Used to be, if you had a coup attempt, you’d just hear how it ended up. The news stories would be along the vein of A) “the existing government today stood down and/or died in a strange and convenient accident” or B) “there was a coup attempt in Backwateristan this morning, all involved are either dead or under arrest, film at 10″.

Not so these days; since the little attempt in Russia nigh on twenty years ago that had Yeltsin shelling the White House, the news has done its best to get people involved as and when the story happened.

Yesterday, it got even weirder. The BBC, amongst others, called events in Ecuador a coup, before anything too coup like had happened. Then when something approximating a coup (and the following putting down of said coup) happened, they called it again.

Strange times.