Snowmail: Somalia on the brink of famine

Piracy on the seas around the Horn of Africa is threatening the kind of famine not seen in Somalia for more than 25 years. That's what the man running the World Food Programme thinks, anyway.

The ships carrying food that sustains three million people hit by war, drought and crop failure have stopped running. Their military escorts have gone and few dare make the trip with eight attacks on ships in three months.

So thousands of tonnes of food will sit in warehouses in South Africa while stomachs go empty unless somebody steps in to guarantee those shipments. And Britain is one those currently refusing to do anything about it.

Ours is among the governments who have been asked to send warships to escort the food aid, but we haven't and there might be a small argument going on between the foreign office and the ministry of defence as to why. Jonathan Miller is on the case.

Do gas price rises mean it's time for (candle) Wicks?

You might have noticed lots of other news outlets going big on Faisal Islam's revelations last night about gas price rises of nearly 70 per cent within three years. We'll be following it up tonight with the energy minister Malcolm Wicks.

When average bills top £1000 and one in three households are in or approaching fuel poverty, will banging on about winter fuel payments of a couple of hundred pounds for pensioners cut the mustard?

Sorry Prudence, you're dumped

But of course the big, if slightly indecipherable, economic story is the FT's revelations that Gordon Brown is ditching prudence, or rather ditching the economic rules that gave him the right to talk about it.

Whenever a story like this pops up there's an unholy rivalry between the politics and economics correspondents about whose patch this falls into and I've been enjoying reading all the blogs and articles thrown up by colleagues elsewhere today.

Is this really about the end of Gordon Brown's credibility, or a story about keeping the economy from deep recession? The experts have been telling us all day how these rules had long lost their credibility anyway because the Treasury kept moving the goalposts.

The Tories keep repeating their "you don't leave a criminal in charge of the keys to the prison" analogies.

If you aren't quite sure what an economic cycle or the sustainable borrowing rule is, don't worry. The important thing is what the government intends to do after it has changed the rules and the answer to that could well be higher borrowing to fund spending and even pre-election tax cuts.

Putting money in at one end of the economy could well prompt the Bank of England to take it out at the other by raising interest rates. We're on the trail of the ch-ch-ch-ch-changes... and what they might really mean.

Obama's pre-presidential tour

The man Britain seems to want as the next US President (if polls can be believed) is heading here next week for a few hours.

En route he will take in Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe to project himself not just as potential commander-in-chief but as a world leader despite his relative lack of experience when compared to his Republican rival John McCain.

He's under an awful lot of pressure not to put a foot wrong and given how much tuning of those old positions on withdrawal from Iraq, talking to Iran, etc there has already been, every single word will be watched. Lucy Manning in Washington takes the temperature ahead of a fascinating week.

The robots have taken over

And Nintendo tells us the next generation of video games will use mind control. We'll be testing how far the technology has got... and wondering how it could be applied. A TV set that changes channel when you think it's getting boring?

See you at seven,

Krishnan

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