Obama's half-brother is tracked down to Nairobi slum

It is a detail of the already exotic life story of Barack Obama that his campaign was not intending to highlight to voters at the Democratic Convention in Denver next week: the circumstances of a little half-brother called George.

It is not quite the first time we have heard of 26-year-old George Hussein Onyango Obama. The candidate did give him a very cursory mention in one of his best-selling memoirs, with the observation that he was a "beautiful boy with a rounded head".

But it is only now that we know where George is and what he is up to. The Italian version of Vanity Fair purports in its latest edition to have tracked down brother George living in obscurity in a hut in the shanty town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, surviving on less than a dollar a month.

He will not, in other words, be by his brother's side in Colorado enjoying reflected adulation. "No one knows who I am," he told the magazine, saying he is too embarrassed to admit to anyone that the man running for the White House in America is his half-brother because of his abject penury. "If anyone says something about my surname, I say we are not related. I am ashamed."