Why West is not always best

As the rich world suffers its crisis of excess, we can learn much from peoples who live with little.

A study into why infants smile can help us teach us about autism and Down syndrome. Charlotte Philby pays a visit to Babylab HQ

The first attempt in 50 years to discover why infants smile can help our understanding of conditions such as autism and Down syndrome. Charlotte Philby visits Babylab HQ

Quite how hollow a victory would have beckoned Frankel at Goodwood next week, but for the sporting intervention of Sheikh Mohammed, became evident yesterday when only seven others remained in contention for the Group One Qipco Sussex Stakes. These include his own pacemaker, Bullet Train. Fortunately the sheikh had already committed his Godolphin stable to supplementing Farhh, an excellent second to Nathaniel in the Eclipse last time. That colt was duly added to the field yesterday for a fee of £19,500. Even so, a lap of honour so surely beckons the unbeaten champion that Coral offer odds of just 1-20. "Though the addition of Farhh ensures a new foe, it will still be one of the biggest shocks ever seen on a racetrack if Frankel does not make it win No 12," said the firm's spokesman, David Stevens.

Mineral-rich Guinea is scrapping a controversial mining deal after fears it represented bad value for the country's valuable assets, keenly in demand from the likes of Rio Tinto and Brazil's Vale.

According to Anna Richardson, "we each make about 200 eating decisions a day". Judging from the ballooning of the national waistline, pretty much all of those decisions are "Oh go on then. I shouldn't but I will".

Serves 2-4

Cirque Mandingue, who open the Roundhouse’s Circusfest season, have strong and exuberant acrobats, slightly hampered by a clichéd sense of theatre. The core team do pyramid balancing, tumbling and stomping dance moves. The energy dips when they start clowning or telling stories.

Hillary Clinton launches search after photograph appears to show fate of US pioneer's aeroplane

If Rashid isn't British, I'm not sure that anyone qualifies. A big, genial ex-rugby league player, he calls an alleyway a "snicket" and says "job's a good'un" when something's gone well. He's about as Bradford as they come – the only awkward detail being that you now have to specify which district of Bradford you're talking about. Channel 4 had chosen one of Britain's most segregated cities for its experiment in multicultural understanding – Make Bradford British – and what it hoped to work out was what common values might unite a citizenry so sharply divided by race and class. It was Big Brother with a social mission – eight pointedly different people invited to share a house and settle their differences, amicably if possible, though obviously a little friction wasn't going to go amiss.

From a £400 Alice Temperley Filofax to a gold-nibbed Montblanc pen, Britain's stationery fetish is refusing to be erased by technology

"I get the feeling sometimes that the staff want us to fail," said Stefan, one of three men who featured in Daddy Daycare, a Channel 4 reality series designed to address a social crisis that almost certainly doesn't exist. I don't mean for a moment, by the way, that there are no incompetent or deadbeat fathers out there. Or that it isn't useful for even the most well-intentioned man to learn some lessons about childcare. But the implication that today's men are unusually bad at fatherhood ("Modern British life has spawned a generation of dysfunctional dads") is surely not true. Even the horror statistic used to underwrite this exercise in mental re-education could be seen from another angle as a silver lining: "Almost half of all mothers feel fathers don't do their share," said the voiceover at the beginning of the show. Really? You mean that as many as 50 per cent of mothers now feel fathers do? The truth of it was that it wasn't the staff at the south London nursery Stefan had been sent to who wanted him to fail. It was the production company. And even they only wanted him to fail a bit comically in the first half so that he could recover in the second, make a public act of contrition, and score a modest triumph before the final credits.