Needless to say, the second sentence is buried deep in the article, whose headline is “Shias stage anti-US protest.” And here’s from the bottom of another article:Protests against the US presence in Iraq have been staged by Shias in the central city of Karbala at the climax of a pilgrimage that has attracted up to one million people….However the BBC’s Damien Grammaticas in Karbala says the anti-US demonstrations were small-scale, involving only a few hundred people. [BBC News, 4/23/03]
The Doctors Without Borders (MSF) group said that Baghdad hospitals are in dire straits, but that there was no large-scale health crisis in the country. “MSF has not found any reason to justify a major humanitarian medical programme in Iraq,” said MSF international president Morten Rostrup. [Agence France Presse, 4/24/03]This admission is all the more remarkable as, according to a mail I received from someone recently in southern Iraq, the more the aid agencies create stories of humanitarian crises, the more money they get–and the media often goes along unquestioningly.