WHO could fail to be moved by the plight of Ali Ismail Abbas?

The twelve-year-old boy, about the same age as my eldest, lost both arms and suffered horrific burns in a US air strike in Baghdad. His mother, father, brother and two sisters were killed.

With trembling lips and eyes full of tears he pleaded to Western journalists surrounding his grimy hospital bed: "Please could you get me some arms?" His doctor said he would be better off dead because he could do little for him. Ali's picture, sent round the world, will be one of the most defining and enduring images of this war. Just like the shot of that naked child running down the road in Vietnam, it will be forever etched on our collective consciousness.

Cash has flooded in to funds set up to help Ali and politicians and the forces have pulled out all the stops to fly him to Kuwait for treatment. "We will do whatever we can to help," said Tony Blair. But we all know there are hundreds of other children horribly maimed and injured, just like Ali, lying in dirty hospital wards or left untreated at home, away from the cameras. We need to pull out all the stops to get them the medical aid they desperately need too.

Ali's fearful face, a snapshot of history forever frozen in time, has become symbolic of the suffering of this war. His story, as it turns out, also gives some hope. But will it, like the image of that crying child in Vietnam, be a force for change?

I WAS amazed at pictures of soldiers in the Gulf hosing down their laptop computers to get the sand off. When one of my children spilt juice on our laptop it was written off. But the GoBook Max, specially made for the army in the field, is waterproof and shockproof. "We drop each one 54 times from one metre, bake it in an oven, chill it in a freezer, vibrate it, and submit it to a shower of hurricane proportions," say the makers. If it can also withstand whatever five young boys will throw at it, I want one - now. As well as the juice incident, a memory card mysteriously disappeared from another laptop - a write-off again. And I have lost count of the number of times the children being heavy-handed has resulted in huge computer repair bills. Forget the military market, the GoBook is going to be much, much bigger then that - it's the perfect family computer.

SCIENTISTS have discovered a new perfume that cons men into thinking the women wearing it are about one stone lighter than they are. But it will never sell. Because women don't want to look slim for men. Most of us would rather other women thought we looked good. And this perfume, sadly, doesn't work on women. After a lifetime of dieting and trying to squeeze into smaller clothes, we women are experts at spotting the difference between a size twelve and a fourteen. And, of course, we aren't as easily conned.

THE number of children not having the controversial MMR vaccine is now low enough to allow a national outbreak of potentially-deadly measles. While I respect the right of parents to reject the vaccine, how many have selfishly relied on the fact that the majority would still be vaccinated, making the risk to their child small? Didn't they realise they were slowly shifting the balance?