Hundreds of thousands of peace marchers – as many as 700,000, according to organisers as they totted up the numbers mid-afternoon, but police insisted it was under 100,000, and even CND put the numbers just at 150,000 – were swarming past him; and, though the weather may have been markedly warmer than that which greeted the phenomenon that was the 15 February march, hearts were colder.

Britain’s biggest wartime demonstration was a more dour, determined and altogether angrier affair. Gone, it seemed, were the ranks of the well-dressed middle-classes, most of whom had been holding a placard for the first time, who swelled the first event to such historic proportions. Instead, the more bizarre groupings and banners (South London Home Educators; Sex Workers of the World Unite – and, yes, you can bet that heads were craning to see who was holding the poster) were almost lost in the sea of CND, SWP and Socialist Alliance posters, and their messages were not the stuff of musical comedy. ‘Weep with the Widows of Iraq.’ ‘Bomb Texas, they have oil too.’ The Workers’ Revolutionary Party Young Socialists, in particular, built a number of bridges with the rest of the nation by carrying the simple, pithy, ‘Victory to Iraq.’ Guardian/UK

Related: Global Day of Protest Against War on Iraq — A 200K poster in PDF format “listing the 603 cities, on all seven continents, that held protests on F15, along with crowd estimates for many of the largest turnouts.” [via monkeyfist]

And why in the world, in articles like this, does the New York Times keep saying “thousands of protesters” when it is talking about hundreds of thousands… two orders of magnitude greater?