By Alex Lavelle
EDITOR'S NOTE
Last Friday morning our Saturday newspaper editor Margaret Easterbrook asked me what I thought of publishing on our front page this harrowing picture of a desperate Somali boy ravaged by hunger being weighed next to his distraught mother.
An emaciated Somali boy is weighed next to his distraught mother.Credit: Peter Caton
It was not an image that would have brightened readers' breakfast experience, but I encouraged her to do so.
Our job is not to sanitise what's going on in the world, but to inform, both about what's wonderful about our pale blue dot and also what's not.
I was at school when Bob Geldof turned the world's attention to the disastrous famine in Ethiopia in the mid-80s, while the extraordinary photograph of the dying young girl with a vulture standing a few metres behind her taken in Sudan in 1993 is an image I will never forget.
As it turned out, we didn't publish the picture of the starving boy on the front of the paper because Donald Trump ordered the bombing of a Syrian military base.
The bombing was an act that the Australian Prime Minister - and The Age - supported, but put the world on edge.
Matt Wade's story about the crippling poverty and malnutrition in Somalia instead ran in our Insight pages and at the top of the homepage once interest in the Syrian bombing subsided a little.
The situation in Somalia is critical after three years of drought, and none of the four African regions either in or on the verge of famine receive the attention they deserve or need.
They are difficult places to get to and poor security means reporters need to be sponsored by an aid agency and travel with an armed escort.
Matt says the scale of the crisis was brought home to him during a visit to the only specialised centre for the treatment of severely malnourished children in the capital of Somaliland, Hargeisa.
Many of the desperate infants were being treated on the floor of the hospital and five children had died at the centre in the previous week.
While there was enormous interest in the Syrian bombing, our single biggest story of the week reflected one of Melbourne's major obsessions - the weather.
Extremes in conditions always capture attention, and the rubbish weekend gave people plenty of time to read about it.You can get your daily weather fix about what to wear, what to expect and the weekly forecast, each morning from around 7am.
Here was today's. You can also upload and send us your weather pics - or suggest an appropriate song for the day - using the link at the end of the story.I am away next week, so will write to you again in a fortnight.
Have a great Easter.