>>Just like a sentence I overheard in the news, "the incident could hurt the relations between both countries". Great observation! Imagine if they omitted the word "both" - the viewers could think that it may hurt relations between one of them but not the other.
>
>Hmmm, not necessarily. If they ommitted "both" then the sentence would suggest "all" nations, i.e. everyone would suffer. If they's already specified the nations then a simple "the" would have sufficed.

Actually, it was "both of the two"... where just "the two" would be enough. That's what writing for the news does to your language - you always try to zip the info into... not necessarily fewer words, but fewer sentences. And then you get even worse than this.

Just this morning, "...gassed the Kurds who were concentrated in the north of the country". "Were concentrated"? Wow! I thought they lived there, like, forever. Or maybe they didn't? Maybe concentrating them was part of the gassing project? Where were they before that?