11 October 2010 Last updated at 14:06 GMT

Ten 'most threatened' buildings in England and Wales

The Unitarian Chapel on Upper Brook Street in Manchester is on the endangered list

The Victorian Society has released a list of what it says are the 10 most endangered buildings in England and Wales.

It follows a public appeal by the charity to find the most threatened Victorian and Edwardian buildings.

The buildings are in Leicestershire, Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Sheffield, Grimsby, Liverpool, Manchester, London and Vale of Glamorgan.

Included is a former ice factory, an old fire station and a school.

This is the fourth year the Victorian Society has run its endangered buildings list, which aims to highlight the problems facing historic properties.

In order to be on the list, a building has to be at risk, whether from demolition, insensitive development or years of neglect, the society said.

The list of 10 was drawn up using nominations from members of the public.

Dr Ian Dungavell, director of the Victorian Society, said: "Our heritage is a finite resource and once historic buildings like this are gone they cannot be replaced."

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VICTORIAN SOCIETY'S AT RISK LIST

• Hammerton School, Ouseburn Road, Darnall, Sheffield
• Grimsby's former ice factory, Gorton Street, Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire
• Wedgwood Institute, Queen Street, Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent
• Bradgate House Stables, Bradgate Hill, Groby, Leicestershire
• Royal Liverpool Seamen's Orphanage, Newsham Park, Tuebrook, Liverpool
• 30 Euston Square, London
• The Unitarian Chapel, Upper Brook Street, Manchester
• Old Fire Station, Court Road, Barry, Vale of Glamorgan
• Normansfield Hospital, Kingston Road, Teddington, Greater London
• Former Moseley School of Art, Moseley Road, Birmingham

Also on the list is a boarded-up former orphanage in Liverpool, designed by Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse and built in the 1870s, and a former Unitarian chapel on Upper Brook Street in Manchester.

The roof of the Grade II-listed chapel, which dates back to the late-1830s, has been taken off for safety reasons and the Victorian Society wants Manchester City Council to ensure the rest of the building is protected.

"Time is running out for the chapel, as the longer it lies empty and exposed to the elements the harder it will be to save," said Dr Dungavell.

"We urge Manchester City Council to take the lead and bring this eye-catching ruin back into use."

Manchester City Council said it had been working to re-develop the site and was currently in negotiations with a developer to renovate the building.

A council spokesman said: "Discussions are at an early stage but we hope to make an announcement about the future of the chapel within the next few months."

'Eye-catching ruin'

Also on the list is the former Moseley School of Art in Birmingham, built in 1898, which is now the headquarters of the British Association of Muslims.

The Victorian Society is concerned about the building's "deteriorating condition".

Dr Dungavell said: "Even in harsh economic times historic buildings like the former art school need to be cared for or they won't survive for future generations.

"This is a nationally significant building and we urge the council to use its powers and make sure urgent repairs are carried out."

The Moseley School of Art in Birmingham is now home to the British Association of Muslims

The former Wedgwood Institute in Burslem in Stoke-on-Trent has also been included on the list.

Until recently, it was home to Burslem's public library, but closed two years ago due to structural problems, the society said.

The library books have been moved elsewhere but the building remains at risk of further deterioration.

The Victorian Society's list is different to the At Risk Register organised by English Heritage, but some of the buildings, such as the Grimsby former ice factory, features on both of them.

The ice factory was built in 1900/1901 and produced ice for Grimsby's fishing industry for 90 years, before closing in 1990.

Ice-making machinery remains inside the building, even though the factory is now derelict.

Earlier this year, the Great Grimsby Ice Factory Trust was set up to campaign for its restoration.

Vicky Hartung, chair of the trust, said: "It's one of the few remaining buildings from our heritage.

"We were a glorious fishing port at one time, we are no longer that, but it's a spectacular building and we think it can be brought to life again and contribute to the town."

14 October 2010 Last updated at 07:57 GMT

Background noise affects taste of foods, research shows

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

This might be the best place for the tastiest meal

The level of background noise affects both the intensity of flavour and the perceived crunchiness of foods, researchers have found.

Blindfolded diners assessed the sweetness, saltiness, and crunchiness, as well as overall flavour, of foods as they were played white noise.

While louder noise reduced the reported sweetness or saltiness, it increased the measure of crunch.

The research is reported in the journal Food Quality and Preference.

It may go some way to explaining why airline food is notoriously bland - a phenomenon that drives airline catering companies to heavily season their foods.

"There's a general opinion that aeroplane foods aren't fantastic," said Andy Woods, a researcher from Unilever's laboratories and the University of Manchester.

"I'm sure airlines do their best - and given that, we wondered if there are other reasons why the food would not be so good. One thought was perhaps the background noise has some impact," he told BBC News.

"Nasa gives their space explorers very strong-tasting foods, because for some reason thay can't taste food that strongly - again, perhaps it's the background noise.

"There was no previous research on this, so we went about seeing if the hunch was correct."

Tasteful

In a comparatively small study, 48 participants were fed sweet foods such as biscuits or salty ones such as crisps, while listening to silence or noise through headphones.

Meanwhile they rated the intensity of the flavours and of their liking.

In noisier settings, foods were rated less salty or sweet than they were in the absence of background noise, but were rated to be more crunchy.

"The evidence points to this effect being down to where your attention lies - if the background noise is loud it might draw your attention to that, away from the food," Dr Woods said.

Also in the group's findings there is the suggestion that the overall satisfaction with the food aligned with the degree to which diners liked what they were hearing - a finding the researchers are pursuing in further experiments.

15 October 2010 Last updated at 04:07 GMT

Hitler's relationship with Germany explored

By Stephen Evans BBC News, Berlin

The new exhibition in Berlin has Adolf Hitler as its focus for the first time

The title is important: Hitler and the German People. The first ever big exhibition in a major German museum to focus on Hitler is not just about him but about his relationship with the people.

And that, of course, makes for discomfort. After all, the people who come to the German Historical Museum in Berlin are the grandchildren and, occasionally, the children of those who participated in the poisonous relationship in the 1930s and early 40s. This is not an exhibition where the visitors view coolly from outside. It is one where they look into themselves, too.

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“Start Quote

I find the exhibition of Hitler not a good idea. I believe the neo-Nazis will come”

End Quote Hans Coppi, whose parents were hanged by the Nazis

What they will find as they walk the rooms is that Hitler and the Nazis permeated ordinary German life. There are tiny toys depicting him, children's models of him in uniform with his arm outstretched in salute.

There is a quilt where the inhabitants of a village have depicted their homes in delicate needle-craft - alongside the Nazi symbols also stitched with great care. There is a cup and saucer with a swastika, and a lamp shade with the same symbol. There is a deck of playing cards showing Hitler and other Nazis. There is a gravestone from 1938 with a swastika.

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Museum director Hans Ottomeyer on why the exhibition was put together

There are also exhibits that give the game away, as it were. There is a very ordinary amateur painting, but on the back you see the Torah, the implication being that the sacred Jewish text was just taken and used for material for a hobby. Who now knows where it came from or what became of the original owners?

As you look, you wonder.

One of the few bits of personal memorabilia is a vast wooden desk with an eagle and snake on the front, and used by Hitler. The conclusion the organisers want you to draw is about his obsession with aggrandisement. It is a desk that is useless except for what it says.

There are paintings of the masses as just that: the masses - regimented, indistinguishable one from the next. There is a painting from before the war which depicts the masses hauling their leader - depicted as a monstrous giant - in adoration. The organisers said they want the viewer to conclude: don't say nobody knew it was coming because here it is foretold.

The depiction of the swastika remains illegal in public places

The exhibition is ground-breaking because it breaks a great taboo in Germany - and remember that the depiction of the swastika or the Nazi salute remain illegal in public places (the museum is exempt because it's technically for research purposes). But previous attempts at exhibitions focusing on Hitler came to naught because of the fear of attracting neo-Nazis.

Six years ago, for example, a similar exhibition entitled Hitler and the National Socialist Regime was rejected because it was felt to be too personalised - too focused on the man.

It's the images of Hitler that remain the problem, and in this current exhibition they are sparse. There are the busts of him, which were turned out industrially for mantelpieces throughout the land. And there are pictures of him in rows on the front covers of today's news magazines, perhaps to make the point that Hitler sells.

But there isn't personal memorabilia. The clothes he wore are not here. The German museum has not, for example, borrowed one of his uniforms from a museum in Moscow.

Simone Erpel, the curator of the exhibition, said: "Something worn by Hitler, even if it was just twice, could become a fetish."

There's no doubt it is all very thoughtfully done, but people remain uneasy. On the one hand, there are people who say that Hitler is not studied enough in schools so the more serious contemplation and sheer information there is, the better.

Busts of Hitler were turned out industrially for mantlepieces

But there are also those who see dangers. Also in the week when the exhibition opens, three small brass plaques on cobble stones were laid in a quiet street a short distance from the museum.

On them were the names of three people executed by the Nazis for organizing resistance and saving Jews. One of the people at the street ceremony was Hans Coppi whose parents were hanged.

"I find the exhibition of Hitler not a good idea. I believe the neo-Nazis will come," he said.

To which the director of the Museum on Unter den Linden, Hans Ottomeyer replies: "We are not haunted by neo-Nazis because we are a place of enlightenment. They don't read books and they don't go to exhibitions".

"Hitler was a poor tramp and it needed the acclaim of the Germans to make Hitler what he became. This the exhibition tries to reflect. It is about propaganda and it is about the means of his attraction."

So does the holding of the exhibition mean that Hitler is now in the past, a person for museums but remote from today's reality?

"He is not past and remote. He is still everywhere to be feared," says Mr Ottomeyer.

"Our cities and our public buildings are still destroyed and not rebuilt - and the same is true of the minds and the values of the people which were heavily hampered by the Third Reich and its effects."

19 September 2010 Last updated at 03:36 GMT

Last 'sin-eater' celebrated with church service

The Reverend Norman Morris led the service for Richard Munslow

The restored grave of the last known "sin-eater" in England has been at the centre of a special service in a Shropshire village churchyard.

Campaigners raised £1,000 to restore the grave of Richard Munslow, who was buried in Ratlinghope in 1906.

Sin-eaters were generally poor people paid to eat bread and drink beer or wine over a corpse, in the belief they would take on the sins of the deceased.

Frowned upon by the church, the custom mainly died out in the 19th Century.

It was prevalent in the Marches, the land around the England-Wales border, and in north Wales, but was rarely carried out anywhere else.

Believers thought the sin-eater taking on the sins of a person who died suddenly without confessing their sins would allow the deceased's soul to go to heaven in peace.

While most of the sin-eaters were poor people or beggars, Mr Munslow was a well-established farmer in the area.

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“Start Quote

This grave at Ratlinghope is now in an excellent state of repair but I have no desire to reinstate the ritual that went with it”

End Quote The Reverend Norman Morris

The Reverend Norman Morris, the vicar of Ratlinghope, a village of about 100 residents on the Long Mynd near Church Stretton, led the "God's Acre" service at St Margaret's Church.

Mr Morris said: "It was a very odd practice and would not have been approved of by the church but I suspect the vicar often turned a blind eye to the practice."

Locals began the collection to restore the grave, which had fallen into disrepair in recent years, believing it would be good to highlight the custom and Mr Munslow's place in religious history.

It took a few months to raise the £1,000 needed to pay for the work, carried out by local stonemason Charles Shaw.

Mr Morris said: "This grave at Ratlinghope is now in an excellent state of repair but I have no desire to reinstate the ritual that went with it."

Avatarocious

Another spectacle hits an iceberg and sinks.
BY John Podhoretz
December 28, 2009, Vol. 15, No. 15

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

Avatar, we are told, does things with cameras and computers and actors that have never been done before. Its painstaking combination of real-life action and animation has, we are told, taken cinema to a new level. It cost anywhere from $328 million to $500 million, we are told, and took four years to make. It is a breakthrough, we are told, the boldest step into the future of filmmaking, an unparalleled achievement.

What they didn't tell us is that Avatar is blitheringly stupid; indeed, it's among the dumbest movies I've ever seen. Avatar is an undigested mass of clichés nearly three hours in length taken directly from the revisionist westerns of the 1960s-the ones in which the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys. Only here the West is a planet called Pandora, the time is the 22nd century rather than the 19th, and the Indians have blue skin and tails, and are 10 feet tall.

An American soldier named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is sent to make friends with the blue people. To effect this, scientists download his consciousness into a 10-foot-tall blue body. Jake discovers that the natives are wonderful in every possible way. They are so green it's too bad their skin has to be blue. They're hunters and they kill animals, but after they do so, they cry and say it's sad. Which only demonstrates their superiority. Plus they have (I'm not kidding) fiber-optic cables coming out of their patooties that allow them to plug into animals and control them. Now, that just seems wrong-I mean, why should they get to control the pterodactyls? Why don't the pterodactyls control them? This kind of biped-centrism is just another form of imperialist racism, in my opinion.

Like the Keebler elves, the Blue People all live in a big tree together and they go to church at another big tree, under which (we learn) lives Mother Earth, only since it isn't earth, she isn't called Mother Earth, but the Great Mother or something like that. Meanwhile, back among the humans at their base camp, there's a big fight. The scruffy scientists, led by Sigourney Weaver, want to learn, learn, learn about the wonders of the planet and the people and Mother Earth and the big tree and the pterodactyls.
But the scientists work for an evil corporation (natch) and the evil corporation is only there because it wants-you can write the rest; but I will, just for the sake of expedience-to exploit the planet's natural resources. In particular, it wants to exploit a mineral called (again no kidding) unobtainium. And it turns out there's a big deposit of unobtainium under the Keebler Elf Tree. They want the elves to move.

Getting them to move is Jake Sully's job. And he does earn their trust, even though the leader of their tribe says, "His alien scent offends my nose!" (The line is translated from their nonexistent language with subtitles that are designed to look like the men's room signs at an Indian casino.) The Blue People, in particular the contemptuous and lovely Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), show him their wondrous ways. But before he can discuss hiring Allied Van Lines with them, the Evil Corporation intervenes.

It is run by an evil Yuppie, and the Yuppie's security is provided by an evil Marine. And for no good reason other than to get the movie into its second act, they decide to stage a military attack on the Elf Tree, thus blowing the zillions of dollars they sank into the project of making Jake Sully into a Blue Person rather than waiting a couple of weeks.

Oy, the suffering that ensues, all for some lousy unobtainium! Oy, the destruction! You can hear writer-director James Cameron weeping over his special-effects computer as the bad humans he created commit this terrible atrocity against the Blue People who don't exist. As for me, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde's immortal crack about Charles Dickens's tears as he killed off the child heroine of his Old Curiosity Shop: "It would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

The only salvation for Pandora lies with our man Jake Sully turning into the leader of the blue-skinned people, rallying them to the cause of protecting their planet against the Evil Corporation. This, too, is unacceptably paternalistic, in my view; after all, why should giant blue people have to learn these things from a shrimpy white guy who doesn't even have a tail or built-in Skype?

Eventually, it falls to Jake to plug his fiber-optic cables into a plant and ask the Great Mother to do something. And she does. She rallies the pterodactyls, not to mention some rhinoceroses and dogs, to join with an army of blue people to take down the EC. In the end, it's Jake Sully vs. the Evil Marine, who is dressed up to look like (again, not kidding) a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot, one of those ludicrous toys from the late 1960s that gave toys a bad name.

You're going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks about the movie's politics-about how it's a Green epic about despoiling the environment, and an attack on the war in Iraq, and so on. The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism-kind of.

The thing is, one would be giving James Cameron too much credit to take Avatar-with its mindless worship of a nature-loving tribe and the tribe's adorable pagan rituals, its hatred of the military and American institutions, and the notion that to be human is just way uncool-at all seriously as a political document. It's more interesting as an example of how deeply rooted these standard-issue counterculture clichés in Hollywood have become by now. Cameron has simply used these familiar bromides as shorthand to give his special-effects spectacular some resonance. He wrote it this way not to be controversial, but quite the opposite: He was making something he thought would be most pleasing to the greatest number of people.

Will it be? Aside from the anti-American, anti-human politics, the movie is nearly three hours long, and it doesn't have a single joke in it. There is no question that Avatar is an astonishing piece of work. It is, for about two-thirds of its running time, an animated picture that looks like it's not an animated picture.

On the other hand, who cares? It doesn't count for much that the technical skill on display makes it easier to suspend disbelief and make you think you're watching something take place on a distant planet. Getting audiences to suspend disbelief isn't the hard part; we suspend disbelief all the time. It's how we can see any movie about anything and get involved in the story. The real question is this: If Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on soundstages with sets and the like, would it be interesting? Would it hold our attention?
The answer is, unquestionably no. There's no chance anybody would even have put it into production, no matter that Cameron made the box-office bonanza Titanic. So the question is: Does the technical mastery on display in Avatar outweigh the unbelievably banal and idiotic plot, the excruciating dialogue, the utter lack of any quality resembling a sense of humor? And will all these qualities silence the discomfort coming from that significant segment of the American population that, we know from the box-office receipts for Iraq war movies this decade, doesn't like it when an American soldier is the bad guy?

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary,is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic.

25 Funniest Analogies (Collected by High School English Teachers)

25 Funniest Analogies (Collected by High School English Teachers)

Every year, English teachers from across the U.S. can submit their collections of actual similes and metaphors found in high school essays. Here are last year’s winners:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had it’s two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six foot, three inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality to it, like when you’re on vacation in another city and “Jeopardy” comes on at 7 PM instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped form the pavement, just like grubs when you fry them in hot grease.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 PM traveling 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 PM at a speed of 35 mph.
15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who also had never met.
17. He fell for her like he was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are known to do.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
22. He was lame as a duck. Not a metaphorical duck, either but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

source

NHS money 'wasted' on homeopathy

Page last updated at 14:41 GMT, Monday, 22 February 2010

The NHS should stop funding homeopathy, MPs say.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said using public money on the highly-diluted remedies could not be justified.

The cross-party group said there was no evidence beyond a placebo effect, when a patient gets better because of their belief that the treatment works.

But manufacturers and supporters of homeopathy disputed the report, saying the MPs had ignored important evidence.

It is thought about £4m a year is spent on homeopathy by the NHS, helping to fund four homeopathic hospitals in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow and numerous prescriptions.

Homeopathy is a 200-year-old system of treatment that uses highly diluted substances - sometimes so none of the original product is left - that are given orally in the belief that it will stimulate the body's self-healing mechanism.

HOMEOPATHY Homeopathy involves giving people very dilute amounts of a substance that in larger amounts might produce symptoms similar to the condition being treated For example, one remedy which might be used in a person suffering from insomnia is coffea, a remedy made from coffee Homeopathy: Your views

Supporters believe the remedies help relieve a range of minor ailments from bruising and swelling to constipation and insomnia.

But the MPs said homeopathy was basically sugar pills that only worked because of faith.

In medicine it is recognised that some people will get better because they believe the treatment they take is going to work.

The MPs said the NHS should not fund treatments on this basis.

They argued the effectiveness was often unpredictable and involved a deception by the medical establishment.

They also warned it could lead to a delay in diagnosis if symptoms were cured but the underlying reason for them was not tackled.

The MPs also criticised the drugs regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, for allowing medical claims to be made.

The bar for licensing for homeopathic remedies is not set as high as for medical treatments, partly because they have been used since the NHS was set up in 1948 before the current system of regulation was brought in.

Committee chairman Phil Willis said this approval and the fact they were funded by the NHS in the first place lent the remedies "a badge of authority that is unjustified".

But the report acknowledged there was a public appetite for homeopathy with surveys showing satisfaction rates of above 70%.

But the report was disowned by one of the committee's MPs. Labour's Ian Stewart said he was dissenting from the report because the MPs had refused to take into account that homeopathy worked for some people and he also said he was concerned by the "balance of witnesses".

'Disappointed'

Paul Bennett, superintendent pharmacist at Boots, on homeopathy

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said the government would give a full response to the report in the coming months.

But she added: "In the meantime we would reiterate that we appreciate the strength of feeling both for and against the provision of homeopathy on the NHS.

"Our view is that the local NHS and clinicians, rather than Whitehall, are best placed to make decisions on what treatment is appropriate for their patients - this includes complementary or alternative treatments such as homeopathy."

Robert Wilson, of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers, said he was "disappointed" by the findings.

He said the MPs had ignored evidence that homeopathy was effective.

"There is good evidence that homeopathy works, for example in animals and babies, neither of which experience placebo effects."

And Dr Michael Dixon, medical director for the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health, set up by Prince Charles to promote complementary medicine, disputed the findings, saying homeopathy still had a role in the NHS.

"We should not abandon patients we cannot help with conventional scientific medicine.

"If homeopathy is getting results for those patients, then of course we should continue to use it."

The British Medical Association said it was concerned about NHS funds being used on homeopathy and called for an official review into its effectiveness.

Happy moments 'protect the heart'

Last Updated: Monday, 18 April, 2005, 15:20 GMT 16:20 UK

Happy moments 'protect the heart'

Happiness was more commonly linked to leisure, rather than work

Every moment of happiness counts when it comes to protecting your heart, researchers have said.

A team from University College London said happiness leads to lower levels of stress-inducing chemicals.

They found that even when happier people experienced stress, they had low levels of a chemical which increases the risk of heart disease.

The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This shows that people who are happy and unstressed are likely to have less potentially dangerous stress chemicals in their bodies Professor Peter Weissberg, British Heart Foundation

It showed that those who were happy less often had higher levels of a bloodstream chemical called plasma fibrinogen, which shows if there is inflammation present.

It is an indicator of how great a risk a person has of developing heart disease in the future.

Daily happiness

Researchers tested 116 men and 100 women who were taking part in a major study of thousands of London-based civil servants recruited between 1985 and 1988 when 35-55 years old to investigate the risk factors for coronary heart disease.

They carried out tests on people at work, during leisure periods and in the laboratory.

People were also asked whether or not they were happy at 33 moments during the day.

The researchers then evaluated how often people were happy in the course of the day.

Leisure was, unsurprisingly, linked with more happy moments than work.

It was found that some people reported they never felt happy, while others reported feeling occasional happiness and those who felt happy most of the time.

The results were adjusted for gender, age, employment status, weight, smoking habits and psychological distress.

Levels of cortisol - a stress hormone - were 32% lower in people who reported more happy moments.

Cortisol has been related to abdominal obesity, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and autoimmune disorders.

The researchers also discovered happy people have had lower levels of fibrinogen when they were stressed.

Emotional state

Professor Jane Wardle, who worked on the study, said: "All the research to date has been on unhappiness, rather than happiness.

"This research suggests we should aim to maximise the happiness of the population."

Professor Andrew Steptoe, who led the study, said: "It has been suspected for the last few years that happier people may be healthier both mentally and physically than less happy people.

"What this study shows is that there are plausible biological pathways linking happiness with health."

He added: "What we find particularly interesting is that the associations between happiness and biological responses were independent of psychological distress.

"We already know that depression and anxiety are related to increased physical health risk. This study raises the intriguing possibility that the effect of happiness may be somewhat separate."

Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation said: "The results of this study build upon this team's work, which we are delighted to have supported.

"Evidence that emotional state is important for good heart health is growing and this shows that people who are happy and unstressed are likely to have less potentially dangerous stress chemicals in their bodies."

A Life Revealed

A Life Revealed

Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story.

By Cathy Newman

She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.

The photographer remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her picture. "I didn't think the photograph of the girl would be different from anything else I shot that day," he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan's refugees.

The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the "Afghan girl," and for 17 years no one knew her name.

In January a team from National Geographic Television & Film's EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes. They showed her picture around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee camp near Peshawar where the photograph had been made. A teacher from the school claimed to know her name. A young woman named Alam Bibi was located in a village nearby, but McCurry decided it wasn't her.

No, said a man who got wind of the search. He knew the girl in the picture. They had lived at the camp together as children. She had returned to Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near Tora Bora. He would go get her.

It took three days for her to arrive. Her village is a six-hour drive and three-hour hike across a border that swallows lives. When McCurry saw her walk into the room, he thought to himself: This is her.

Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist.

Time and hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened. "She's had a hard life," said McCurry. "So many here share her story." Consider the numbers. Twenty-three years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is the story of Afghanistan in the past quarter century.

Now, consider this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes challenge ours. Most of all, they disturb. We cannot turn away.

"There is not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war," a young Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story that appeared with Sharbat's photograph on the cover. She was a child when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried. And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread.

"We left Afghanistan because of the fighting," said her brother, Kashar Khan, filling in the narrative of her life. He is a straight line of a man with a raptor face and piercing eyes. "The Russians were everywhere. They were killing people. We had no choice."

Shepherded by their grandmother, he and his four sisters walked to Pakistan. For a week they moved through mountains covered in snow, begging for blankets to keep warm.

"You never knew when the planes would come," he recalled. "We hid in caves."

The journey that began with the loss of their parents and a trek across mountains by foot ended in a refugee camp tent living with strangers.

"Rural people like Sharbat find it difficult to live in the cramped surroundings of a refugee camp," explained Rahimullah Yusufzai, a respected Pakistani journalist who acted as interpreter for McCurry and the television crew. "There is no privacy. You live at the mercy of other people." More than that, you live at the mercy of the politics of other countries. "The Russian invasion destroyed our lives," her brother said.

It is the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will it ever end? "Each change of government brings hope," said Yusufzai. "Each time, the Afghan people have found themselves betrayed by their leaders and by outsiders professing to be their friends and saviors."

In the mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village in the foothills of mountains veiled by snow. To live in this earthen-colored village at the end of a thread of path means to scratch out an existence, nothing more. There are terraces planted with corn, wheat, and rice, some walnut trees, a stream that spills down the mountain (except in times of drought), but no school, clinic, roads, or running water.

Here is the bare outline of her day. She rises before sunrise and prays. She fetches water from the stream. She cooks, cleans, does laundry. She cares for her children; they are the center of her life. Robina is 13. Zahida is three. Alia, the baby, is one. A fourth daughter died in infancy. Sharbat has never known a happy day, her brother says, except perhaps the day of her marriage.

Her husband, Rahmat Gul, is slight in build, with a smile like the gleam of a lantern at dusk. She remembers being married at 13. No, he says, she was 16. The match was arranged.

He lives in Peshawar (there are few jobs in Afghanistan) and works in a bakery. He bears the burden of medical bills; the dollar a day he earns vanishes like smoke. Her asthma, which cannot tolerate the heat and pollution of Peshawar in summer, limits her time in the city and with her husband to the winter. The rest of the year she lives in the mountains.

At the age of 13, Yusufzai, the journalist, explained, she would have gone into purdah, the secluded existence followed by many Islamic women once they reach puberty.

"Women vanish from the public eye," he said. In the street she wears a plum-colored burka, which walls her off from the world and from the eyes of any man other than her husband. "It is a beautiful thing to wear, not a curse," she says.

Faced by questions, she retreats into the black shawl wrapped around her face, as if by doing so she might will herself to evaporate. The eyes flash anger. It is not her custom to subject herself to the questions of strangers.

Had she ever felt safe?

"No. But life under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and order."

Had she ever seen the photograph of herself as a girl?

"No."

She can write her name, but cannot read. She harbors the hope of education for her children. "I want my daughters to have skills," she said. "I wanted to finish school but could not. I was sorry when I had to leave."

Education, it is said, is the light in the eye. There is no such light for her. It is possibly too late for her 13-year-old daughter as well, Sharbat Gula said. The two younger daughters still have a chance.

The reunion between the woman with green eyes and the photographer was quiet. On the subject of married women, cultural tradition is strict. She must not look—and certainly must not smile—at a man who is not her husband. She did not smile at McCurry. Her expression, he said, was flat. She cannot understand how her picture has touched so many. She does not know the power of those eyes.

Such knife-thin odds. That she would be alive. That she could be found. That she could endure such loss. Surely, in the face of such bitterness the spirit could atrophy. How, she was asked, had she survived?

The answer came wrapped in unshakable certitude.

"It was," said Sharbat Gula, "the will of God."

Page last updated at 11:08 GMT, Wednesday, 7 October 2009 12:08 UK

Was this man the first terrorist of the modern age?

Emile Henry's attack on a cafe in 1894, which killed one person

It's eight years to the day since the first shots were fired in America's War on Terror. But can the terrorism tactics it sought to crush be traced back to a single attack on a Parisian cafe more than 100 years ago, asks Professor John Merriman.

On February 12, 1894, a young intellectual anarchist named Emile Henry went out to kill. And, in doing so, he arguably ignited the age of modern terrorism.

As he had looked down on Paris from near his miserable lodgings in the plebeian 20th arrondissement on the edge of Paris, he vowed war on the bourgeoisie. His specific goal was to avenge the execution of Auguste Vaillant a week earlier.

Unable to feed his family, Vaillant had thrown a small bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, slightly wounding several people. His goal: to call attention to the plight of the poor.

Unlike previous anarchist bombers, Henry was an intellectual

Now, armed with a bomb hidden under his coat, Henry walked up the Avenue de l'Opera, pausing at several elegant cafes, but he moved on because they were not full enough. He entered the Cafe Terminus, which is still there, near the Gare St Lazare, ordered two beers, and a cigar.

With the latter he lit the fuse of his bomb, and threw it into the cafe, leaving carnage behind. Amid thick, acrid smoke, marble tables, metal chairs, and mirrors had shattered. The screams and shouts of those wounded joined the smoke.

Henry ran away, before being wrestled to the ground after a fierce struggle. In the cafe, 20 people had been wounded, some very seriously, one of whom would die.

Along with the bombing of the Liceo theatre in Barcelona, the attack on the Cafe Terminus signalled a marked change in targets of terrorists.

Where before it was policemen or heads of state - the French president Sadi Carnot was assassinated the same year - who were the targets of violent anarchists, now it was ordinary people. The bourgeois.

Guillotine

At his trial, Henry described how his love for humanity had been transformed into hatred for the ruling classes. Fifteen months earlier, one of his bombs had killed five policemen. Now he had gone out to kill bourgeois because they were who they were.

Henry was executed, by guillotine, three months after his attack

He had "no respect for human life, because the bourgeois themselves have absolutely none".

Emile Henry was guillotined at age 21.

There are of course salient differences between the terrorists of the 1890s and those in our world. For one thing, the role of religious fundamentalism, such as so-called jihadists who subscribe to al-Qaeda's world view, was not a part of anarchist attacks.

However, can we find useful parallels between Henry's bomb, or "deed" as the violent anarchists used to call such attacks, and terrorism today?

Then, as now, terrorists targeted anyone identified with their enemies. Moreover, both cut across social boundaries. Unlike the notorious French anarchist bombers Ravachol and Vaillant, who were decidedly down and out, Emile Henry was an intellectual.

Both groups have used weapons that levelled the playing fields. Dynamite, invented in 1868 by Alfred Nobel, represented as one contemporary put it "a modern revolutionary alchemy".

Kamikaze pilots

An American anarchist crowed, before being hanged in Chicago following the famous police riot at Haymarket, "in giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe, science has done its best work."

Both share a fervent belief in ideology, and confidence that eventually they will win - providing an apocalyptical, even millenarian aspect to terrorists

Likewise, road-side bombs in today's world have emerged as a weapon of choice. And then, as now, terrorist practitioners seek "revolutionary immortality" - hoping to inspire others with their heroic demise. Suicide bombers, however, with the exception of Kamikaze pilots, are a new phenomenon.

Both sets of terrorists target a powerful enemy, a structure they set out to destroy. For the anarchists, the enemy was the state, and the pillars that supported it - capitalism, the army, and the Church, with Henry adding the bourgeoisie.

For the anarchists, only the destruction of the state could bring equality and thus happiness.

In the case of jihadists today, the West and particularly the power of the United States stand as the target.

Moreover, both share a fervent belief in ideology, and confidence that eventually they will win. This provides something of an apocalyptical, even millenarian aspect to terrorists, many of whom are young, intent on changing the world.

In dealing with terrorism, both the French government more than 100 years ago and American officials in the early period of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, had a tendency to look for a centrally organised, massive conspiracy. Instead, they ought to have acknowledged the role of small groups or even isolated individuals undertaking locally organised, or freelance operations undertaken by "self-starter" terrorist groups.

Torture

Yet, there remains a fundamental difference between revolutionary violence and resistance violence, although they may well share tactics. The latter has in the 20th Century and beyond, been directed at occupying powers, for example, Israel, French forces in Algeria, and the US in Vietnam and Iraq.

Revolutionary and resistance terrorism, however, have in common that their violence is directed against states that they view as oppressive and whose presence they consider unjust.

The Madrid bombs of 2004 - an attack on civillians, not police or military

The anarchist attacks in the 1890s remind us of another dimension of terror where some people accuse the state itself of terrorism, undertaken often violently by a repressive state against its own people (or against those in places it invades or occupies).

This variety of terrorism is often conveniently forgotten or overlooked.

Indeed, one theory has it that "terrorism" began with the state, during the radical phase of the French Revolution.

Henry had been deeply affected by the state's increased repression of all dissidents. His father had seen state terror up close, condemned to death in absentia for having been a militant in the Paris Commune of 1871, after which at least 20,000 Parisians perished.

The over-reaction of state authorities in France, as well as in Italy and Spain, during the heyday of anarchist attacks did not work. Anarchists arrested in the systematic repression by the police in 1894, including a number of anarchist intellectuals put on trial that same year, accused of being in an "association of evil-doers," were not terrorists.

The French government used the panic that the anarchist bombs understandably brought to crack down on dissidents. The repression undercut the government's claim on moral authority. The French government in the 1890s did not torture prisoners - their Spanish counterpart did - public revulsion turned against the government and indeed the wave of attacks ended.

More than 100 years later, it is a policy from which today's elected leaders could, perhaps, learn.

John Merriman is the Charles Seymour professor of history at Yale University and author of The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-De-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror, published by JR Books.

Page last updated at 11:30 GMT, Tuesday, 2 March 2010

Did the discovery of cooking make us human?

By Clare Kingston BBC Horizon

Learning to cook created 'big brains'

Cooking is something we all take for granted but a new theory suggests that if we had not learned to cook food, not only would we still look like chimps but, like them, we would also be compelled to spend most of the day chewing.

Without cooking, an average person would have to eat around five kilos of raw food to get enough calories to survive.

The daily mountain of fruit and vegetables would mean a six-hour chewing marathon.

It is already accepted that the introduction of meat into our ancestors' diet caused their brains to grow and their intelligence to increase.

Meat - a more concentrated form of energy - not only meant bigger brains for our ancestors, but also an end to the need to devote nearly all their time to foraging to maintain energy levels.

As a consequence, more time was available for social structure to develop.

'Accident'

Harvard Professor Richard Wrangham believes there is more to it than simply discovering meat.

Australopithecus was ape-like but walked upright like humans

He thinks that it is not so much a change in the ingredients of our diet, but the way in which we prepare them that has caused the radical evolution of our species.

"I think cooking is arguably the biggest increase in the quality of the diet in the whole of the history of life," he says.

"Our ancestors most probably dropped food in fire accidently. They would have found it was delicious and that set us off on a whole new direction."

To understand how and when our bodies changed, we need to take a closer look at what our ancestors ate by studying the fossil records.

Our earliest ancestor was the ape-like Australopithecus.

Australopithecus had a large belly containing a big large-intestine, essential to digest the robust plant matter, and had large, flat teeth which it used for grinding and crushing tough vegetation.

None the less, it was Australopithecus that moved out of the trees and onto the African savannah, and started to eat the animals that grazed there.

And it was this change of habitat, lifestyle and diet that also prompted major changes in anatomy.

Bigger brain

The eating of meat ties in with an evolutionary shift 2.3 million years ago resulting in a more human-looking ancestor with sharper teeth and a 30% bigger brain, called Homo habilis.

The brain consumes 20% of a person's energy while sitting

The most momentous shift however, happened 1.8 million years ago when Homo erectus - our first "truly human" ancestor arrived on the scene.

Homo erectus had an even bigger brain, smaller jaws and teeth.

Erectus also had a similar body shape to us. Shorter arms and longer legs appeared, and gone was the large vegetable-processing gut, meaning that Erectus could not only walk upright, but could also run.

He was cleverer and faster, and - according to Professor Wrangham - he had learned how to cook.

"Cooking made our guts smaller," he says. "Once we cooked our food, we didn't need big guts.

"They're costly in terms of energy. Individuals that were born with small guts were able to save energy, have more babies and survive better."

Professor Peter Wheeler from Liverpool John Moores University and his colleague, Leslie Aiello, think it was this change in our digestive system that specifically allowed our brains to get larger.

Energy transfer

Cooking food breaks down its cells, meaning that our stomachs need to do less work to liberate the nutrients our bodies need.

This, says Wheeler, "freed up energy which could then be used to power a larger brain. The increase in brain-size mirrors the reduction in the size of the gut."

Significantly Wheeler and Aiello found that the reduction in the size of our digestive system was exactly the same amount that our brains grew by - 20%.

Professor Stephen Secor at the University of Alabama found that not only does cooked food release more energy, but the body uses less energy in digesting it.

He uses pythons as a model for digestion as they stay still for up to six days while digesting a meal. This makes them the perfect model as the only energy they expend is on digestion.

His research shows that pythons use 24% less energy digesting cooked meat, compared with raw.

So being human might all be down to energy.

Cooking is essentially a form of pre-digestion, which has transferred energy use from our guts to our brains.

According to Professors Wheeler and Wrangham and their colleagues, it is no coincidence that humans - the cleverest species on earth - are also the only species that cooks.

Page last updated at 23:49 GMT, Thursday, 4 March 2010

Dinosaur extinction link to crater confirmed

By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News, The Woodlands, Texas

The dinosaurs were one of many groups to go extinct

An international panel of experts has strongly endorsed evidence that a space impact was behind the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs.

They reached the consensus after conducting the most wide-ranging analysis yet of the evidence.

Writing in Science journal, they rule out alternative theories such as large-scale volcanism.

The analysis has been discussed at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in the US.

A panel of 41 international experts reviewed 20 years' worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, around 65 million years ago.

The extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including the dinosaurs, bird-like pterosaurs and large marine reptiles, clearing the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.

FROM THE TODAY PROGRAMME More from Today programme

Their review of the evidence shows that the extinction was caused by a massive asteroid or comet smashing into Earth at Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

When the 10km-15km space rock struck the Yucatan, the explosive energy released was equivalent to 100 trillion tonnes of TNT - over a billion times more explosive than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The huge crater that remains from the event is some 180km in diameter and surrounded by a circular fault about 240km in diameter.

"You can actually trace debris right up to the rim of the crater from across the world," Co-author Dr David Kring, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, told BBC News.

"You can start in Europe, cross the Atlantic and it just thickens as you approach the Chicxulub impact crater."

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BBC's David Shukman: Asteroid was '20 times faster than a bullet'

In the new study, scientists examined the work of palaeontologists, geochemists, climate modellers, geophysicists and sedimentologists who have been gathering evidence about the K-T extinction.

They conclude that the Chicxulub space impact is the only plausible explanation for the devastation evident in geological records.

The initial impact would have triggered large-scale fires, huge earthquakes, and continental landslides which generated tsunamis.

Dr Gareth Collins, one of the review's co-authors from Imperial College London, said the asteroid hit Earth "20 times faster than a speeding bullet".

He added: "The explosion of hot rock and gas would have looked like a huge ball of fire on the horizon, grilling any living creature in the immediate vicinity that couldn't find shelter."

Dr Joanna Morgan, another co-author from Imperial, commented: "The final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs happened when blasted material was ejected at high velocity into the atmosphere. This shrouded the planet in darkness and caused a global winter, killing off many species that couldn't adapt to this hellish environment."

The ejected debris (white) can be seen in rocks from 65 million years ago

The review confirms that a unique layer of debris ejected from a crater is compositionally linked to the Mexican crater and is also coincident with rocks associated at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary.

The team also says that an abundance of shocked quartz in rock layers across the world at the K-T boundary lends further weight to conclusions that a massive meteorite impact happened at the time of the mass extinction. This form of the mineral occurs when rocks have been hit very quickly by a massive force. It is only found at nuclear explosion sites and at asteroid impact sites.

"Combining all available data from different science disciplines led us to conclude that a large asteroid impact 65 million years ago in modern day Mexico was the major cause of the mass extinctions," said author Dr Peter Schulte, assistant professor at the University of Erlangen in Germany.

David Kring explained: "I have been invited to give colloquia at a number of universities across North America and I had always been surprised by the number of people who didn't think the connection was as firm as it was.

"I think it was very important for this distinguished panel of experts from around the world who have seen the evidence from their own geographic quarter to debate the issue and come to a final resolution. I think it is that international consensus that is so important in this case."

Today, the crater is buried under Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, but weaknesses in the overlying rock have produced a ring of slumping that is visible from space

Scientists have previously argued about whether the extinction was caused by a space impact or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in India, where there were a series of super-volcanic eruptions that lasted approximately 1.5 million years.

These eruptions spewed more than 1,000,000 cu km of basaltic lava across the Deccan Traps - enough to fill the Black Sea twice. These were thought to have caused a cooling of the atmosphere and acid rain on a global scale.

Despite evidence for relatively active volcanism in the Deccan Traps at the time, marine and land ecosystems showed only minor changes within the 500,000 years before the time of the K-T mass extinction.

Furthermore, computer models and observational data suggest the release of gases such as sulphur into the atmosphere after each volcanic eruption in the Deccan Traps would have had a short-lived effect on the planet.

The panel also discounted previous studies that suggested the Chicxulub impact occurred 300,000 years prior to the mass extinction event.

Scientists estimate that this type of impact occurs on average about once every 100 million years; about five have occurred during the evolution of complex life on Earth.

The importance of Chicxulub was cemented by the announcement in 1991 of the discovery of shocked quartz in a 1.6km-deep drill hole from the crater.

David Kring, Alan Hildebrand and William Boynton presented their results at that year's LPSC, then held at Nasa's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Dr Kring explained that he was "elated" with the consensus about the link between Chicxulub and the K-T mass extinction.

Page last updated at 07:43 GMT, Sunday, 21 February 2010

Voodoo religion's role in helping Haiti's quake victims

By Henri Astier BBC News, Miami

Some argue voodoo should play a leading role

A month before Haiti's devastating earthquake, prominent musician Theodore "Lolo" Beaubrun and a few friends were summoned by spirits who tried to warn them about the impending cataclysm.

"They told us to pray for Haiti because many people would die," says Mr Beaubrun - the frontman of the group Boukman Eksperyans.

"I thought it was about politics. I didn't know it was going to be an earthquake."

The spirits may have failed to make themselves understood, but according to Mr Beaubrun - whose music and outlook are steeped in voodoo culture - they are standing by the Haitian people in their hour of need.

"We are extremely traumatised," he says.

"We have seen death. But the spirits entered the minds of people to advise and help them heal. They speak to us. It's like therapy."

But Mr Breaubrun's idea that voodoo should play a leading role in helping victims of the country's worst-ever natural disaster is currently little more than a hope.

Voodoo relief

Haiti's traditional religion has kept a low profile in the aftermath of the earthquake.

The songs and prayers heard amid the rubble and tent cities around Port-au-Prince are overwhelmingly Christian.

Some Christian communities do not want to give food to voodoo followers Theodore 'Lolo' Beaubrun Singer

The voodoo religion may be practised by many Haitians - the exact number is unknown - and has not been totally absent from the aid effort.

Louis Leslie Marcelin, another singer who also describes himself as a spiritual guide and healer, has used his home in Port-au-Prince as an alternative school and a care centre.

"We work with children and parents," he says. "We work with poor people whose relatives have died."

But such efforts by voodoo leaders have been few and far between. The bulk of the religious relief aid work in Haiti has been carried out by Catholic and Protestant groups.

"For a religion that's supposedly the national religion of the Haitian people, it's amazingly absent in the earthquake phenomena," says Gerald Murray, a University of Florida anthropologist who has carried out extensive fieldwork in Haiti.

Prejudice

Some argue that voodoo's conspicuous absence in the aftermath of the quake is due to prejudice. Many Christians - especially Protestants - regard voodoo as devil worship.

This idea was expressed in its most striking form by the US televangelist Pat Robertson, who said shortly after the quake that Haiti had made a "pact with the devil" when it defeated French colonists two centuries ago.

According to Mr Beaubrun, such attitudes have been in evidence during relief operations.

"Some Christian communities do not want to give food to voodoo followers," he says.

"As soon as they see people wearing peasant clothes or voodoo handkerchiefs, they put them aside and deny them food.

"This is something I've seen."

The 12 January quake left more than a million homeless

Hostility to voodoo - which blends elements of Christianity with West African animistic beliefs and practices - is indeed rife among some evangelical groups in Haiti and elsewhere.

However most mainstream Christians - notably Catholics - have insisted on not marginalising the voodoo faith.

Father Reginald Jean-Marie of Notre-Dame, the largest Roman Catholic church in Miami's Little Haiti, insists: "Any system of belief that people cling to especially in a time of crisis can be of help to them."

Blaming voodoo for the country's problems, he says, is "theological nonsense".

"When the (Asian) tsunami happened it was not because people did wrong," he says.

"Things happen because they are natural disasters. If you claim that voodoo is responsible for those things, then is God responsible when bad things happen to good Christians?"

Faraway god

The three days of prayer held for earthquake victims on 12, 13 and 14 February pointedly included voodoo practitioners.

And, perhaps equally pointedly, a houngan (voodoo priest) taking part in the event stressed the common element between his faith and Christianity.

Religious faith plays an important role in Haitian society

He told the BBC he would "pray to bondye" - referring to the voodoo supreme god, while not stressing the "loa", the lesser spirits that are at the centre of rituals.

This suggests tension between Haiti's rival faiths is not the main reason for voodoo's lack of visibility after the earthquake.

The principal factor, according to anthropologist Gerald Murray, could be theological.

In the voodoo belief system, natural disasters are not caused by the "loa", but by a distant "bondye".

The supreme being that unleashes the forces of nature is an unfathomable entity which cannot be influenced.

Only the lowly "loa", Mr Murray notes, can be accessed or propitiated - often through rituals led by houngans.

The main role of these specialists, Mr Murray adds, is the diagnosis and healing of an individual's illnesses.

"They have not traditionally played a role of national, social leaders of any type," he says.

"They will continue to be spirit healers for people who believe that their problems have been caused by the loa - but this earthquake was not caused by the loa."

Many Haitians will find solace in voodoo, which remains an important element of Haitian identity.

But the coping strategies it offers in the aftermath of the earthquake may be limited.

January 8, 2010

Op-Ed Columnist

The Messiah Complex

By DAVID BROOKS

Readers intending to watch the movie “Avatar” should know that major events in the plot are revealed.

Every age produces its own sort of fables, and our age seems to have produced The White Messiah fable.

This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.

Avid moviegoers will remember “A Man Called Horse,” which began to establish the pattern, and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” More people will have seen “Dances With Wolves” or “The Last Samurai.”

Kids have been given their own pure versions of the fable, like “Pocahontas” and “FernGully.”

It’s a pretty serviceable formula. Once a director selects the White Messiah fable, he or she doesn’t have to waste time explaining the plot because everybody knows roughly what’s going to happen.

The formula also gives movies a little socially conscious allure. Audiences like it because it is so environmentally sensitive. Academy Award voters like it because it is so multiculturally aware. Critics like it because the formula inevitably involves the loincloth-clad good guys sticking it to the military-industrial complex.

Yet of all the directors who have used versions of the White Messiah formula over the years, no one has done so with as much exuberance as James Cameron in “Avatar.”

“Avatar” is a racial fantasy par excellence. The hero is a white former Marine who is adrift in his civilization. He ends up working with a giant corporation and flies through space to help plunder the environment of a pristine planet and displace its peace-loving natives.

The peace-loving natives — compiled from a mélange of Native American, African, Vietnamese, Iraqi and other cultural fragments — are like the peace-loving natives you’ve seen in a hundred other movies. They’re tall, muscular and admirably slender. They walk around nearly naked. They are phenomenal athletes and pretty good singers and dancers.

The white guy notices that the peace-loving natives are much cooler than the greedy corporate tools and the bloodthirsty U.S. military types he came over with. He goes to live with the natives, and, in short order, he’s the most awesome member of their tribe. He has sex with their hottest babe. He learns to jump through the jungle and ride horses. It turns out that he’s even got more guts and athletic prowess than they do. He flies the big red bird that no one in generations has been able to master.

Along the way, he has his consciousness raised. The peace-loving natives are at one with nature, and even have a fiber-optic cable sticking out of their bodies that they can plug into horses and trees, which is like Horse Whispering without the wireless technology. Because they are not corrupted by things like literacy, cellphones and blockbuster movies, they have deep and tranquil souls.

The natives help the white guy discover that he, too, has a deep and tranquil soul.

The natives have hot bodies and perfect ecological sensibilities, but they are natural creatures, not history-making ones. When the military-industrial complex comes in to strip mine their homes, they need a White Messiah to lead and inspire the defense.

Our hero leaps in, with the help of a pack of dinosaurs summoned by Mother Earth. As he and his fellow freedom fighters kill wave after wave of Marines or former Marines or whatever they are, he achieves the ultimate prize: He is accepted by the natives and can spend the rest of his life in their excellent culture.

Cameron’s handling of the White Messiah fable is not the reason “Avatar” is such a huge global hit. As John Podhoretz wrote in The Weekly Standard, “Cameron has simply used these familiar bromides as shorthand to give his special-effects spectacular some resonance.” The plotline gives global audiences a chance to see American troops get killed. It offers useful hooks on which McDonald’s and other corporations can hang their tie-in campaigns.

Still, would it be totally annoying to point out that the whole White Messiah fable, especially as Cameron applies it, is kind of offensive?

It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

It’s just escapism, obviously, but benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind — even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains.