Sources and data

Why this page exists

Much of what you see on cupa.org.pk is the Centre's own work. Some of it comes from other organisations: government data services, international organisations, news feeds, maps, photographs and fonts. This page lists each of those sources, links to the terms it is published under, and says what we do with it, so that you, and the people who publish the material, can check that we use it fairly.

Everything here is read by the Centre's own systems or added by our staff. Your browser does not contact these sources when you read our pages, except for the videos, the Unsplash photographs and the visitor statistics described in the privacy policy.

How we read other sites

We say who we are. Our automatic requests carry a name such as "CUPA-FeedReader/1.0" with a link to our website, so a publisher can see who is asking and contact us.
We keep requests light. We ask a site again only if its content may have changed (conditional requests), wait at least five minutes between automatic requests to the same site, and refresh most data every half hour to every few days. If a site answers "too many requests" or refuses us, or asks us to wait, we back off for an hour or more, and up to a few days if the site asks us to wait that long.
We keep within each service's limits. Services that issue keys (Congress.gov through api.data.gov) are used well inside their published hourly limits.
A relay for some public feeds. A few official sites will not answer the shared cloud servers that host our website. For those, a scheduled job on GitHub reads the same public feed or data file, about once an hour, with the same identification, and passes it to the website.
We keep only what we need. From news feeds we keep the headline, the link, the date, the outlet's name and at most 300 characters of the summary the feed itself provides. We never copy the full text of articles.

US government data

Works of the US federal government are in the public domain in the United States (17 U.S.C. § 105). We name the agency on every page that uses its data.

ForeignAssistance.gov (US Department of State and USAID). The published country totals and complete activity dataset, read for Pakistan and summarised in the US aid explorer with tables and downloads. ForeignAssistance.gov.
USAspending.gov (US Department of the Treasury). Prime awards with Pakistan as the place of performance, read through its public API for the US-funded projects map. About the data.
U.S. Census Bureau, International Trade API. Monthly US goods trade with Pakistan, shown as charts and tables on the trade dashboard. Used under the Census Bureau's API terms of service. This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
Congress.gov API (Library of Congress), with a key from api.data.gov. Status, sponsors and titles of the bills and resolutions in our Congress tracker, each linked to Congress.gov; bill texts are linked on GovInfo (US Government Publishing Office). Congress.gov API, api.data.gov limits.
Consolidated Screening List (International Trade Administration, trade.gov), which brings together the sanctions and export-control lists of the Departments of the Treasury (OFAC), Commerce (BIS) and State. The entries that concern Pakistan are shown on the sanctions page. Consolidated Screening List. Our page is for research and information only and is not a screening tool: always check the official list before making a decision.
Federal Register API (Office of the Federal Register). Titles and summaries of documents relevant to Pakistan (for example arms sales notifications), read as research leads for our staff. Developer resources.
US Department of State, the US Embassy in Pakistan and the White House. Their public news feeds. Official statements appear in the statements tracker with the exact title, the date, the issuer and a link to the official page; any summary is our own and labelled as such.

Pakistan government

Ministry of Foreign Affairs press releases (mofa.gov.pk). Added by hand to the statements tracker: the exact title, the date and a link to the official page, with our own labelled summary. The texts remain the Government of Pakistan's.

International organisations and research data

World Bank Indicators API. Economic indicators for Pakistan, used in our research tools. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 under the World Bank's terms of use for datasets. Source: World Bank.
International Monetary Fund DataMapper API and IMF press releases. Used and attributed under the IMF's copyright and usage terms. Source: IMF.
The GDELT Project DOC 2.0 API. Lists of news coverage that our staff review as research leads. GDELT's data is free to use with a citation: The GDELT Project, gdeltproject.org. Terms of use.

News reports

Our staff follow public RSS and Atom news feeds, among them Dawn, The Express Tribune, Business Recorder, Al Jazeera, BBC News, the IMF and Google News searches. The list changes as staff add or remove feeds.

What we keep: the headline, link, date, outlet name and at most 300 characters of the feed's own summary. Never the full article.
Most of it is seen only by our staff. When staff choose to feature a story, for example under "In the news" on the home page, we show the headline, the outlet's name, the date and at most that short extract, linked to the original article. Stories found through Google News are marked "via Google News".
Each feed remains its publisher's property and is used under the publisher's own feed terms, for example BBC News feeds and Google's terms of service. We do not use publishers' logos.

Maps

Natural Earth (naturalearthdata.com), public domain. The world, region and Provinces guide maps are drawn from it, using the edition that follows Pakistan's official boundaries. Jammu and Kashmir is shown as disputed territory.

Weather

Open-Meteo (open-meteo.com). Current weather for the cities of our offices on the contact page, read by our server at most once every 20 minutes. Data under CC BY 4.0, credited on the page as "Weather data by Open-Meteo.com".

Photographs

Wikimedia Commons, US government and other photographers. Every photograph's author, licence (with a link to it) and source is listed on the image credits page, linked from the foot of every page. Photographs under Creative Commons licences such as CC BY and CC BY-SA are used under those licences.
Unsplash. A few illustrative photographs are loaded from Unsplash under the Unsplash License.

Fonts

Inter (The Inter Project Authors) and Newsreader (The Newsreader Project Authors, Production Type), both under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. We serve them from our own site, with their licences: Inter, Newsreader.

Videos

YouTube and Vimeo. Videos are shown in the providers' own players (YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode, Vimeo with "Do Not Track") and only load when you press play. Their YouTube terms and Vimeo terms apply.

Services we run on

Cloudflare hosts the website, its database and our email, and, if switched on, provides cookie-free visitor statistics.
GitHub stores the encrypted nightly backups and runs the relay jobs described above.

The privacy policy explains what these services handle about visitors.

Our own work

The Centre's own charts, notes and datasets are published under CC BY 4.0, as the terms of use explain. That licence does not cover the material listed on this page, which stays subject to its owners' terms.

Corrections and takedown requests

If you publish material listed here and think we have used it wrongly, or you see an error in data we show, please write to info@cupa.org.pk with the address of the page and what is wrong. We will look at it promptly and, where appropriate, correct it, add a credit or remove it. We can also stop reading a feed or service at its publisher's request.