Showing posts with label Kentucky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kentucky. Show all posts

Tuesday, 2 August 2016

Coups d’état; what is the chance of succeeding?



Last month’s coup d’état against Turkey’s President Erdogan failed, but between 1950 and 2010, on average a coup had a 50-50 chance of succeeding.

Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne from the University of Kentucky examined 450 from that 60 year period, and found that 227 – 49.7% – were successful. And the plotters seemed to be improving, because those mounted since 2003 had a 70% success rate.

But coups have become less common. Their heyday was the 1960s, when there were about 15 a year. By the first decade of the new millennium that was down to 5 a year. One reason may be that the world is getting richer. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler of Oxford University found that if people’s average incomes doubled, the risk of a coup fell by more than a quarter.

As to the ingredients of a successful coup, there seems a fair degree of consensus – detain key leaders, take over key media outlets, control key transport arteries. The Turkish plotters failed to  implement these properly, but perhaps a new factor was at play – social media, which President Erdogan used very effectively to rally support.



Wednesday, 4 May 2011

US tornadoes - biggest outbreak ever

The USA has just suffered its most active tornado outbreak since records began. Between April 25 and April 28, no fewer than 362 struck, including 312 during one 24 hour period. The previous record was 148 over two days in April 1974.

The twisters killed at least 350 people in Alabama and 6 other states, making this the deadliest episode since the Tupelo-Gainesville outbreak of 1936 when about 435 people were killed by 17 tornadoes in the states of Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina.

This time the worst hit was Alabama, where 250 people were killed. The winds also caused death and destruction in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was the town that suffered most, where the clear-up is expected to cost at least £40m.

The deadliest tornado in US history remains the Great Tri-State Tornado of 1925, which caused the deaths of more than 700 people. (See my blog of April 18)