Saddam Hussein's execution was announced on Dec 30 2006,
about 6 AM local Iraq time (03:00 UTC). Although the event
was prominent in the news media, I did not at first think it
qualified
as the kind of global event that engages the attentions
of large numbers of people in an emotionally coherent way. However, it was
clearly an event of historical note, and worth assessing to
satisfy curiosity, and though I originally intended to add it to our list of
exploratory analyses, several people independently
suggested it should a formal event. A prediction with adequate
time specification was provided, and the event was added to the formal list.
Peter Bancel proposed a period beginning at the time of the
hanging and continuing for 14 hours following it (to midday
in the US) to capture the spread of news (03:00 to 17:00
UTC).
The graph shows no clear trend, with Chisquare of 50385.02 on
50400 df for a p-value of 0.520 and Z = -0.049.
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