Your Money; Famine in Somalia
KING: Get you up-to-date on a big story you need to know about right now. The Obama White House tonight pledging an additional $105 million to the urgent humanitarian effort under way in the Horn of Africa, where more than 12 million people are said to be in desperate need of food and water. Our Anderson Cooper is there this week for a firsthand look. Anderson is with us now live from a massive refugee camp at Kenya's border with Somalia. Anderson, you're getting a firsthand look at this devastating awful humanitarian crisis. But tell us what you're seeing.</s>ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Well John, this has become the largest refugee camp in the entire world. You can actually see it from space. It's extraordinary. There's more than about 500,000 Somalis who are living here and in the surrounding areas around this camp desperate for food aid, many internally displaced people in Somalia, more than a million of them, more than 100,000 now have gone to Mogadishu desperately looking for food. According to the U.N., about 3.2 million Somalis are in immediate need of food assistance, immediate need of assistance. And the fear is with the drought continuing for the next couple of months before the rains come and with Al Shabaab, this terrorist organization extremist group which is in control of the south where the famine really is, where the hardest hit area is that tens of thousands more people will die in the coming months as this drought continues, the worst drought in 60 years. And the famine continues to spread from small pockets in the south to the entire southern part of Somalia. So it is a desperate situation for many here. Aid has been slow in coming. This was a predicted drought. This has been on the radar of a lot of folks in the aid community for many, many months. And yet there is still not enough in the pipeline, not enough food, not enough money being addressed to meet the immediate needs of so many people here -- John.</s>KING: And when you say the immediate needs, there's obvious frustration there that that this is taking so long for the world to react. Is there one thing that is most in demand that anybody watching could try to help?</s>COOPER: Well look -- you know aid organizations will say money is the bottom line. You know money that allows them to operate here, money that allows them to get supplies, that allows them to fly in food and water and help people long term develop agriculture that can prevent this kind of thing in the future. It is a -- it really is a desperate situation here, but mainly inside Somalia and that's where we're going to be reporting from for the next two nights -- John.</s>KING: Anderson Cooper for us on the Kenya-Somalia border. Anderson and his team there throughout the week to get a sense of this. And this reminder you'll want to watch this reporting anyway and this reminder beginning tonight "AC 360" moving to 8:00 p.m. in the East. That's immediately following this program. You won't want to miss that coverage and Anderson Cooper's program in the days and weeks ahead. And still ahead here after months of silence, leading Arab nations are suddenly pressuring Syria to stop the deadly crackdown. Why the change and will President Assad listen?