Word: coupe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Last week, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the beneficiary of January's people's coup, herself almost fell victim to the fickle mob. For days, crowds jammed EDSA, swelling to 400,000, many of them angry, poor people enraged at Arroyo's brass-knuckled arrest the previous week of Estrada, their former champion. At dawn on Tuesday, a 40,000-strong mob laid siege to Arroyo's rambling presidential palace, forcing her to scurry from room to room for safety, sometimes donning a bulletproof vest. Was she frightened? "Maybe for a split second," she said...
...generals in the Philippine navy and air force were contacted by Arroyo's adversaries in the early stages of the Manila disturbances and offered large sums of money to switch sides. Fortunately for the President, the generals balked. They probably did so less out of loyalty than pragmatism: the coup sounded too hastily planned to succeed...
...anti-Arroyo demonstrations at EDSA early last week grew with such velocity that even the coup plotters?allegedly several senators and former police officers?were scrambling to catch up with events. "There was no time for them to organize support in the armed forces," said one ex-military intelligence chief. The nature of the crowd was different, too. Instead of the earnest-but-cheerful street warriors of the first two People Power demonstrations, these were Manila's poor, who had charged out of the slums as much to rage against their own misery as to reinstall Estrada. They quickly became...
...Arroyo. Another mistake the plotters made was using the tried-and-true methods of bribing top men in uniform. Says one Western diplomat: "If the instigators had appealed to the mid-ranking officers, the idealists who are angry at how the rich control everything in the Philippines, the coup might've worked...
...championed privatizing the postal system, where Japanese have squirreled away more than $2 trillion in savings. But he's no outside agitator either. He fills a parliamentary seat that was occupied by his grandfather and father, and last fall he held back from supporting a longtime ally's abortive coup against Mori. There was also a fair bit of back-room politicking on Koizumi's behalf. At a dinner in a plush Ginza restaurant in mid-April, half a dozen conservative stalwarts, including former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, selected Koizumi as their man. "Our backgrounds...