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The Australian - Sadly, some dying people are more equal than others, by Emma Tom

THE big problem with living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is that you’ve got to die really grossly before you rate a mention in the international press. Particularly if you’re competing against a single comatose American.

A couple of weeks ago, The Sydney Morning Herald ran a tiny news brief in its foreign pages: “Militiamen grilled bodies on a spit and boiled two girls alive as their mother watched, United Nations peacekeepers have charged, adding cannibalism to a list of atrocities allegedly carried out by one of the tribal groups fighting in northeast Congo, the Patriotic Resistant Front of Ituri.”

That was it. A single, overloaded sentence. A search by the News Limited library found no other mention of the incident in any other leading Australian newspaper. You’d think watching your daughter get poached in water and oil before being devoured would be worth a little more. A couple of paragraphs, at least. But that’s what you get for living in a place where too many people with dark skin die horribly. Where’s the surprise factor? Where’s the audience appeal?

It’s very different in the US. Over there, Mary Schindler is also watching her daughter die. She’s the mother of Terri Schiavo – a woman being starved by the state after dieting her brain to sludge. But unlike those nameless sisters in the Congo, the pros and cons of killing Schiavo have been debated around the planet. When Terri finally passes on to that big weight-loss clinic in the sky, she can rest assured that at least people cared. Even if some of them chose to express it by removing her tubing.

Err, ditto that.