Manila Coup

Some 150 renegade Philippine soldiers staged a protest that at first looked like a coup attempt. They took over a Manila shopping centre, and accused the government of corruption and colluding with rebel groups. They demanded the resignation of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo but later backed down. According to Beth Macdonald, the coup started at 1 am Saturday night (early morning of 27 July) and finally ended at 10 pm Sunday night. The period of most tension was from about 6 am to noon, followed by another at around 5 pm to 7 pm as 5 pm was the deadline the Pres. set for "appropriate action" against the rebel soldiers.

"It was agreed they would end the siege and they will march back to barracks," said Colonel Danilo Lim, a member of the government panel that met the rebel soldiers.

Witnesses said the renegades began defusing bombs they had laid to booby trap an apartment block they had seized following an announcement by President Gloria Arroyo that the rebellion was over. Earlier Sunday, a second 7pm local time (1100GMT) deadline for the rogue soldiers to surrender was extended indefinitely to allow for last-ditch talks. The 7pm ultimatum was an extension of an earlier 5.00pm Sunday deadline to surrender or face attack.

The formal prediction was from the period 08:00 to 18:45 local Manila time (00:00 to 10:45 UTC). It was made at the time I received Beth Macdonald's email announcement of the coup attempt in progress. The end points were determined by the total data available for the 27th at that time. The results show a chisquare of 39062 on 38700 df, with p = 0.0971. The following figure shows the marginally significant, but steady trend of 45 reporting eggs. The data for our egg in the Philippines, in Manila is shown in green. Interestingly, it has a similar trend to the network for most of the period, but at about 15:00, there is a strong reversal of the trend for roughly two hours.

Manila Coup


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