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Baghdad Bombs Oct 25 2009
At least 147 people were killed in two car bombings in
central Baghdad yesterday, bringing fears of a
blood-drenched election campaign.
The attacks, the deadliest in two years, occurred along a
road thronged with traffic. They destroyed three government
buildings: the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Public
Works and the Baghdad governor’s office, where ten
members of parliament were attending a meeting.
The bombs exploded within two minutes of each other at about
10.30am. First came the smaller bomb outside the
governorate, which caused pedestrians to flee 500 metres
north towards a ministerial complex, where the larger bomb
went off.
The dead included 35 employees at the Ministry of Justice
and at least 25 staff members of the Baghdad Provincial
Council, according to Iraqi police and medical sources.
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Hospitals struggled to cope with more than 700 casualties,
including three American contractors, and smoke hung over
the city for hours.
The GCP event was set for 6 hours beginning 1 hour before the
explosions (06:30 - 12:30 GMT). The result is Chisquare
21919.047 on 21600 df, for p = 0.063 and Z = 1.531.
Partly because there has been a fair amount of web chatter
about October 25th being a day to note, and partly to
provide context for the 6 hour period of the Baghdad bombing
event, the following figure shows the 24 hour GMT day.
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical
effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from
noise. This means that every "success" might be largely
driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect
can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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