate it ranks the most active countries with the story driving each, flags the week-over-week movers (and what's new on the board), and tallies the week by region — every entry linking to its desk.
2026-07-1318:17 UTC	Added	A pre-send numbers gate: before each edition goes out, every figure in the draft (casualties, tonnages, dollar amounts, percentages) is extracted and re-verified against the specific source cited beside it — the accuracy control that most directly targets the kind of error our corrections log has recorded.
2026-07-1222:34 UTC	Added	Every source the brief cites is now snapshotted to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine at publish time, with a per-edition ledger committed in the open — so the citable record survives link rot. Existing editions were backfilled; capture gaps are recorded, never hidden.
2026-07-1222:01 UTC	Fixed	The corrections page's lessons memo said 'seven corrections'; the published log records five. The memo now matches the log.
2026-07-1222:01 UTC	Added	Forecast due dates as a calendar: subscribe to /calls.ics and every open call's resolution deadline lands in your own calendar; graded calls drop off.
2026-07-1222:01 UTC	Added	The seizure ledger now records the corridor — origin, transit, and destination as the source reported them — shown on each Vault row and carried in the CSV/JSON exports (schema v3). Only what the source states; never inferred.
2026-07-1222:01 UTC	Changed	An open forecast call whose window has closed now shows 'Due — awaiting verdict' on the Tabularium and its call page, instead of a stale 'Open' — the verdict itself still lands at the weekly Reckoning.
2026-07-1217:06 UTC	Added	Every desk (country, region, mission area, organization) now links to the running series it appears in — a 'Running series' block that jumps straight to the full story-arc timeline.
2026-07-1212:52 UTC	Changed	Navigation consolidated to two menus — Dispatches (the products: Statim, Editions, Series, Conspectus, the new Reckoning page, Podcast) and Record (Tabularium, Aerarium, Scrinium, Index, Data). Added a Feeds page cataloguing every channel, and completed the footer as a full sitemap.
2026-07-1201:00 UTC	Changed	The email family gets the site's new look: the courier masthead on the daily brief, real brand type on mail apps that support it (everyone else keeps the classic Georgia), slightly larger small print, and flatter cards.
2026-07-1123:40 UTC	Changed	The site masthead is now live type over the engraving — the wordmark is real Cinzel text laid over a text-free art strip, so it's crisp on any screen, selectable, and adapts to light/dark; the email keeps its classic banner.
2026-07-1120:32 UTC	Changed	The site now sets real type: Cinzel for the wordmark, Newsreader for reading, and a system font for labels, replacing Georgia and Trebuchet.
2026-07-1119:23 UTC	Changed	The homepage now loads far faster: its world map is served as a cached image instead of being embedded on every visit, cutting the page's size by about 90 percent. Pages also gained distinct, descriptive browser-tab titles and link-preview cards for sharing.
2026-07-1118:37 UTC	Changed	Navigation and footer refined: Conspectus moved into the Dispatches menu (the intraday-to-weekly cadence ladder) and Series moved to the front of Explore; the footer gained a Subscribe button and its clusters were tightened so the Record group matches the nav and site-status sits with the changelog and corrections.
2026-07-1117:13 UTC	Changed	Top navigation reorganized: a Home tab plus three menus — Dispatches (Editions, Statim, Podcast), Record (Tabularium, Aerarium, Data), and Explore (Conspectus, Index, Scrinium, Series). About moved to the footer, and the Editions archive gained an engraved masthead.
2026-07-1116:56 UTC	Changed	The top navigation is reorganized: Editions and Statim stay as tabs, and the rest is grouped under two menus — Record (Tabularium, Aerarium, Data) and Explore (Conspectus, Index, Scrinium, Podcast, Series). The footer is now four labelled columns.
2026-07-1115:48 UTC	Changed	The home page is now a front-of-book situation board — the Statim wire, the latest edition, a world map of the week, the running story arcs, and the latest podcast — with the full run of daily editions moved to a dedicated Editions archive.
2026-07-1102:26 UTC	Added	Public-figure desks now carry a portrait medallion — sepia-toned, drawn from freely-licensed (Creative-Commons / public-domain) Wikimedia images — matching the country flag medallions; organizations and any figure without a free image show a drawn monogram.
2026-07-1101:47 UTC	Added	Public-figure desks: standing files for the officials, leaders and candidates who recur across editions (2+ mentions), alongside the country and organization desks. Country, organization and public-figure lists can now be sorted by article count.
2026-07-1021:34 UTC	Added	A spike log and 'Noted' items: the brief now keeps a capped record of notable stories it considered and cut, with the reason — the weekly Reckoning audits it for systematic blind spots in the filter itself. Cut stories that met the sourcing bar appear on the Catalogue, the desks they touch, and search as 'Noted': the full factual card, reported but not analyzed, never emailed. The Methodology page explains exactly what these feed and what they never touch.
2026-07-1020:29 UTC	Added	Country desks now build a 'state of play' once stories accumulate: any country with three or more stories inside a week gets the same short, dated daily synthesis the region and mission-area desks carry — twenty desks qualify today. When a country goes quiet, its last read stays with its date, so you can see where things stood.
2026-07-1020:11 UTC	Added	Flag medallions on the country desks: each country in the desks index and atop its own desk now carries a small drawn medallion — its flag in the site's muted palette inside a bronze ring — so a column of sixty desks can be scanned by eye. Complex emblems are honestly simplified to their field geometry, and new countries get a spec the day they first appear.
2026-07-1019:38 UTC	Added	Cite this: every story card on the Catalogue and the Desks now carries a one-click citation — publisher, headline, edition number and date, the underlying sources with their information date, the permalink, and the date you copied it. Paste it straight into your own product; it pairs with the CC BY data downloads.
2026-07-1019:25 UTC	Added	One search box over everything: the new Search page (the magnifier icon in the navigation) searches editions, desks, forecast calls, seizures, and Statim alerts at once, with each result labeled by type and linking to its home. Exact name matches — a country desk, say — surface first.
2026-07-1017:05 UTC	Added	Engraved rule-with-fleuron ornaments: the pure-prose pages (About, Methodology, Disclaimer) now read as a single book page with a fleuron divider between sections instead of separate cards, and a matching bronze ornament sits above the footer on every page.
2026-07-1016:40 UTC	Added	Lamplight mode — a dark theme for the site drawn from the podcast cover: an espresso-leather field, gold-tinted type, and lamplit wine, with parchment artifacts (the masthead, emblem cards, the Conspectus plate, archived editions) kept light, like papers under a lamp. Toggle it with the oil-lamp button at the bottom-left of any page; your choice is remembered. Emails and print are unaffected.
2026-07-1015:02 UTC	Added	Series — every running story as a timeline. A new page assembles each story's whole arc in one view, freshest development first: the Statim wire flash, each morning's edition item, the forecast call with its live revisions, and the eventual resolution. Reached from the footer, the homepage wire strip, and each desk's thread folds.
2026-07-1011:43 UTC	Added	Every forecast call now has its own permanent page under /calls/ — the frozen claim, a probability-trajectory chart from opening call through each update, the counter-signal, the market comparison when one is aligned, and the verdict once graded. Linked from every Tabularium row and desk dossier; the data downloads carry each call's URL.
2026-07-1002:12 UTC	Added	The Conspectus — a new page mapping the week's world at one glance: an engraved world-map plate showing every country the brief has touched in the trailing seven days, sized by activity, each marker opening that country's desk. In the top navigation after the Vault.
2026-07-0922:07 UTC	Changed	The section pages (Tabularium, Vault, Statim, Desks, Catalogue, About) now open with an engraved emblem set in a warm parchment card, and every page — the homepage, the podcast, and the smaller record pages — shares that same intro-card look.
2026-07-0901:24 UTC	Changed	Normalized the earlier archived editions (July 1–6) to the current card format so the whole archive reads as one design — story cards now render headline-first on white, bordered cards in the reading serif, matching recent editions. The as-sent originals are untouched.
2026-07-0900:14 UTC	Changed	Updated site banner with new Roman countryside panorama
2026-07-0818:53 UTC	Added	The six region desks now carry an engraved map emblem — an antique-map medallion of each region in the masthead's style — matching the mission-area desks.
2026-07-0816:42 UTC	Added	The mission-area desks now carry an engraved emblem — a sepia medallion in the masthead's style (a shield for National Security, a broken chain for organized crime, and so on) above each desk's title.
2026-07-0813:16 UTC	Added	When a Statim story escalates to a higher urgency tier, it now posts as a new flash that re-alerts the higher tier and cross-links to the one it supersedes — so the trajectory (e.g. a threat maturing into a closure) is visible on the wire.
2026-07-0812:39 UTC	Removed	Removed two errata that referenced an unpublished pre-launch dry-run edition (dead links, duplicate issue number); the corrections log now covers only the published record.
2026-07-0812:34 UTC	Added	The Statim wire now has a search box — find any past flash by keyword (headline, place, or source), with matching days expanding and the rest folding away.
2026-07-0810:58 UTC	Changed	The Statim wire now groups flashes by day, with older days collapsed behind a click so the running wire stays easy to scan, and every flash time is shown in both ET and UTC.
2026-07-0803:11 UTC	Added	The Vault and the Tabularium are now published as open data — downloadable CSV and JSON, released under CC BY 4.0 with a data dictionary and stable per-row IDs — so the foreign-seizure ledger and the graded forecast record are citable. See the new Data page.
2026-07-0801:01 UTC	Changed	Statim flashes no longer appear as separate Catalogue entries — the Catalogue is now the record of corroborated edition stories, and a flash's finalized version enters it via the next daily. Flashes still live on the Statim page and RSS, and their numbers now reset each day.
2026-07-0800:38 UTC	Changed	The homepage now shows each edition's full Bottom Line Up Front, and its Statim panel resets after the morning brief to show only flashes not yet folded into an edition.
2026-07-0800:38 UTC	Changed	Statim is now described throughout as the intraday wire, and its page carries a new panel explaining the three precedence tiers — FLASH, IMMEDIATE, and PRIORITY — what each means and why it trips.
2026-07-0723:32 UTC	Added	Statim flashes now carry a precedence tier — FLASH, IMMEDIATE, or PRIORITY — each distinctly branded on the wire, in the Catalogue, and in flash-alert emails. You can opt in to any tier on its own, so you hear only about the urgency level you care about (or take the umbrella and get them all).
2026-07-0721:12 UTC	Added	Added a fourth sourcing tier, Analysis, for items built on an interpretive report or assessment (e.g. a think-tank analysis) rather than event reporting — flagged so you read them as informed judgment, not breaking fact. Filterable on the Catalogue alongside Corroborated, Single-source, and Developing.
2026-07-0717:59 UTC	Changed	The brief now reads in a serif typeface. Story text, analysis, and section copy are set in Georgia — a publication-of-record voice — while tags and labels stay in the sans-serif face. Story cards are pure white on a warmer page and lifted with a soft shadow, and each story's source-confidence tier (Corroborated / Single-source / Developing) now appears as an all-caps pill on the source line.
2026-07-0714:05 UTC	Changed	Subscriptions are now per product line. The subscribe form offers each email separately — the daily brief (which also carries the weekly Reckoning and monthly Confiscata) and Statim flash alerts as its own opt-in — and each email's unsubscribe removes only that line. Existing subscribers were carried over to the brief, Reckoning, and Confiscata unchanged.
2026-07-0714:00 UTC	Added	Statim — the flash wire. Urgent, breaking developments now go out between the daily editions as a quick What / So what with a source link, within hours rather than waiting for the next morning. Flashes are fast and lightly corroborated (usually Developing or Single-source); the daily brief remains the corroborated record, and each flash folds into the next morning's edition. Follow the running wire on Statim (now in the nav), by RSS, or as an opt-in email alert; flashes also appear in the Catalogue tagged 'Flash'.
2026-07-0710:36 UTC	Changed	Brought the whole archive site to the brand system — warm parchment story cards everywhere, the Statim flash red rail, one consistent set of category pill labels, and a sweep of the site's own wording for consistency (the catalogue's source filter is now labelled "Sourcing").
2026-07-0703:04 UTC	Changed	Visual refresh across the emails and site: quieter story cards (one uniform background, soft-fill category tags in place of solid blocks, bronze links) and a cleaner edge-to-edge masthead banner.
2026-07-0703:04 UTC	Fixed	Email editions now render legibly in dark mode (Apple Mail on Mac and iPhone) instead of washing out to low contrast. Every email product's footer also now carries the full open-source / no-classified disclaimer.
2026-07-0701:14 UTC	Fixed	Printed and PDF-saved editions now place the headline above the category pills, matching the on-screen order. Long story cards also flow across page breaks instead of leaving gaps.
2026-07-0619:04 UTC	Changed	Mission taxonomy simplified from six categories to five: 'Force Protection' retired (its angle — threats to a forward border/customs presence abroad — folds into the forward-presence reasoning lens across the other categories). The two items previously filed under it were re-aligned to National Security and Partnerships & Engagement.
2026-07-0618:07 UTC	Changed	Confidence language is now presented as the Cursus Publicus's own convention — the same fixed probability bands, consistent vocabulary, and calibration — defined plainly on the Methodology page, rather than citing an external intelligence standard. No change to the bands or scoring.
2026-07-0617:26 UTC	Changed	Forecasts are now a living picture: an open call can be updated as evidence shifts — the Tabularium shows the probability trajectory — but each call is still graded on its opening probability, so updates keep readers current without relaundering the original call. Retroactively folded one duplicate 20-July USMCA call (2026-07-03) into an update of the original (2026-07-02) so the record isn't double-counted.
2026-07-05	Added	The Vault — a running, always-current ledger of every foreign seizure and arrest the brief has flagged, sortable and filterable by commodity, country, category and type (now in the nav, beside the Tabularium). The Confiscata becomes its periodic monthly review. Feedback moved to the footer.
2026-07-05	Added	The Confiscata — a new monthly product reviewing the foreign seizures and arrests the brief flagged: the commodity mix, the countries and corridors, and the emerging trends behind them, as an email, an archived page, and a podcast episode. A companion to the weekly Reckoning.
2026-07-05	Added	A public Source Status dashboard: for each day's run it shows which data feeds were live, empty, or failed, plus a rolling ~30-day uptime grid. If a normally-working source goes dark, the daily health check now emails an alert. Part of the same open-accountability approach as the corrections and calibration records.
2026-07-05	Added	Broader, more authoritative daily sourcing. Alongside the existing news sweep, the brief now pulls standing official feeds directly — Europol for seizures and organized crime; WHO, ECDC and CDC travel notices for disease outbreaks; WOAH for animal and agricultural disease; and UN ReliefWeb for disasters and displacement — so the most consequential items come from primary sources, not just news aggregators.
2026-07-05	Added	A visual dashboard on the Tabularium: an accuracy-over-time trend, a calibration curve (are the confidence words honest?), and the record broken out by mission area. It appears automatically as calls resolve — a chart of a handful of calls would only mislead, so it stays hidden until the record is substantial.
2026-07-05	Changed	The corrections page now shows what we changed in response to recurring errors, not just the errors themselves — the distilled lessons the brief applies before publishing appear beneath the corrections log.
2026-07-05	Changed	Corrections now feed back into the brief. When a correction reveals a recurring factual or sourcing mistake, it's distilled into a lessons memo the brief reads before publishing — so the same error is less likely to repeat. This mirrors how graded forecasts already feed the next calls.
2026-07-05	Changed	The Tabularium ledger was redesigned — mobile-friendly cards, colored mission-area pills matching the brief, and the call itself brought forward as the focus.
2026-07-05	Changed	The subscribe and feedback forms moved to their own address, subscribe.cursuspublic.us.
2026-07-05	Added	A public corrections log: an append-only, in-the-open record of any material factual error found after an edition is published.
2026-07-05	Added	A daily health check for the pipeline — a watchdog that verifies each morning's edition actually published and emails an alert if it didn't, so a silent failure can't go unnoticed.
2026-07-05	Added	Named-entity dossiers. Standing pages now exist for named organizations and public figures, not just countries, once they cross a coverage threshold.
2026-07-05	Added	A daily 'state of play' on each region and mission-area dossier — a two-to-three sentence synthesis of where that desk stands, refreshed every day instead of weekly.
2026-07-05	Added	Calibration on the Tabularium. Beyond the win/loss record, the scoreboard now shows, for each confidence word, how often those calls actually came true versus what the word claims — flagging where we run over- or under-confident. Those lessons feed back into how the next calls are written.
2026-07-05	Added	Prediction-market comparison. Where a Watch Ahead call genuinely lines up with a liquid market (e.g. Polymarket), we now show the market's odds next to our own, track how they move over the life of the call, and score our record against the market's — a check on whether we beat the crowd, not just our own past words.
2026-07-01	Added	The public archive: every edition on the web, a searchable and filterable Catalogue, per-country / region / mission-area Dossiers with their own RSS feeds, and a two-host audio Podcast.
2026-07-01	Added	Source reliability tiers (Confirmed / Single-source / Developing) on every item, and a shift from hedged wording to directional Watch Ahead calls.
2026-07-01	Added	The Tabularium and the weekly Reckoning: every Watch Ahead forecast is logged as it is made and graded in the open on an append-only scoreboard — hits and misses alike, against the exact words used when the call was made.