The US considers al-Shabab a terrorist group and last year stopped aid to the large area of Somalia it controls. Families have built their own homes at the camp with tree branches, wood and plastic sheets, he says. Labour MP Nick Raynsford said that, when Mr Coulson was at Downing Street, the cabinet secretary was…

The law firm had said it was being prevented from responding to "inaccurate" comments made by News International chairman James Murdoch because the company would not allow it breach its duty of client confidentiality. In April 2010 US President Barack Obama issued an executive order naming al-Shabab a terrorist organisation, meaning no US aid could…

The law firm had said it was being prevented from responding to "inaccurate" comments made by News International chairman James Murdoch because the company would not allow it breach its duty of client confidentiality. 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…

In other developments in the phone-hacking saga: Earlier, the Met was accused by MPs of a "catalogue of failures" in the News of the World phone-hacking inquiry. News International's parent company News Corporation has also confirmed it has stopped paying the legal fees of former private detective Glenn Mulcaire, who was convicted of phone hacking…

The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Somalia said the ongoing conflict in Somalia had made it extremely difficult for agencies to access communities in the south, which are controlled by al-Shabab. The deputy administrator of the US Agency for International Development, Donald Steinberg, said the aid must not benefit al-Shabab. The…

She said there had been a "surge of inquiries and requests for assistance from the public and solicitors". Al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group which controls large swathes of south and central Somalia, had imposed a ban on foreign aid agencies in its territories in 2009, but has recently allowed limited access. The UN has declared a…

"If we don't act now, famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months, due to poor harvests and infectious disease outbreaks," said the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Somalia, Mark Bowden. The BBC's Africa correspondent Andrew Harding says the emotive word "famine" is used rarely and carefully by humanitarian organisations, and…

Families have built their own homes at the camp with tree branches, wood and plastic sheets, he says. The BBC's Africa correspondent Andrew Harding says the emotive word "famine" is used rarely and carefully by humanitarian organisations, and it is the first time since 1992 that the word has been applied to a situation in…

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". Prime Minister David Cameron told MPs that "with hindsight" he would not have hired ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson as…

Downing Street and Buckingham Palace denied claims by Labour MP Chris Bryant that royal officials raised concerns about Mr Coulson's appointment She said there had been a "surge of inquiries and requests for assistance from the public and solicitors". "The overall requirement is $1.6bn (�990m) for Somalia, roughly $300m is needed in the next two…