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The UK Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, said the response by many European and developed countries to the crisis in the Horn of Africa had been "derisory and dangerously inadequate". Drought, conflict and poverty have now combined to produce the necessary conditions for famine. One woman he met arrived after a long trip, much of it on foot, carrying her one-and-a-half-year-old son on her back - only to realise, when she arrived, that he was dead. Prime Minister David Cameron told MPs that "with hindsight" he would not have hired ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his communications chief, in the closest he has come to an apology. The UN said the humanitarian situation in Somalia's southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle districts had deteriorated rapidly and declared them to be suffering a famine.