Burnett

MorinCooper

"I was talking to mothers with children, the children looked maybe nine months to one year old - the mothers were telling the children were three and four years old, so they are absolutely tiny." She said some of the mothers had walked up to six days with no food to try to find help. "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. Those conditions include more than 30% of children being acutely malnourished, and four children out of every 10,000 dying daily. The US considers al-Shabab a terrorist group and last year stopped aid to the large area of Somalia it controls. She said there had been a "surge of inquiries and requests for assistance from the public and solicitors". An estimated 10 million people have been affected in East Africa by the worst drought in more than half a century. More than 166,000 desperate Somalis are estimated to have fled their country to neighbouring Kenya or Ethiopia. Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers said the move came after a "significant increase in the workload" over the past fortnight. 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 on behalf of the News of the World in 2007.