Human suffering in Somalia
Updated on 10 October 2007
On tonight's show with Snowmail...
Devastating footage from Somalia will be somewhere near the top of our programme tonight. I think probably the lead.
The place persists in being far too dangerous for any outsider to risk visiting but one journalist has been able to supply the most harrowing account of human suffering.
It's very clear that the American-backed Ethiopian invasion and the attempt to install the Western-backed government that had been holed up in Baidoa has proved a failure and the internecine warfare is as bad as at any time.
The one period of order, the six months during which the Islamic courts movement held power with some considerable popular support, is now far behind. The Ethiopians are effectively trapped with long supply lines only sustained with US support.
It is one of these tragedies where the West has interfered, supposedly with high intent designed to prevent radical anti-Western elements taking root and has again misjudged the scale of the crisis confronting it.
And what we have tonight is very dramatic footage of what, for most of the people living there is everyday life in Mogadishu: dead soldiers on the street; gunfire everywhere; tanks; injured civilians and general human misery.
The question is whether Britain and Italy, once the colonial powers, can bring any influence to bear on those who never were to rethink what they are doing. The failed state continues to fail.
Brown takes a beating
Back here there has been the usual farmyard noises on the floor of the House of Commons as Government and Opposition try to claw political advantage from the pre-Budget statement.
The Tories are enraged at what they see as the theft of their ideas while Labour preens itself for once again lifting the ideas of others to pursue their idiosyncratic third way. Prime Minister's Question Time saw the Prime Minister himself getting a bit of a drubbing.
Wildcat strikes by postal workers
The postal strike staggers from disaster to catastrophe. It is beginning to have the feel of the miner's strike, decent men and women caught up in a kind of march to the jobs graveyard in the face of a crying need to change the way the whole thing functions.
And is there a deeper plot afoot perhaps to make privatizations an inevitability?
Racing trial
A lot of fascinating court cases are in being, The Kieren Fallon case tells us more about the way in which the alleged race-fixing plot was uncovered.
There is a new trial of men accused of running English terrorist training camps and then there is the shed, the wife, the mistress and the fire. Today it seems it may be the turn of the mistress.
Chinese cyber police in action
The Chinese reckon they know a thing or two about workers. They are having their Communist Party Congress this week and Lindsey Hilsum is looking at the fine-tuned controls and repression that ensure dissident views never go too far.
She will be introducing us to the cyber police who pop up on your screen when you dare to try to access some site of which they do not approve. Inevitably this mythic figure refers you to 'the authorities'.
The Big Frieze
And finally, Nicholas Glass has gone to Regent's Park to the giant frieze exhibition. I'm not sure what he is going to find there but I don't suppose the artists who made the stuff know either.
Race-car dodging 'roo
While I'm at it, don't miss the kangaroo tonight. Amazingly, this jumping marsupial finds its way onto a motor race circuit and hops along at about 50mph, weaving in and out of the speeding cars and lives, if not to tell the tale, certainly to wag it.
