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World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk

Adam Goodes: softly spoken champion with strength to unite a divided nation

Posted: 25 Jan 2014 01:06 AM PST

The fiercely proud Adnyamathanha man has proved that he is a leader on and off the field

Paul Farrell

Fresh clashes kill 12 in China's Xinjiang region

Posted: 25 Jan 2014 01:05 AM PST

Six die in explosions and another six shot dead by police in Xinjiang, home to ethnic minority Uighurs

Six people have died in explosions and another six have been shot dead by police in fresh violence in China's restive western region of Xinjiang, home to the ethnic minority Uighurs, state media reported.

Assailants threw explosives at police in Xinhe county in the Aksu prefecture on Friday, triggering a clash in which police killed six and captured five suspects, according to the Tianshan news outlet, which is run by the regional Communist party.

Another six people died in blasts, the news outlet said, without providing details.

The official Xinhua news agency reported that the Uighur town of Xinhe was shaken by three blasts that hit a hair salon, a produce market and a vehicle that exploded after it was surrounded by police. The case is under investigation.

Xinjiang is home to low-intensity insurgency by native Turkish Muslim Uighurs against what they see as discrimination and religious suppression by China's majority Han people. The government has responded with a crackdown on what it calls terrorism incited by separatists who are influenced by radical Islam.

The Tianshan report called Friday's violence an act of terrorism.

Last year, clashes between authorities and members of the minority group left scores dead, including 40 police officers.

The violence included an unprecedented attack on Tiananmen Gate in Beijing that killed three Uighur assailants and two tourists last year.


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Australian of the Year Awards 2014 - as it happened

Posted: 25 Jan 2014 12:41 AM PST

Follow the awards ceremony from Canberra as the announcements happen

Paul Farrell

Cairo bombings: militant group claims responsibility as new blast hits city

Posted: 25 Jan 2014 12:02 AM PST

Tension high in Egyptian capital as al-Qaida inspired group says it will carry out more attacks

Philip Hensher: fault lines at the Jaipur literature festival

Posted: 25 Jan 2014 12:00 AM PST

India's foremost literary event is going from strength to strength, with thousands on hand to take in Xiaolu Guo's remarks about the regrettable dominance of English

When January begins to chuck it down, and agents start to ask awkward questions about delivering the next novel, literary people long to go on pilgrimage. Or the modern equivalent of the pilgrimage, where the object of devotion uproots itself and sends itself to the far corners of the world to bask in the adoration of an unfamiliar and often bewildered audience: in short, January is when lucky literary folk take off for an international festival.

Whenever novelists gather, they start to exchange tales of woe at the hands of provincial English festivals ("And I had to sleep on the sofa of the chairman's mistress, and she asked if I would mind if the dog stayed at his usual end …"). Or they begin, greedily, to talk about the joys of an obscenely overfunded jolly at the expense of some foreign government ("I had my own driver and limo, and only two sessions, five days apart, and a suite at the Oberoi …").

Since the founding of the Jaipur literature festival in 2006, opportunities for both disaster and excess have greatly expanded. The first outing attracted a mere 100 passing customers, according to the festival's ebullient guiding spirit, William Dalrymple. Since then, it has grown exponentially, and has featured an immense row over the invitation to Salman Rushdie in 2012. It remains, astonishingly, free, and the number of attendees is now in the hundreds of thousands, surging in and out, listening intently, furiously arguing, gazing at the faces of novelists of whom they might never have heard. Of course, there is also a certain enchanting meat-market aspect to it. I dare say that if you are a Jaipur teenager, your parents may bluntly refuse you permission to go and hang out down the mall. "I'm just popping to the Jaipur literature festival," on the other hand, may well elicit not just permission but 500 rupees to spend on a book.

Anyway, the success of the enterprise has encouraged all sorts of other literary festivals across the region. "Seriously," an Indian star novelist friend of mine told me, "I could spend six months of every year going from Asian festival to Asian festival." There are said to be 60 in India alone. Jaipur, by popular consent, remains the best and most enjoyable, largely thanks to efficient organisation and the constant presence of Dalrymple, by now apparently regarded by the Indian reading public as an honorary Indian, occupying the place formerly taken by Mark Tully.

There are always fault lines in subcontinental engagements with literature, and they often come to the forefront at festivals. When I went to the Hay Dhaka festival in 2012, there was a marvellous tension between writers in English and writers in Bengali, sparked off by their holding a predominantly English-language festival in the hallowed ground of the Bangla Academy. I felt rather divided, having listened to my Bengali poet brother-in-law, Jahir Hasan, going on about Bengali writers who "departed from the mainstream" by writing in English. There was less of that in the air at Jaipur, which after all is overwhelmingly a festival for writing in English, but there clearly was a division working its way to the surface between Anglo-American writers and those from other backgrounds. This year, the Anglo-American stars included Jonathan Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jim Crace, Justin Cartwright, AN Wilson, Mary Beard, Nicholas Shakespeare and dozens of other curious and busy folk, hoping to flog a few books in the freezing Rajasthani January air.

The division was quite apparent in some of the press coverage – the Times of India barely mentioned any writers other than those ethnically or nationally Indian. Franzen needn't have bothered coming, for all the attention the paper paid him. Lahiri, born in London and a US citizen, happily counts as Indian for the Jaipur audience on the basis of her ethnicity. Indian public discourse is capable of more jingoistic sentiment than western media would find comfortable, but papers still didn't bite on the Chinese English-language novelist Xiaolu Guo's contention that American writing was "massively overrated" and that Franzen's work was "smeared" by it, and that what was needed was for reading habits to become much less English. It is true that by the conventional standards of the English-language novel, Xiaolu Guo's work in English is poor. It would take some nerve, however, if she were implying that what is needed is an entire change of critical standards in order to recognise her own work as a masterpiece.

I saw Guo in the green room, looking jolly pleased with herself, but was promptly whisked away to a fierce interview with a gentleman from Kolkata. "You moderated the session with Antony Beevor on history. May I ask, following on from that –" "No, I didn't. That was someone else." "Excuse me?" "I wasn't there. You've mistaken me for someone else." "Ah. Well, may I ask the question anyway?" Many writers spend the days at the festival, and the evenings with the entertainment. There was, too, the knowledge that Dame Judi and Bill Nighy and Celia Imrie were in town, shooting the sequel to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – the Second-Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I fervently hope. Surely they would turn up at some point, dimming the star power on the podium?

Perhaps they did. But I was there with my husband and there were a lot of Bangladeshi friends to catch up with. One day we simply bunked off and went to see the Monkey temple – I can't tell you what magnetic pull is exerted on me by those two words. I can report, however, that Jaipur possesses probably one of the half dozen most perfectly beautiful cinemas in the entire world, the Raj Mandir, where we wasted an evening watching the divine Aamir Khan rob banks and perform circus tricks in an irresistibly rubbish movie, in preference to talking about "Whither travel writing?" – I hope forgivably. How did we get there? Oh, we had our own driver and limo, of course. Didn't I mention?

Philip Hensher

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Experience: I survived an earthquake while scuba diving

Posted: 25 Jan 2014 12:00 AM PST

'I could see waterfalls of sand pouring over the coral, and on the seafloor, a few metres below us, cracks began forming and the sand was sucked down'

I've been scuba diving for 15 years. I love the calmness of being submerged, the hypnotic sound of my breath and the quiet clicks of fish eating coral.

Last October, I was on a diving holiday in the Philippines with a friend. It was a sunny morning, and after breakfast we boarded the boat with seven other advanced divers. This was my 40th dive, so I knew the drill. I put on the gear and dived off the boat, slowly sinking to about 20m. I saw luminous corals, languorous turtles silhouetted in the deep blue of the ocean and hundreds of tropical fish.

After nearly 45 minutes, the sound of my breathing was drowned out by a low rumble like an engine, and I felt deep, powerful vibrations, as if a big boat with a propeller was passing overhead. I looked up but couldn't see anything. The dive instructor's eyes were wide with confusion: he didn't know what was going on either, even though he'd done thousands of dives. We swam next to each other, staying close to the side of the reef. I couldn't see my friend and the other divers. The situation felt sinister and dangerous.

Then we were enveloped by clouds of white sand that mushroomed up around us, and I thought, could it be an underwater bomb? A giant turtle raced past us and into the deep; they are normally slow movers, so this was very weird behaviour. The vibration became so intense, I could feel it in my bones, and the sound turned into a deafening roar. I could see waterfalls of sand pouring over the coral, and on the sea floor, a few metres below us, cracks began forming and the sand was sucked down. That's when I realised it was an earthquake. The noise was the sound of the Earth splintering open and grinding against itself.

The instructor and I held hands and looked into each other's eyes; I felt comforted by his presence. I was paralysed but clear-headed. My heart was beating strong and fast, and everything seemed incredibly clear and vibrant. I didn't panic, but my body felt on high alert, ready to react. I remember thinking, "I have no power over whatever this is. We are going to have to stay very still and very close, and let it do whatever it's going to do."

The sound and vibrations lasted only two or three minutes, though it felt a lot longer, and when they stopped I heard the swoosh of the sand falling over the seabed. Uneasily, I followed the dive master through the plumes of sand, searching for the others. It took enormous willpower to resist the urge to swim to the surface as fast as I could, but after five minutes we saw them about 20m away and swam over. We all held hands and stopped for three minutes to avoid decompression sickness, which can be fatal. It was a huge relief to see my friend, and we all shared incredulous looks, before finally surfacing, pulling out our breathing apparatus and shouting, "What was that?"

Back on the boat, we rushed to check the news and discovered we had witnessed a huge earthquake, measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale. It released more energy than 30 Hiroshima bombs, and we had been pretty much at the epicentre. I was high on adrenaline and felt lucky not just to have survived, but also to have experienced nature at its most stunning, and most ferocious. On the news, we were horrified to see that more than 200 people had died, with 1,000 injured. I spent the night on the boat with the rest of the group, drinking lots of very strong Philippine rum.

Nearly all those who died were on the island of Bohol, 30 minutes away. That morning, I had been due to take a boat to hospital there, because I had bad earache, but at the last minute I decided to dive. Had I gone, I would have arrived as the earthquake hit. I now believe the open ocean is the safest place you can be during an earthquake: you can move with the tremors, and are far from falling buildings or debris that could kill you. The ocean saved my life.

Two weeks later, when I was back home, I heard that the same area of the Philippines had been hit by the deadliest storm on record, typhoon Haiyan. I was broken-hearted. I contacted the people I'd met and sent provisions and money to the worst-hit areas. The power of that earthquake made me realise how little control we have over life, and how fragile it is. And that it is at its most beautiful under the sea.

• As told to Moya Sarner.

Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@theguardian.com


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I'm in Kolkata, not Davos, and the view from here is somewhat different | Ian Jack

Posted: 25 Jan 2014 12:00 AM PST

At the World Economic Forum this week the Pope called for a redistribution of wealth, but here in India justice for the poor seems a long way off

The World Economic Forum in Davos this week heard the Pope call for a redistribution of wealth. There's certainly a lot to take and to give. A paper published by Oxfam on Monday showed that the world's richest 85 people have the same amount of wealth as the 3.5 billion people who comprise the poorer half of the world's population. To quote Larry Elliott, you can fit 85 people on a double-decker bus. Redistribute the wealth of this busload and a population equivalent to that of Africa, India and China put together becomes twice as rich.

If the prevailing theory of global capitalism is to be believed – that, above all else, people are motivated by money – then the poorer half of the word should, metaphorically speaking, be upending these 85 plutocrats by the ankles and shaking them down for every last cent of their £1.7 trillion. So why don't the poor rise up? I'm not necessarily advocating this – turmoil is never an attractive prospect if you have a house, a family and a salary to defend – but surprisingly few of the poor themselves seem to want to; and no political ideology, at least one that's potent and anywhere near popular, has emerged recently to encourage them.

On the same day that Oxfam published its report I flew to Kolkata, from where I write this. Thanks to my host's generosity I flew business class. It was marvellous. Money buys comfort: much more legroom, seats that turn into beds, hot towels, better food, white tablecloths. But money also buys you preference in the public realm, from the state as well as the airline, in the form of fast-tracking through immigration and security. Perhaps every country now feels bound to advertise itself as "business friendly" by pandering to self-importance in this way, but it still felt odd at Kolkata to use an immigration desk marked for use only by passengers who paid higher fares. The implication is that money can relieve the state of its obligation to treat citizens equally – that the state can be bought. It confirms a long-suspected reality.

When I first came to Kolkata in 1977 it was still called Calcutta and enjoyed a global reputation for poverty, slums and chaos that has since been overtaken by other cities and regions, such as Mumbai and the Horn of Africa. Raw statistics alone don't furnish reputations and Calcutta's had grown partly because Mother Teresa's mission to rescue dying pavement dwellers attracted the attention of so many TV crews and writers. But the facts were stark and visible. The Bangladesh war had filled slums with refugees, the city's infrastructure was ruinous and its economy, tied to the old imperial trades in jute, coal and tea, looked to be in unstoppable decline. The Naxalite uprising, an attempted insurrection led by young middle-class Marxists, had been ruthlessly suppressed a few years before but not before it red-flagged the city to investors as a place to avoid.

Thanks to a wonderful book by a Guardian writer, the late Geoffrey Moorhouse, I knew many of these facts before I arrived. First published in 1971 and titled simply Calcutta, it remains one of the best introductions to any great city in the way it combines historical research with contemporary observation, and sympathy with amusement and rage. Crossing the bridge over the Hooghly that morning on the journey from the station, I saw the city as Moorhouse had seen it: the smoking river ferries, the trams, the broken pavements, the imperial history behind the blackened commercial buildings that would look at home in Victorian Leeds or Glasgow – and of course the poor, washing at standpipes or stretched out asleep among exhausted dogs and the busy feet of passers-by.

Will such people ever find justice? After spending a lot of the book examining the miserable condition of the poor, Moorhouse in his last paragraph breaks out into a fantasy of bloody retribution, the night when "every poor man in the city rises from his pavement and his squalid bustee [slum] and at last dispossesses the rich with crazy ferocity". At first they'll pick off the rich in small handfuls, "hauling them out of their cars and butchering them on the spot". Then the rickshaw men, who "like animals" have spent their lives pulling rich Calcuttans around their city, will signal a general slaughter by tinkling their rickshaw bells. "The time for compassion will be past."

Nothing like that has happened in the 40 years since. Only 12 years later Moorhouse was admitting in a new introduction to his book that his closing paragraph was "much less prophecy than speculation" but that he was expressing as best he could "what Calcutta made me feel". And the fact is that many people felt a similar thirst for or fear of an apocalypse and sometimes a mixture of both. Outsiders felt it especially. It seemed a quite logical outcome. You had a few people with cars and air-conditioned homes surrounded by a sea of people with much less and a significant minority with nothing at all. Why wouldn't the second kill and rob the first? Yet not only has the bloodlust failed to arrive, the political party that embodied both the angry hopes of the poor and the guilt-cum-fear-cum-idealism of the Calcutta bourgeoisie has also collapsed.

The CPM, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), ruled Bengal without interruption between 1977 and 2011 and for a long time seemed unassailable. As Amit Chaudhuri writes in Calcutta: Two Years in the City, its ideology was "embraced by almost every intellectual as well as moral person" in the streets of his youth. In the countryside the party devised an energetic programme of agricultural reform that gave land rights to sharecroppers and encouraged the planting of high-yield crops. People said the CPM had the peasant vote absolutely sewn-up; its cadres were disciplined, its beliefs righteous, its corruption much less than in other parties. Things began to go wrong – arrogance, the brutal imposition of the party will, as well as the usual sloppiness of any party grown too used to power. A lost election was on the cards, clearly. What nobody expected was the CPM's complete expunction, as though Marx and Lenin had never been painted on thousands of walls or been mentioned in millions of conversations: the long history of popular Marxism in Bengal vanished as though it had never been.

So now on the way in from the airport I saw no portraits of bald men with trim beards and longhaired men with bushy ones, no hammers and no sickles. A movement that for a time promised to make the poor richer now seems ghostlier than the Indian mythologies it wanted to replace. Its nemesis is a popular woman chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, who leads a simple life and likes the colour blue, in which much of official Kolkata has been painted. Blue isn't red. Beyond that, it's hard to see an ideological programme, though that would hardly make Bengal unusual. The Pope may seek redistribution and Davos may announce it desirable, but the club-class traveller will be safe in his roomy seat for a long time yet.

Ian Jack

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AFL legend Adam Goodes wins Australian of the Year

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 11:48 PM PST

Sydney Swans superstar sees winning accolade as a chance to celebrate his Indigenous culture

Paul Farrell

NHS patients 'should be more pushy to get drugs'

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 11:00 PM PST

Prof David Haslam, chairman of Nice, says the British should be more like Americans, who tend to be less deferential

British patients should adopt more "pushy" American attitudes with their doctors to get drugs they are entitled to, the head of the NHS rationing body has said.

Prof David Haslam, chairman of the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (Nice), said that patients need to see themselves as "equal partners" with doctors to get the treatment they need.

And he explained that after working as a doctor near an US air force base in Cambridgeshire, he noticed that American patients had a less deferential approach than local residents.

"Americans tended to want to know more about their treatment than the British who tend to be much more 'thank you doctor, I will take that'," he told the Daily Telegraph.

Earlier this week a government report found that a third of patients with kidney cancer and one in three motor neurone disease sufferers are not receiving the drugs they need.

Health experts warned that the research by the Health and Social Care Information Centre had exposed an "endemic and disastrous postcode lottery" of care within the health service.

Prof Haslam said an investigation was under way to uncover why so many patients are not being prescribed medications .

But he explained that patients should demand the drugs they need and only be refused Nice-approved drugs if they are unsuitable

He said that, although he was not suggesting that patients should be confrontational, he wanted them to tell doctors if they think they are missing out on treatments which could help them.

He said: "When products have been approved for use by the NHS by Nice, patients have a legal right to those drugs – as long as they are clinically appropriate. The take-up should be much higher than it currently is."

The former GP also urged people to have a better understanding of the drugs they are taking or might be able to take, allowing them to work better with their doctor.

He added that it was "essential for the future of the health service and the future health of the nation" for patients to understand their conditions and treatments.


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How did I manage to fall for a Goa gem scam?

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 11:00 PM PST

Sarah Bowles is articulate and bright. Here she talks about how she lost her life savings in India to fraudsters

When Sarah Bowles woke up in a Berlin youth hostel on a chilly morning just before Christmas, she felt both sick and relieved. Sick because she knew that her £6,500 life savings were lost and she would have to explain to her family why she was in Germany rather than travelling in India. And yet relieved that her ordeal was over, not least as she had avoided the real threat of ending up in prison.

Her story? She had fallen for one of the growing number of ingenious jewellery scams being perpetrated against lone travellers – particularly in the Indian state of Goa, but also elsewhere.

Back in the UK, the articulate, educated 28-year-old from Surrey can't quite believe what happened. In an interview with Guardian Money, she reveals how she fell for a highly sophisticated scam in which the fraudsters were so confident of ripping her off that they gave her a plane ticket to Berlin and €500 in cash.

However, Bowles got off relatively lightly, she has since discovered. Another woman who was similarly conned reportedly lost $50,000. Her hope is that others will learn from her experience.

Bowles's story starts last month. After travelling around India with a friend, who left to go home, she found herself alone for the first time, staying in a beach hut in Goa. It was part of a trip of a lifetime for which she had saved for years, and she was planning the next leg.

As she was walking through a market one day, Bowles was greeted by two young Indian men, who asked "how is your life?" They got into a conversation, and she ended up having tea with them. The well-to-do pair talked about their families and their lives as jewellery designers in Mumbai, further up the coast. They asked her why Europeans were friendly to Indian visitors to Europe, but standoff-ish in India, making her feel guilty.

The conversation then turned to a nearby market they would visit the next day. Bowles had been planning to visit it at some point, and so they agreed to go together. The following day only one of the duo turned up but her initial fears that he would try to hit on her came to nothing and, Bowles says, they passed a nice, relaxed day together. Returning from the market on the back of his scooter, he shot past the turning to her beach, announcing they would instead head to his cousin's home for dinner.

Several other men were there, and during the meal they casually mentioned an opportunity to earn some money. They said several other tourists had helped them by shipping gems abroad using their duty free allowance of £10,000 – earning themselves £4,000 in the process. All Bowles had to do was pack up a parcel containing the jewels, then send it overseas to herself. She would collect it at the other end and hand it to their representative.

Bowles's immediate reaction was that it sounded too good to be true and she wasn't interested. At this point a smartly dressed, likeable, well-educated man arrived, who Bowles now knows was designed to give the venture credibility.

Each time she changed the subject, the conversation kept returning to the proposal. When she revealed she'd considered travelling to Australia next, she was offered a free flight. She said she'd sleep on the idea and finally, at 2am, was dropped back at her beach hut having agreed to meet them at 8am.

To this day, Bowles doesn't really know why she met them again, but has put it down to her over-developed "English" sense of not wanting to let them down. She was shown the jewels but not allowed to touch them. A parcel was made up, and before she knew it she had agreed to travel to Berlin. The men took her to a local post office and handed over the parcel addressed to "General Post Office Berlin".

All through the process the men repeatedly emphasised that they were trusting her with their very expensive jewels and begged her not to let them down.

While the parcel cleared customs (expected to take three days) the men insisted Bowles stay in their swanky apartment in Goa and she was accompanied at all times. But after two days she took a phone call that turned her world upside down.

An officious-sounding man, purportedly from Indian Customs, said he suspected her of jewel smuggling and wanted to know why there was no purchase receipt to accompany the customs form. He gave her 24 hours to prove that she had paid for the items, or things would "not be good for her".

At this news, panic broke out among the group and in her words, they were all "visibly shitting themselves", and talking about going to jail. She was told that their lawyer would deal with the matter, but it might be better for all concerned if they got her out of the country.

An old chip and pin reader was produced and she says it was clear that she would have to pay for the items – in effect to provide a receipt and avoid the prospect of being arrested. She was promised that the money would be reimbursed four days later. The gang knew she had £6,500 in her account, and that was the sum that was inputted into the machine.

The gang was concerned that her bank, Lloyds, would decline the payment, but it went through. The date, she ruefully recalls, was Friday 13 December.

Within hours Bowles was heading to the airport. The men provided the flight ticket and to give the scam credence, they gave her a bundle of cash – €500 – to pay for a hotel when she arrived in Berlin. She was reassured that the Indian customs officer had been bribed and it was going to be safe to leave.

When she arrived in a freezing Berlin, Bowles found a hostel and called her contact back in Goa. Her calls were not answered, but a text prompted a response asking her how she was. Within a day, all the Indian mobile numbers she'd been given went dead. Alarm bells had already been ringing, but the truth of what had happened to her finally became clear when it emerged there was no General Post Office in Berlin. After three nights she was forced to call her parents and say she was coming home.

"I now know, from reading various accounts online, that this is a widespread scam practised across different parts of India. I suspect it has survived because of its reliance on making the victim feel they are a guilty party and less likely to report it."

Concerned that she had handed over her card details to the gang, and wanting to know why Lloyds had allowed such a large payment to go through, Bowles contacted the bank. However, she says Lloyds's complex fraud department couldn't have been less helpful. After a very brief look at her notes they asked her: "What did you expect to happen?"

Bowles was told that the payment had gone through unquestioned as it had been a chip and pin purchase, and that she would have to put the loss down to experience. However, Lloyds has since agreed to refund her the £193 overseas fees the transction incurred as a goodwill gesture.

The obvious question is: why did an intelligent woman of 28 fall for such a plan? Bowles pauses, then replies: "Right from the start alarm bells were ringing, but looking back on it they were very careful not to give me any time alone or with other travellers. I kept thinking there would be an opportunity to opt out but before I knew it, it was happening. Originally I felt that I had wanted to show the first pair I met that not all westerners were standoff-ish, and to this day I find it hard to believe that they weren't genuine people. I was determined to believe that people are generally good and trustworthy, despite some negative experiences I'd had on the trip. I have learned a lot about myself, not least that I have to lose my fear of letting people down. I trusted people that I shouldn't have."

• Sarah Bowles is not her real name

What happens if you are forced to hand over your card details?

Bowles' case raises the interesting question: does the bank have any responsibility if the cardholder hands over their details under duress and their customer loses out?

If you are kidnapped or physically threatened with violence and are forced to hand over your card and pin, the banks will often refund in full – although they will want to see evidence in the form of a police report. Disputes in this area often centre around what constitutes a physical threat, which is very case specific.

In Bowles's case, she handed over her card to make the payment voluntarily (albeit under the perceived threat of ending up in an Indian jail) and in banking terms "authorised" the payment. Had she gone to local police and told them she been physically threatened, Lloyds would have been more likely to refund her.

A Lloyds spokeswoman told Guardian Money: "We have sophisticated fraud detection systems in place to protect our customers. However in relation to this case, as the customer authorised the transaction we were unable to help on this occasion."

Bowles said a chargeback would have been highly unlikely to have worked in this instance, as a chargeback attempts to rely on the money being available in the benefiting account. Fraudsters are generally quick to move money on.

A spokesman for the Financial Ombudsman Service, to which consumers often turn after being denied bank refunds, says: "If a consumer has been forced, or compelled to hand over their card or pin number there are a number of factors that the ombudsman would consider when looking at the complaint. These range from the circumstances surrounding the incident, the involvement of the police/reporting of the theft and the subsequent actions of the bank.

"We have seen cases in the past where claims have been rejected because the consumer was not physically forced to give up their card. The threat – implicit or direct – that compels a consumer to hand over their card should always be considered seriously by a bank, as should any police report supporting this.

"However, we would not expect the bank or credit provider to be a source of compensation because a crime has been committed against a consumer. If you are the victim of a crime and your card is stolen, then the most sensible thing to do is report the loss of your card as soon as possible and contact the police. It is rare for the ombudsman to see a case where allegations of blackmail may be involved. Realistically, these cases are better suited to a court to address, in light of the complexities involved in investigating the allegations."

Miles Brignall

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Simon Gerrans on verge of record third win in Tour Down Under

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 10:54 PM PST

Australian rider finishes third in stage five to take the lead back from compatriot Cadel Evans

Quebec fire: rescuers battle through ice in search for bodies of 30 old people

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 09:14 PM PST

Eight confirmed dead as emergency workers use steam machines in hunt through destroyed retirement home

Grant Baker wins Mavericks big wave contest

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 09:04 PM PST

Forty-year-old South African beats hand-picked field of competitors in huge surf in northern California

No, Thailand's protesters don't want 'less democracy' | Dave Sherman

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 08:00 PM PST

Democracy does not begin and end with the ballot box – it's a myth that this is all about an elite rejecting the popular vote

As Thailand's protests intensify and a state of emergency is imposed in and around Bangkok, some have begun referring to the demonstrations as "antidemocratic", zeroing in on the opposition's boycott of a forthcoming election and the protest leaders' calls for an unelected "people's council" to replace existing democratic structures. But the truth is more complex, with the protesters being arguably – and paradoxically – more democratically minded than the elected government they oppose. To understand how this is possible, one has to scratch beneath the surface of Thai politics and dispel some myths.

Myth 1: The protesters are mainly 'Bangkok elites'

The government is led by Yingluck Shinawatra, who is widely acknowledged to be the proxy of her self-exiled brother and former PM Thaksin Shinawatra. The protests began last November after the parliament passed an amnesty bill that wiped Thaskin's slate clean, allowing him to return to Thailand without serving his two-year jail sentence.

Spearheaded by the opposition Democrat party and Bangkok's middle classes, the protests grew even after the bill was withdrawn, morphing into a wider movement to reform Thailand's politics, cleansing them of Thaksin's influence once and for all. These protesters are often called an "elite" by pro-Thaksin groups – it's a term used to discredit their opponents, and it has caught on among many in the international media. In reality, while the protests indeed have their centre in Bangkok, most protesters are fairly diverse, and include the city's middle and working classes, as well as students and people of all walks of life from Thailand's south. Crucially, the majority of the Bangkok-born working class do not support the government.

It is true that the protest does not enjoy much support in the country's northern and northeastern regions, where the majority of Thailand's population resides. This geographic divide highlights the protest's limits as a national movement, but it in no way supports the notion that protesters are an unrepresentative elite.

Myth 2: Urban protesters oppose rural Thais' desire for equality

The protests were never driven by a need of urban Thais to deprive their rural compatriots of their rights, but were triggered by specific and highly provocative actions by the pro-Thaksin government and parliament. The controversial amnesty bill carried one clear message: we are here to serve, first and foremost, the needs of Thaksin Shinawatra, not the country – and it was, in effect, the last straw.

But while the protesters want to remove Thaksin from Thailand's body politic, they do not specifically seek to punish his rural supporters. When Yingluck Shinawatra first assumed power after winning the 2011 election, all Thais accepted the result peacefully. Had "Bangkok elites" wanted to bring down the government simply because it represented the power of their opponents, they would've come out against it much sooner.

Some protesters have, unfortunately, said disparaging things about rural Thais, questioning their ability to make the "right" electoral choices due to a lack of education and other perceived faults. What this shows is that Thailand has a long way to go in conquering the many stereotypes that exist among its people – but it does not point to a protest born of a desire of one part of the population to disenfranchise another.

Myth 3: The protesters want 'less democracy'

Thai protesters will invariably tell you that democracy does not end with elections – that it is not simply a piece of paper placed into a ballot box. This shows parallels to Egypt last year, as masses piled into the streets, challenging the elected government of Mohamed Morsi in its drive to consolidate power and impose a theocratic state on an unwilling populace. It's not that Egyptians did not want democracy – a year earlier they had died in the streets fighting for it – but they felt democracy was usurped by the very government elected under its rules.

Thai protesters' anger and disillusionment comes from a similar place. They are reacting to the government's abuses of power, its vast corruption and a majoritarian style of rule that excluded opponents from any decision-making on key issues of governance. As the government became more and more dedicated to fulfilling Thaksin's need to regain power, it became not just distasteful to the protesters, but politically illegitimate.

To the protesters, Thaksin has always been seen as an autocrat for whom democracy is simply a means to holding on to power, not a guiding political philosophy. Therefore opposing Thaksin and his proxy government is not seen as antidemocratic – as Thaksin himself is antidemocratic in substance, if democratic in form.

Meanwhile, Yingluck's dissolution of parliament and call for new elections as the protests intensified was viewed as nothing but a raised middle finger to the protesters: "We don't care what you're protesting or demanding; we will have an election, and we will win on the strength of our supporters alone. You don't matter!" The protesters heard this message loud and clear, and it only deepened their resolve to resist an illegitimate government, hiding behind the facade of an election.

Hence, the demand for "reform before election" – with most protesters accepting democracy with free elections as a basic form of government, but only after reforming the system to eliminate Thaksin's influence from Thai politics.

In truth, eliminating Thaksin and his influence from Thai politics may be a very tall order, and the protest leaders' unyielding demands for a vague and unelected council will have to be tempered by a more realistic and nationally acceptable compromise. Nevertheless, the protests in Thailand are not fundamentally antidemocratic. It is a reform movement born of a deep frustration and outrage with the way democracy has been cheapened and abused by one man and his interminable drive to regain power.

Dave Sherman

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Gmail outage hits millions across the world including India, US and UK

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 07:10 PM PST

Email service used by hundreds of millions went down for at least an hour in several countries on Friday

Australian same-sex couples flock to New Zealand to get married

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 06:19 PM PST

Registrar reports growing international interest since the country legalised gay weddings in August 2013

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Ukrainian president offers concessions to protesters

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 05:36 PM PST

Viktor Yanukovich promises to reshuffle government and bring opposition leaders into anti-crisis team after days of deadly riots

Ukraine's embattled president has offered a string of concessions to the protesters occupying central Kiev. But the package is unlikely to bring an end to the conflict, which has already claimed at least three lives in the capital.

After lengthy negotiations with opposition leaders, Viktor Yanukovych saidon Friday he would reshuffle the government and modify draconian laws against demonstrations. But the key demand, for snap parliamentary and presidential elections, does not appear to be on the table, nor is there any suggestion that the president is ready to sack his hardline prime minister, Mykola Azarov.

In central Kiev, anti-government activists who occupied another government building overnight, were unimpressed with the concessions. At the barricades near the Dynamo Kiev football stadium, protesters resumed their assault on police lines overnight, with barricades of burning tyres lit and projectiles fired at riot police using a giant catapult. The police doused the fires with water cannon but were not responding with force.

As the night continued, the majority of those at the barricade were the hardcore of the protest movement, dressed in combat fatigues and ready for violence.

Earlier in the day, there had been a more mixed crowd at the barricade. Natalia, a 50-year-old engineer from the east of Ukraine, had arrived on Thursday, bringing helmets and medicines to the barricades. "I came here to defend the future of my children. We have no future if we are ruled by this criminal," she said.

Sergiy, a 20-year-old student wearing helmet and gas mask and wielding a wooden stick and a shield fashioned from a traffic sign, said he thought negotiating with the president was pointless: "This bastard is only playing for time, but the country has already risen up against him."

He claimed that a friend of his was beaten up by men in civilian clothes after being seized from the protest, then taken to a forest and stripped naked.

There were many such stories. A video of one incident where riot police humiliated a naked protester and took trophy photographs has circulated widely, sparking further outrage. Mikhailo Gavrilyuk told journalists he was seized on Wednesday as he attempted to help an injured fellow protester. "They dragged me off and started beating me. They threw me to the ground, put their legs on my head and photographed me. They took turns to beat me, and someone suggested they should cut off my hair, which they then did with a knife."

He later had his clothes taken away and was taken, naked, to a police station, he said. The interior ministry has announced an investigation into the incident, but Gavrilyuk said he expected fellow protesters to exact "terrible revenge".

The changes to the laws and government reshuffle are expected to take place at an emergency parliamentary session scheduled for next Tuesday. But as the weekend approached, Yanukovych faced not only a stand-off in Kiev but also a breakdown in his authority across the west of the country, where activists have seized administrative buildings in a number of cities, and built barricades around them. The interior ministry claimed that a policeman had been shot while walking home, unarmed, on Friday night. Details of the incident, and whether it was linked to the protest, were not forthcoming.

The trio of opposition political leaders who took part in discussions with Yanukovych have come under pressure to take a firmer stance against the government and withdraw from negotiations. Former heavyweight boxer Vitali Klitschko on Wednesday promised to "go on the attack" if Yanukovych did not call elections within 24 hours, but is now calling on protesters to hold a ceasefire, uneasy about being seen as responsible for escalating the situation. However, he said on Friday that the protest would not wane without Yanukovych's resignation.

Klitschko said: "A month ago this would have been over with the firing of Zakharchenko [the interior minister]. Two weeks ago people would have been satisfied with the dismissal of the government. Today people will only accept the resignation of the president."

The European commission official Stefan Füle travelled to Kiev to meet with Yanukovych on Friday and urged him to refrain from further violence. Füle was instrumental in arranging an association agreement between the European Union and Ukraine - that Yanukovych backed out of at the last minute - sparking the initial round of protests two months ago. In France and Germany, the Ukrainian ambassadors were summoned by the respective foreign ministries, who expressed concern over the violence.

Shaun Walker
Oksana Grytsenko

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Australian dollar heads for four-year low amid China growth fears

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The Aussie dipped below 87 US cents after RBA member said it could go as low as 80

US Senator John McCain calls on Egypt to release Australian journalist

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Peter Greste and two Al Jazeera colleagues have been held for almost a month by military government

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Why it's time to redefine Australia Day

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Can we celebrate our nationhood in a spirit of genuine reconciliation? When acknowledgement of past wrongs is accompanied by a monumental gesture of racial progress?

Paul Daley

Win: a trip to Italy

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 04:01 PM PST

To be in with the chance of winning a four-night stay in Italy for two, simply fill out your details here

Associated Press demands halt to sale of painting by George Zimmerman

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After previous Zimmerman work sold for more than $100,000, AP seeks halt of sale of painting depicting state prosecutor

Judge orders hospital to cut life support from brain-dead pregnant woman

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Marlise Munoz kept alive despite family's wishes because hospital claimed it illegal to withdraw treatment from pregnant patient

Tom Dart

Texas hospital acknowledges brain-dead status of pregnant woman

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Fort Worth hospital keeping Marlise Munoz alive despite family's wishes heads to court but admits fetus is no longer viable

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America's UK bases way past their sell-by date | @guardianletters

Posted: 24 Jan 2014 01:00 PM PST

You do my heart good, Seumas Milne (70 years of foreign troops? We should close the bases, 23 January). Someone has noticed they are still here, and so are we who live beyond the fences. The people of East Anglia have grown used to their neighbours, living amiably enough with them and tolerating the inconveniences that pervade daily life. The great majority of East Anglians claim to understand the need for the presence of the visiting forces, a view that perhaps fails to take into account the major changes the world has seen. The myth persists that the local economies depend on the bases despite the fact that this has not been the case for many a long year.

Very occasionally the temperature is raised, an example being in the aftermath of the Libyan bombings in 1986. The bombers that took part in that raid flew from Lakenheath, which as well as being a USAF base is an English village. The village quite reasonably felt reprisals were likely and reacted vociferously. The Americans retreated; it is now rare to find them involved in community activities. All shops in three towns and all the villages traded in both UK and US currencies. This has now stopped. The forces rely entirely on their own resources for all goods and services. Little America (or Instant Sunshine as it is known to US forces) is as distant from the locals as the US mainland. But they are digging in. Housing outside the base has been abandoned in favour of new homes safe inside. From where I stand, just this side of the border, I see no sign of a retreat.

So many people, including my late husband, Cyril, and the legendary John Bugg, spent many years trying to show how futile this presence had become. I suppose we must believe that the weapons have gone, and that RAF (one lone squadron leader) Lakenheath is now a training facility. This must be a very expensive way to fund training and the noise is not abated. I have a dream for that vast space: what a perfect place for a wind farm and a new incinerator. Now, that would benefit the local economy and allow us to listen to the Archers.
Pam Brown
Lakenheath, Suffolk

• The freeing of brownfield land on this scale and with good communications and utility services should be the catalyst for at least six new towns, with some of the social housing our people need so much. One assumes that the MoD still owns these areas – that they have not been sold to foreign owners and leased back – so development should be for the public good in many ways. So what are we waiting for? The idea could be sold to the US as a cash saving for them and might even appeal to the Republicans.
Andrew Carmichael
Preston

• Seumas Milne mentions the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement, which facilitates the co-operation on which the UK's nuclear weapons programme depends and was last renewed for 10 years in 2004. Co-operation is not merely one-way: the US military outsources work to the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment, currently operated by a consortium of Serco, Jacobs Engineering and Lockheed Martin, the latter two being US companies. There is a strong legal argument that the MDA breaches the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which prohibits exchanges of nuclear weapons technology between states. It would be interesting to know what plans the government have to debate, announce or even celebrate the renewal of the MDA this year.
Patrick Keiller
Oxford

• Seumas Milne's well-reasoned piece raises the issue of the sovereign base areas on Cyprus. All his arguments apply with equal force to this remnant of British imperialism in the Mediterranean. The precise role of the SBAs has long been public knowledge and the fact that they are largely concerned with gathering signals intelligence can no longer justify their retention in the 21st century, particularly in the light of recent revelations about the mass eavesdropping activities of the NSA and GCHQ. It is surely time for a public debate that could lead to their closure, a prospect that would have wide support in Cyprus.
John Berry
Bridgwater, Somerset

• There also needs to be a hard look at the Nato, that is US, nuclear armed bases across Europe, which are also part of the US global military empire. There are five nuclear armed bases in non-nuclear countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. The host countries, in times of conflict, can take control of the nuclear armed planes; their pilots are trained to do this. Further, the states, including the UK, are tied into Nato's nuclear policies which still, unbelievably, include the first use of nuclear weapons. So, effectively, not only the UK but the whole of Europe is part of the US offensive posture. As if there was not enough killing power stationed in Europe, the US is developing new, faster aircraft which could be configured for Europe – part of the Pentagon's prompt global strike programme.

Maybe getting rid of Nato bases is "political science fiction", as Seumas says in the Ecuadorian context. But to achieve any moves towards a more stable world, there should be questions asked in the UK and Europe on Nato: its domination by the Pentagon, its global reach and its dangerous nuclear policies.
Rae Street
Littleborough, Lancashire

• The total subservience of the UK to the US is reflected in the confidential cost-sharing agreement, signed in the 70s, that applies to all US bases and provides a multi-million pound subsidy. The bases are run as dollar economies with goods flown in that are free of customs and excise duty and VAT. US armed forces personnel pay no UK income tax, a privilege that extends to US employees of private contractors, some on six-figure salaries. There would be a concerted campaign to keep the bases open on the grounds that they generate jobs in their local areas, but the evidence is that alternative uses subsequent to base closures provide a broader range of skilled manufacturing and service jobs that more than compensates.
Steve Schofield
Bradford


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