Burnett

CurtisShumaker

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that Washington would provide an extra $28m in emergency aid to counter the famine. "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. News International has said a May 2007 letter from the firm had made it believe that hacking was a "matter of the past" and confined to a single rogue reporter. The deputy administrator of the US Agency for International Development, Donald Steinberg, said the aid must not benefit al-Shabab. 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 Somalia. In other developments in the phone-hacking saga:

WhiteheadLavoie

He said discussions with al-Shabab about the safe distribution of food aid were taking place at a local level, and that responses were expected to differ depending on the locality. 'Dangerously inadequate' Save the Children's Sonia Zambakides told the BBC the situation in Somalia was shocking.

JamisonGutierrez

Downing Street confirms that the prime minister received and responded to a letter from Labour MP Tom Watson last October, in which he had raised concerns about Mr Coulson She said some of the mothers had walked up to six days with no food to try to find help. 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 other developments in the phone-hacking saga: He said the goal was to save lives, "not to play a game of 'gotcha' with a UN agency or any other group that is brave enough to go in and provide that assistance".

JeromeRangel

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. Meanwhile, News of the World owner News International said it had authorised law firm Harbottle & Lewis to answer any questions from Scotland Yard and the Commons home affairs committee about its work for the company. 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. In other developments in the phone-hacking saga: "The overall requirement is $1.6bn (�990m) for Somalia, roughly $300m is needed in the next two months to provide an adequate response to famine-affected areas. Children and adults are dying at an appalling rate," Mr Ban said.

BlackwoodStowers

Earlier, the Met was accused by MPs of a "catalogue of failures" in the News of the World phone-hacking inquiry. Labour MP Nick Raynsford said that, when Mr Coulson was at Downing Street, the cabinet secretary was alerted to evidence of illegal phone hacking, covert surveillance and hostile media briefing against a senior government official - the cabinet secretary later denied it. "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. She said the US had already provided $431m this year in emergency aid to the Horn of Africa, but that was "not enough". In April 2010 US President Barack Obama issued an executive order naming al-Shabab a terrorist organisation, meaning no US aid could go to areas under its control, our analyst adds.