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From Our Own Correspondent: Somalia, Ethiopia and France

Somalia, Ethiopia and France

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Somalia, Ethiopia and France

Owen Bennett Jones has reports from BBC correspondents Mike Wooldridge and Hugh Schofield.

Owen Bennett Jones with insight and analysis from BBC correspondents Mike Wooldridge, seeing how famine is affecting the Somali-Ethiopian border, and Hugh Schofield, who meets fashion's Pierre Cardin

Owen Bennett Jones introduces insight, wit and analysis from BBC correspondents around the world. In this edition, Mike Wooldridge follows the shifting footprint of famine along the Somali/Ethiopian border region, while Hugh Schofield meets the legendary one-off of fashion, Pierre Cardin.

Feeding the eight thousand and thousands more

Public relations experts who work for the UN and other international aid agencies have a most disconcerting task. They must try to raise awareness of human misery so as to secure personal donations - or more often to pressure Western governments to increase foreign aid budgets. It's now a little over three months since famine was officially declared in parts of Somalia, and the drought emergency across the Horn of Africa and East Africa finally seemed to get the world’s attention. Yet the crisis already seems to be slipping off news agendas. 

Mike Wooldridge reported from the refugee camps close to the Ethiopia-Somalia border town of Dollo Ado in July, and has just been back there to see how the situation's changed.

Bringing fashion to the people

What is it that really drives ambitious men and women? Money, fame, power, idealism – it's different, no doubt, for different people – but in some cases it seems to be the desire to prove to those born with greater advantages that you're just as good as them, or maybe even better. To show the snobs that they're wrong. 

There seems to be a touch of that impulse in the man Hugh Schofield recently lunched with in Southern France. Pierre Cardin is the last survivor of the heyday of Parisian haute couture in the 1950s and 60s. He's now aged 89 and still in control of a business empire that spans the globe - and still determined to stand out from the crowd.

(Image: A Somalian refugee holding his child. Credit: Getty)

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