I always assumed that it was to quickly delineate what people say in their capacity as a citizen vs what they say in their capacity as a representative of their government.

“Sarah Carter, from the Canadian embassy, says to avoid the all-you-can-eat buffet” could be interpreted as a personal opinion. “Canada says to avoid the all-you-can-eat buffet” is clearly an official statement.

Plus, sometimes the news may be reporting on a memo or announcement from a government entity which was crafted by several people and has no author listed.

Programmable condoms which make the user look like a bad dragon dildo.

I once had a directory in /tmp called etc which contained subdirectories for something I was migrating.

I thought that I was in /tmp when I ran rm -rf etc… I was actually in /