Zimbabwe came bottom of the 178 countries ranked, below second-worst performer Swaziland, Burundi, the
Democratic Republic of Congo and Ukraine.

The Group of Eight industrial powers meet in Saint Petersburg this weekend but have not much to smile about, according to the index.

Italy came out best in 66th place, ahead of Germany (81), Japan (95), Britain (108), Canada (111), France (129), the United States (150) and Russia, in lowly 172nd place.

Andrew Simms, NEF's policy director, said the index "addresses the relative success or failure of countries in giving their citizens a good life while respecting the environmental resource limits on which all our lives depend."

Nic Marks, the head of NEF's centre for wellbeing, added: "It is clear that no single nation listed in the Happy Planet Index has got everything right.

"But the index does reveal patterns that show how we might better achieve long and happy lives for all, whilst living within our environmental means," he said, according to British daily The Guardian.

"The challenge is: can we learn the lessons and apply them?"

Island nations performed particularly well in the rankings. But Vanuatu, with a population of around 200,000, topped them all.

"Don't tell too many people, please," said Marke Lowen of Vanuatu Online, the republic's online newspaper.

"People are generally happy here because they are very satisfied with very little," he told The Guardian.

"This is not a consumer-driven society. Life here is about community and family and goodwill to other people. It's a place where you don't worry too much."

"The only things we fear are cyclones or earthquakes."

Selected others: 17. Philippines; 23. Indonesia; 31. China; 32. Thailand; 44. Malaysia; 62. India; 64. Iceland; 70. Netherlands; 87. Spain; 88. Hong Kong; 89. Saudi Arabia; 99. Denmark; 112. Pakistan; 115. Norway; 119. Sweden; 123. Finland; 139. Australia; 154. UAE; 156. South Africa; 159. Kuwait; 166. Qatar.

Only the Sahara has more desert than Australia, whose red center has long been thought uninhabitable by modern man.

But while Australia's central deserts are now seen as benign and are starting to yield fruit, salination is turning once productive farmland into lifeless dirt tracts and threatening the country's A$30 billion ($22 billion) agriculture export industry, one of the biggest in the world.

Around 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of land is now officially salt-affected, half of that in southwest Western Australia.

The amount of saline land could rise to 6 million hectares (15 million acres) in 50 years, but that would be the upper limit, says Kevin Goss, chief executive officer for the Cooperative Research Center for Plant-based Management of Dryland Salinity.

Farmers are terrified of the salt, which cuts land values by one-third and reduces output.

Prime Minister John Howard has rated salinity as one of the biggest environmental challenges facing the country and has backed a A$1.4 billion national action plan.

The most celebrated win so far is the reversal of salinity in Australia's biggest river, the Murray, through a combination of engineering works and management of water flows. A national tree-planting campaign is being accompanied by the use of salt-tolerant plants to combat growth of desertification.

FIGHTING BACK

The salt-ravaged land adjacent to Ive's Dicks Creek farm is a mere 35 km (22 miles) from the national capital, Canberra.

Ive bought his 250-hectare (620-acre) property in 1980 to run sheep and cattle. His land was then badly degraded, with active saline seeps on 23 percent of the property.

When it rained, water raced down from rocky bare ridges into the more fertile gully below, further eroding soil and raising the subterranean water table, bringing salt to the surface.

But Ive fought the creeping death that salt brought to his land. He put in contoured and graded banks of land on the hillsides and into the valley to control water rushing down from the ridges. He improved the soil on the gully pastures then put stock up on the rocky ridges when drought threatened.

"The sheep can turn the hills into a moonscape, but they are not prone to erosion because they are so rocky," says Ive, as he proudly looked down on a green valley as a winter wind buffeted a row of planted trees behind him.

When it rained, Ive took sheep off the hills to allow native trees to germinate without competition. Now he has 200,000 hilltop trees. Elsewhere he planted 25,000 furniture-grade trees.

Today, green pastures slope up a ridge thickly wooded with trees on Ive's side of a boundary fence.

On the other side, the hilltop is bare, a scratchy pasture is dotted with skeletons of dead trees and salt patches have eaten to the edge of the fence. Desertification is at the doorstep.

Ive points to a nearby metal drum. It contains a piezometer, a piece of plastic tubing sunk into the earth to measure the depth of the water table beneath.

Over the last 25 years, the water table on Ive's farm has dropped from earth-surface level in places to seven metres depth.

Now only two percent of his property is affected by saline seeps. Water salinity has fallen from up to 20,000 electrical conductivity units to about 60 -- better than Canberra drinking water which has 120.

But not all farmers have been able to perform Ive's "balancing act" between farm production and farm protection.

Most of Australia's 400,000 farmers and family members are still coming to grips with the fight against salinity, which is most widespread in agricultural areas between the vast outback deserts and the coast.

OUTBACK DESERTS GROWING

The outback deserts are also growing, due to climate change. Officially, lowland arid regions cover 3.6 million square km (1.4 million sq miles) of Australia's heart.

"Central Australia will get drier. And the periods of drought are likely to get more ferocious," says Professor Mike Archer, a longtime desert enthusiast and dean of science at the University of New South Wales.

Feral predators, tourists, grazing animals and big fires are all adding to pressures on Australia's deserts, after already making 20 or more mammal species extinct. But it is not all bad.

"Our deserts are in pretty good nick (shape)," says Mark Stafford-Smith, research scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).

"We've got these remarkable areas which are 70 percent of the continent and have some extraordinary biodiversity."

A growing love affair with Australia's deserts is pushing the CSIRO and others to develop a potentially lucrative bush tucker (native food) industry, new medicines from desert plants, salt-tolerant wheat and genetically engineered tomatoes, as well as sustainable harvesting of kangaroos and native plants.

One Western Australian farmer is growing ocean perch in salty ponds on his saline land.

An analysis of virus samples from six of the eight members of the family showed 32 mutations accumulated as it spread, according to the confidential research obtained by Nature.

The analysis had been presented by virologist Malik Pereis of the University of Hong Kong at a closed meeting of animal and human health experts in Jakarta last month.

The first infected member of the family was a 37-year-old woman who probably caught the disease from poultry and then transmitted it to relatives before she died.

The World Health Organization (WHO), which has admitted that the cluster of cases was probably caused by human-to-human transmission, had said in May that there had been no significant mutations in the strain found the in family.

Nature said although the WHO statement was not incorrect, more could have been said about the changes that were found.

"One of the mutations confers resistance to the antiviral drug amantadine, a fact not mentioned in the WHO statement," the journal said.

Scientists fear the H5N1 virus that has killed more than 100 people and millions of bird since 2003 as it spread from Asia to Europe and Africa could mutate into a strain that could spark a human pandemic.

The mutations found in the virus from the Indonesian cluster were not significant enough for the virus to spread beyond the family.

Virologists contacted by Nature said part of the reason the significance of the mutations is unclear is because withholding the information has hampered the study of the virus.

Local cameraman Aleksey Khoroshaylo visits the shore of the Taganrogskiy Bay regularly. The Yeysk Spit is a traditional location for weddings. On that day Aleksey arrived to film the visit of a newlywed couple.

"We came here to film the newlyweds as they drove in. Our driver then says to me: Look, there is a hovercraft. I took my camera, looked at it in a close-up and saw that this could not be a hovercraft because it was too high above the horizon," Aleksey said.

The video recording made by Center TV lasts for 53 seconds. The tape shows a disc-shaped object moving above the sea at a distance of about four kilometers from the shore. Then a flash appears in the centre and a point of light separates and moves into the skies along a bow-shaped trajectory.

Experts have viewed the tape dozens of times trying to compare the object with a ship or a plane. They have even called the military with inquiries and have recieved the definite reply that no tests had been held in the bay on that day.

Yuriy Stroganov, head of a local TV company, and a member of the international organization MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) carefully examined the video and concluded that "the object itself, its movements, especially those mimicking a falling leaf - the shaking from side to side - are internationally known UFO characteristics".

Stroganov plans to send this footage the U.S. He expressed his hope that an American specialist would try to determine the origin of the object.

Looking behind some of the claims made in the novel, the aim of the debate will be to provide an academic response to a work of fiction and "above all explore how enthusiasm has changed attitudes to academic history by replacing it with an alternative version, which the public cannot distinguish from the real thing", reads an abstract to the session.

The IMC is one of the UK's largest academic conferences, with nearly 1,000 research papers presented by medieval specialists from 40 countries.

Subjects from every aspect of medieval life and culture have been covered at this year's three-day conference, which began on Tuesday, from reluctant virgins to female undertakers, courtly knights to grumpy old men, from attitudes to disability and mental health to symbolism and codes in art and manuscripts.

St George - with his reputation as a protector of crusaders - has also been a central figure in discussions, with Scottish academics presenting research that proved that there was a cult of St George in late medieval Scotland.

"We know that George was a popular name in Scottish aristocratic families in the 14th century," said Stephen Boardman, a lecturer in Scottish history at the University of Edinburgh, who presented the paper to the IMC.

"Towards the end of the 15th century the George cult was still going strong, despite the fact that England had been at war with Scotland for much of this time. In fact, James IV was parading around with a St George badge when he was visited by English ambassadors in 1503," he explained.

Alan V Murray, from the University of Leeds' Institute for Medieval Studies, added that St George played a part in some Scottish folk traditions up until the start of the second world war.

Dr Murray said: "Around New Year, Scottish villages often used to put on traditional plays performed by players known as guisers. Many of the plays centred around a combat between St George and a Turkish knight, just as they did in English mummers' plays. In some places guisers' plays continued well into the 20th century."

Axel Müller, director of the IMC, said medieval studies were thriving around the globe.

He said: "Many of the successes and problems we encounter in modern society have their counterparts in the medieval world, and we believe that studying that world can cast a light on many present-day dilemmas: how to treat prisoners of war, how to prevent crime and anti-social behaviour, coping with pain and suffering, surviving in dysfunctional families [and] living harmoniously with people of different cultural and religious viewpoints."