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

India PM Manmohan Singh to hand over power to Rahul Gandhi
Three tonnes of methamphetamine seized in southern Chinese village
Beneath Turkey's turmoil is a bitter battle between two wounded men | Fiachra Gibbons
London Zoo stocktake - the best pictures
Bulgarian and Romanian immigration hysteria 'fanned by far-right'
Michael Schumacher fans to mark his 45th birthday with silent march
Snapchat reacts to hacking group releasing millions of phone numbers
Scott Morrison refuses to confirm Operation Sovereign Borders briefings
It's a 'coward's punch': man whose son died at party says 'king hit' hides truth
Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas – review
Greenpeace activist Colin Russell may be asked to pay, hints Julie Bishop
Second Antarctic rescue? Aurora Australis on standby to free icebreaker
Tuaregs gather for 19th annual Ghat festival - in pictures
India has become a dystopia of extremes. But resistance is rising | John Pilger
Protect the Mozambique forest found on Google Earth, scientists say
Tony Abbott's Indigenous adviser speaks out on jailed youth
Bushfire fears as soaring temperatures make North Stradbroke battle tougher
Tony Abbott’s low-scoring over in the Ashes commentary box
David Cameron's internet porn filter is the start of censorship creep | Laurie Penny
Tony Abbott urged to rethink climate policy after hottest year on record
Snow blankets Boston as north-east US faces storm crisis
Cambodian police fire on striking garment workers
Panama canal expansion in doubt as president confronts European firms
Wet ‘n’ Wild festival customers to get refund after second event cancelled
Australia's convoluted visa laws force committed gay couples apart | Senthorun Raj

India PM Manmohan Singh to hand over power to Rahul Gandhi

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 01:14 AM PST

Gandhi right man to lead country if Congress wins election and that victory by BJP's Modi would be disastrous, says 81-year-old PM

India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has said he would step aside after 10 years in office, paving the way for Rahul Gandhi to take the reins if his party stays in power following this year's scheduled elections.

In only his third news conference in a decade, Singh said that Gandhi – the 43-year-old heir to India's Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty – has the best credentials to become the next head of Congress and prime minister. Singh is 81 and was not expected to seek another term.

"I have ruled myself out as a prime ministerial candidate," Singh said. "Rahul Gandhi has outstanding credentials ... I do hope the party will take the right decision at the appropriate time."

Friday's news conference comes at a time when the Congress party's stock is low, battered by corruption scandals, internal feuding, and an inability to deal with a stumbling economy and deep-rooted problems with poverty, infrastructure and education.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata party, led by Narendra Modi, has the momentum ahead of the May election, after trouncing Congress in recent state elections. The vote was seen as a gauge of voter sentiment in this secular democracy of 1.2 billion people.

Modi, chief minister of western Gujarat state for the past 11 years, is credited with turning his western state into an industrial haven. But critics question whether the Hindu nationalist chief can be a truly secular leader over India's many cultures.

Modi has been accused of doing little to stop anti-Muslim riots in the state in 2002, which left more than 1,000 dead.

"Without discussing the merits of Modi, it would be disastrous for the country to have Narendra Modi as the next prime minister," Singh said.

Asked about BJP claims that he was a "weak" prime minister, Singh responded: "If by a strong prime minister they mean you preside over the massacre of innocent citizens on the streets of Ahmadabad, if that is the measure of strength, I do not believe that is the sort of strength this country needs, least of all from its prime minister." Ahmadabad is the commercial centre of Gujarat.

Modi has denied any role in the violence and he says he has no responsibility for the killings. Last month, he said he was shaken to the core by the violence and his government responded to it swiftly and decisively.

Singh, a technocrat, was chosen to fill the prime minister's seat in 2004 by Sonia Gandhi, the widow of assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Singh has been widely seen as a regent, keeping the seat warm until Rahul Gandhi was ready to take what some see as his birthright.

Singh also addressed the recent diplomatic furore between India and the US, touched off by the arrest and strip search in New York of an Indian diplomat accused of underpaying her Indian maid.

Singh said relations with the US are a top priority.

"Recently there have been some hiccups," he said. "But I believe these are temporary aberrations. Diplomacy must be given a chance to resolve these differences."

Three tonnes of methamphetamine seized in southern Chinese village

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 01:06 AM PST

Police confiscate crystal meth and arrest 182 people working for drug gangs during raid in Guangdong province, officials say

Chinese authorities deployed helicopters, speedboats and paramilitary police to seize three tonnes of methamphetamine in a raid on a southern village notorious for illegal drugs production.

Security forces surrounded and then entered the village of Boshe, where more than a fifth of the households were suspected to be involved in or linked to the production and trafficking of drugs, Guangdong province's police force said on its website.

Police and paramilitary forces from four cities were mobilised in Sunday's raid and they arrested 182 suspects who worked for 18 large drug gangs, the statement said.

Police said: "The village has made a criminal drug production a clan-based, industrialised operation with local protection."

"The offenders have for a long time been brazenly committing crimes, avoiding investigations and even ganging up to violently oppose law enforcement."

China routinely carries out operations targeting illicit drug rings but it is unusual for such wide-ranging law enforcement resources to be deployed at once against a single village.

An aerial photo posted on the police website showed dozens of police vans parked in rows outside a walled village of densely-built old houses with traditional-style peaked, tiled roofs. Another photo showed a helicopter taking off and another one parked nearby. Speedboats were sent to prevent suspects from fleeing the coastal village by sea.

The Yangcheng Evening News, a local newspaper, said the raid involved 3,000 police officers who seized three tonnes of methamphetamine in the raid.

Photos showed paramilitary officers in camouflage uniforms and holding rifles stood over large boxes filled with large packets of what is presumably crystal meth.

Boshe's villagers have resisted Chinese authorities for years, blockading the village entrance with motorcycles when word of a raid spread. The villagers would brandish replica AK-47s, lay nail boards on the road and hurl rocks and homemade grenades at officers, said the paper.

The paper said police first captured the village party secretary, who allegedly was protecting the drug operations from authorities. Other officials captured included the local police chief and police officers.

The provincial police said the city of Lufeng, which Boshe is in, has in the past three years become the source of a third of the country's total crystal meth supply.

The Boshe raid was part of Operation Thunder, which was launched in July 2013 and has resulted in the detention of 11,000 suspects and the seizure of eight tonnes of drugs.

Beneath Turkey's turmoil is a bitter battle between two wounded men | Fiachra Gibbons

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 12:59 AM PST

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's abuse of power is being exposed by the equally intimidating exiled spiritual leader Fethullah Gülen

Imagine for a moment you saw yourself as a "model for the world" like the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who recently not only retained the world titles for locking up journalists and ordering Google to take down web pages, but also declared yet again that he would not rest until Turkey was a "top 10 democracy".

So what would you do if half of your inner circle of ministers and their sons were implicated in the biggest corruption scandal in Turkish history, accused among other things of taking bribes of tens of millions to ignore to billions of dollars of dodgy dealings?

Would you – as Erdoğan did – fire the police who uncovered the corruption; threaten to jail judges and curb their powers; bring in new prosecutors who are relaxed about people keeping millions in cash in shoes boxes, and order that henceforth police must tell ministers if they are thinking of investigating them, so they can tidy their shoe boxes away?

And would you also claim, like him, that "dark forces" in the same judiciary and police that you recently used to lock up your enemies, were plotting to assassinate you?

In a final flourish, Erdoğan allowed his interior minister not only to pick off the detectives investigating the minister and his son, but also to get rid of 70 police chiefs and 580 other officers in six days, while an equal number of Erdoğan supporters were rewarded with their jobs. The new police chiefs' first act was to refuse to investigate fresh corruption cases, one of which allegedly involves Erdoğan's son, Bilal.

Yet until the last few days, Erdoğan seemed as immune as ever to the normal rules of political gravity. This was a leader who not only remained after the deaths of young people during the Gezi protests this summer, but also persuaded a large section of the Turkish public that a crisis he himself had created was actually an international conspiracy against him by the EU, the US, Lufthansa – yes Lufthansa – and of course, Israel.

This time, however, Erdoğan appears to have been undermined by a fatal moment of sanity. After seven days of sacking and shredding, he finally asked four ministers to step down. One refused to go – and said that Erdogan himself should also resign.

In an ideal world the scandal would have been exposed by a fearless cadre of impartial prosecutors. The truth is more complicated. Almost certainly nothing would have come to light if Erdoğan had not crossed his most important former ally, the exiled spiritual leader Fethullah Gülen. The head of a worldwide movement dedicated to interfaith dialogue and reconciling Islam with science, Gülen's followers run a network of schools and media outlets including Turkey's biggest selling newspaper, Zaman.

Gülenists are widely believed to have infiltrated intelligence and the special courts, which were crucial to breaking the malign power of Turkey's coup-happy military by exposing alleged plots against Erdoğan and his moderately Islamist AK party, who were once seen as Turkey's great hope for reform. Awkward questions, however, began to surface when journalists who pried into the movement were rounded up with the ultra-secularist generals. As he was carted off to prison, one investigative reporter, Ahmet Sik, famously cried: "Touch them and you burn."

It is now Erdoğan who is feeling the heat after he threatened to close Gülen's schools. He was convinced the Gülenists were plotting to rid of him and afraid his authoritarianism would destroy the AK party if he assumed Putinesque presidential powers after a referendum later this year.

The first wave of corruption inquiries stopped just short of Erdoğan's own family, whose spectacular enrichment was one of the sparks of the Gezi protests. However, the usually circumspect Gülen delivered the lowest blow personally, saying he once warned a powerful politician of the dangers of his relationship with "a promiscuous woman". Ever the macho, Erdoğan threatened to "break the hands of the traitors" and declared a "new war of independence" against foreign interference (Gülen is exiled in the US). While some secularists revel in the battle, far more in Turkey are terrified at the damage that might be done by Erdoğan's fury.

Turkey has made huge strides in the past decade. Erdoğan and Gülen will be thanked by history for neutering the military, despite the questionable methods used. All that and more is now at risk as these two ill and wounded men go all out to destroy each other — the latest salvo being Erdoğan's use of the military yesterday to allege that it was Gülen, and Gülen alone, who was behind a plot against them. Oh the irony.

There was once much good in Erdoğan, a hardman footballer turned self-styled national saviour – and his fall is a great political tragedy. He promised Turks and Kurds peace, freedom and prosperity, and for a while seemed capable of delivering this. But he will leave a legacy of fear, censorship and corruption.

Now as he winds himself in the rhetoric of martyrdom and conspiracy, Erdoğan has one last chance to redeem himself in the manner of his going. Turkish history, however, is not littered with many edifying precedents.

Semi-secret organisations such as Gülen's Hizmet are not ideal champions of transparent democracy, particularly in a country cursed since Ottoman times by the unseen hand of masonic fraternities and a notorious "deep state". Like the military, they too must be tackled if real democracy is ever to thrive. But for now, with no opposition worthy of the name, and a civil society not yet strong enough to count, they are all Turkey has got.

Fiachra Gibbons

London Zoo stocktake - the best pictures

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 12:52 AM PST

From aardvarks to zebras, the residents of London Zoo came forth to be counted. Dozens of zookeepers coaxed out even the most reluctant creatures to record every resident

Jo Blason

Bulgarian and Romanian immigration hysteria 'fanned by far-right'

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 12:48 AM PST

Former Bulgarian foreign minister says talk of surge of eastern Europeans into UK is politically motivated and highly unlikely

Bulgaria's former foreign affairs minister has criticised the "mass hysteria" surrounding the immigration debate driven by the "far-right".

Nikolay Mladenov, who was Bulgaria's foreign affairs minister until last spring, said claims of a sudden influx of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants to Britain in 2014 were "politically motivated".

Mladenov, who is now the UN Special Representative for Iraq, told the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme that the media had done well to try to set right such suggestions, which "show that this whole mass hysteria, which has been fanned out by some media outlets in the UK, has been purely politically motivated and that there is no reason to believe that the UK will be swarmed by waves of immigrants from Bulgaria".

He added: "I think it's been entirely driven by the far-right political agenda."

Mladenov said the free movement of citizens had reciprocal benefits for host country and guest resident. "A number of people, yes, have moved and they contribute to the development of your economy, just as much as a number of Britons have found Bulgaria as a base to settle down and they contribute to our economy."

He added: "Most countries have benefited from open borders and from trade and from development in the European Union, so I don't think we should be searing of that – we should actually be encouraging it and make sure that those who are qualified find jobs and contribute."

Fears that hundreds of thousands of eastern Europeans would enter the UK when immigration restrictions were lifted on 1 January have dominated the right-wing press recently, although to date no such surge has occurred.

The quarantine period that prevented Bulgarians and Romanians from targeting working in the UK, as well as people from eight other EU countries, ended on New Year's Day, seven years after the two countries achieved full EU membership.

Laszlo Andor, the EU commissioner for employment, social affairs and inclusion, said there were already 3 million Bulgarians and Romanians living in other EU member states. "It is unlikely that there will be any major increase following the ending of the final restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian workers," he said.

Immigration levels on a par with numbers experienced by the UK in 2004, when Poland joined the EU, also seem unlikely.

The UK has put in place a new three-month minimum waiting time before these immigrants are able to claim out-of-work benefits.

Michael Schumacher fans to mark his 45th birthday with silent march

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 12:40 AM PST

Former champion's team Ferrari and F1 fans to mark occasion at French hospital where he remains in critical condition

Michael Schumacher's 45th birthday will be observed by fans and wellwishers outside the French hospital where the seven-time Formula One champion remains in an induced coma, after suffering serious head injuries in a skiing accident.

The Ferrari team, with whom Schumacher won a record five drivers' titles in a row between 2000 and 2004, have organised a silent march in support of their former driver to be held outside the University hospital, Grenoble.

The march is certain to be a sombre and poignant occasion although those present will hope the day will bring encouraging news on the German former racing driver, who is in a critical but stable condition.

No update was given on Schumacher's condition by the hospital or his management on Thursday, which indicated that there had been no change, although his family did make their first statement since the accident in which they insisted the most successful driver in F1 history would keep fighting.

"Following Michael's skiing accident, we would like to thank the people from all around the world who have expressed their sympathy and sent their best wishes for his recovery," the Schumacher family statement read.

"They are giving us great support. We all know he is a fighter and will not give up. Thank you." Schumacher's family have remained at his bedside since the weekend.

The 91-time grand prix winner, who suffered major brain trauma in the accident which occurred when skiing off-piste in the resort of Meribel last Sunday, remains in an artificially-induced coma. It is believed that his life was saved by his skiing helmet, which split on impact.

Schumacher was initially conscious before deteriorating into a critical condition. Rescuers were on hand within minutes of the accident and he was airlifted to hospital, where neurosurgeons have operated twice to remove blood clots on the brain and reduce swelling.

Doctors have said the impact caused numerous brain injuries including intracranial hematomas (multiple blood clots), bilateral lesions and bruising of the brain.

An initial operation carried out on Sunday to reduce swelling was followed by a second to remove the largest of a number of clots in his brain. Jacqueline Hubert, the hospital's director general, said on Tuesday that his condition had started to improve.

Snapchat reacts to hacking group releasing millions of phone numbers

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 12:28 AM PST

App will be updated to let users opt out of the 'Find Friends' function which searches for users in a phone’s address book

Helen Davidson

Scott Morrison refuses to confirm Operation Sovereign Borders briefings

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 12:25 AM PST

In his last briefing before Christmas, the immigration minister said he would issue a weekly email update

Oliver Laughland

It's a 'coward's punch': man whose son died at party says 'king hit' hides truth

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 12:02 AM PST

'Kings are supposed to be honourable people,' says Paul Stanley, whose 15-year-old son Matthew died in 2006

Daniel Hurst

Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas – review

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 12:00 AM PST

Christos Tsiolkas's followup to his much-acclaimed hit The Slap is another startling, profound novel about modern Australia

In his first novel since The Slap – which became an international bestseller, igniting debate over its depiction of the sexual and racial politics of Australia – Christos Tsiolkas chooses a telling phrase to describe a change of season. "Spring," we are told, "had yet to beat back winter."

This portrayal of climate as a fight is one of the recurrent images of competition that jostle against each other across the book's 500 pages. Two school students walking down a corridor are engaged in "a contest, who will move aside first, who will break first". Among the items stuck to the fridge door in the kitchen of a Greek-Australian family are a postcard from Europe and a photo of President Obama: symbols of the struggle within Australian culture between the roots of its first wave of immigrants and the cultural and economic superpower to which the nation increasingly looks.

In this antagonistic tale, the protagonist is, naturally, a competitor. Daniel Kelly is such a prodigy at swimming that he wins a scholarship to a posh Melbourne private school. At different times in a story that covers 16 years he is known as "Danny", "Dan", "Dino" and "Barracuda", a nickname prompted by his ruthless power in the water. This range of appellations reflects the unstable identity of the swimmer, who suffers both class and sexual confusion.

Kelly's coach is Frank Torma, an Australian of Hungarian stock; as befits the novel's exploration of personal and national character, almost every major character is an immigrant or emigrant of some sort. In early chapters set in the mid-90s, Torma believes that Danny has a shot at swimming for Team Australia in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. However, the reader soon suspects that this ambition has not been realised because – in interleaving sections that take place around 2010 – Dan (as he is now called) is living in Glasgow, with a male partner, and so phobic about swimming pools that he won't even go in the water as part of his work as a carer for brain-injured patients.

One of the most impressive aspects of The Slap was Tsiolkas's handling of narration: each chapter of that novel took the viewpoint of a different character, who picked up the story at a later stage in events. Barracuda is also structurally cunning: both strands (Dan in Glasgow and Danny in Melbourne) proceed non-chronologically. But whereas the triggering incident in The Slap – a parent's attempt to discipline another couple's child – was front-loaded, Barracuda takes the opposite approach to a crucial act of violence. We know from early on that the ex-swimmer has spent time in jail, but the precise nature of his crime is lengthily withheld, although hinted at tantalisingly and sometimes with clever misdirection.

The centrepiece of this long, involving novel is a magnificent 50-page sequence set on the night of the opening ceremony of Sydney 2000. By this time, we have long given up any expectation that Danny will be part of the team, but the exact logistics of his spectator status – involving alcohol, leftover resentments from school and hatred of himself, his nation and many others – are exhilaratingly paced and staged.

Barracuda is the writer's fifth novel and follows the previous four, especially The Slap and Dead Europe, in conducting a loud and provocative argument about what it means to be Australian. Half-Greek, gay and dubious about sport, Tsiolkas has the perspective of a triple outsider and, in both the Olympics opening ceremony scene and at a tense meal that takes place on Australia Day, characters challenge, with blistering invective, the image of the nation promoted by its politicians and marketers. In words that make John Pilger seem like a spokesman for the tourist board, a friend of Dan's concludes of her country: "We are parochial and narrow-minded and we are racist and ungenerous and we occupy this land illegitimately and we're toadies to the Poms and servile to the Yanks."

Novelists may of course disagree with their characters, who may also dispute between themselves, and what makes Barracuda a profound work of fiction rather than an anti-government pamphlet is that the attractive aspects of the Australian character – wit, vigour, optimism – and the astonishing beauty of the light and landscape are also given their due: characters who try to leave Australia are generally drawn back.

The controversy that Tsiolkas's fiction has tended to attract is not just the result of his arraigning of Australia. He favours a frankness of language perhaps only matched by his fictional fellow citizen, Sir Les Patterson. The words "wog" and "cunt" appeared in The Slap with such regularity that some critics questioned whether Tsiolkas was at risk of crossing the line between dramatising derogatory language and endorsing it.

In the new book, Greek-Australians often continue to be "wogs"; the school Danny attends is only ever called "Cunts' College" and gay men who father children (an intriguing subplot of the novel) are "superpoofs", in opposition to the more traditional "faggots". Tsiolkas's sometimes startling dialogue is part of his mission – along with explicit descriptions of urination, defecation and ejaculation – to set down the texture of how people really live and speak. His characters have a visceral credibility rare in fiction.

The non-scatological language of Barracuda is filled with watery metaphors: "drowning", "floating" and "freestyle", among other words, have both swimming and non-swimming meanings. And, after The Slap, Christian Tsiolkas has written another novel that deserves to make a big splash.

• Mark Lawson's The Deaths is published by Picador.

Mark Lawson

Greenpeace activist Colin Russell may be asked to pay, hints Julie Bishop

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 11:32 PM PST

‘The Australian taxpayer is entitled to ask why they should be footing the bill’, says foreign minister, of efforts to secure Russell’s release from Russian jail

Second Antarctic rescue? Aurora Australis on standby to free icebreaker

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 11:03 PM PST

Crew on the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long are concerned about 'their ability to move through heavy ice in the area'

Helen Davidson

Tuaregs gather for 19th annual Ghat festival - in pictures

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 11:01 PM PST

Tuareg tribes from Ghat in the Libyan desert meet to celebrate Tuareg traditional culture, folklore and heritage

Bridget Coaker

India has become a dystopia of extremes. But resistance is rising | John Pilger

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 11:00 PM PST

Neoliberalism has failed the vast majority of India's people. But the spirit that gave the nation independence is stirring

In five-star hotels on Mumbai's seafront, children of the rich squeal joyfully as they play hide and seek. Nearby, at the National Theatre for the Performing Arts, people arrive for the Mumbai literary festival: famous authors and notables from India's Raj class. They step deftly over a woman lying across the pavement, her birch brooms laid out for sale, her two children silhouettes in a banyan tree that is their home.

It is Children's Day in India. On page nine of the Times of India, a study reports that every second child is malnourished. Nearly 2 million children under the age of five die every year from preventable illness as common as diarrhoea. Of those who survive, half are stunted owing to a lack of nutrients. The national school dropout rate is 40%. Statistics such as these flow like a river permanently in flood. No other country comes close. The small thin legs dangling in a banyan tree are poignant evidence.

The leviathan once known as Bombay is the centre for most of India's foreign trade, global financial dealing and personal wealth. Yet at low tide on the Mithi river, people are forced to defecate in ditches, by the roadside. Half the city's population is without sanitation and lives in slums without basic services. This has doubled since the 1990s when "Shining India" was invented by an American advertising firm as part of the Hindu nationalist BJP party's propaganda that it was "liberating" India's economy and "way of life".

Barriers protecting industry, manufacturing and agriculture were demolished. Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, Microsoft, Monsanto and Rupert Murdoch entered what had been forbidden territory. Limitless "growth" was now the measure of human progress, consuming both the BJP and Congress, the party of independence. Shining India would catch up China and become a superpower, a "tiger", and the middle classes would get their proper entitlement in a society where there was no middle. As for the majority in the "world's largest democracy", they would vote and remain invisible.

There was no tiger economy for them. The hype about a hi-tech India storming the barricades of the first world was largely a myth. This is not to deny India's rise in pre-eminence in computer technology and engineering, but the new urban technocratic class is relatively tiny and the impact of its gains on the fortunes of the majority is negligible.

When the national grid collapsed in 2012, leaving 700 million people powerless, almost half had so little electricity they barely noticed. On my last two visits, last November and 2011, front pages boasted that India had "gatecrashed the super-exclusive ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] club", launched its "largest ever" aircraft carrier and sent a rocket to Mars: the latter lauded by the government as "a historic moment for all of us to cheer".

The cheering was inaudible in the rows of tarpaper shacks you see as you land at Mumbai airport and in myriad villages denied basic technology, such as light and safe water. Here, land is life and the enemy is a rampant "free market". Foreign multinationals' dominance of food grains, genetically modified seed, fertilisers and pesticides has sucked small farmers into a ruthless global market and led to debt and destitution. More than 250,000 farmers have killed themselves since the mid-1990s – a figure that may be a fraction of the truth as local authorities wilfully misreport "accidental" deaths. In one district of Maharashtra, farmers die by the dozen every week.

"Across the length and breadth of India," says the acclaimed environmentalist Vandana Shiva, "the government has declared war on its own people". Using colonial-era laws, fertile land has been taken from poor farmers for as little as 300 rupees a square metre; developers have sold it for up to 600,000 rupees. In Uttar Pradesh, a new expressway serves "luxury" townships with sporting facilities and a Formula One racetrack, having eliminated 1,225 villages. The farmers and their communities have fought back, as they do all over India; in 2011, four were killed and many injured in clashes with police.

For Britain, India is now a "priority market" – to quote the government's arms sales unit. In 2010, David Cameron took the heads of the major British arms companies to Delhi and signed a $700m contract to supply Hawk fighter bombers. Disguised as "trainers", these lethal aircraft were used against the villages of East Timor. The collapse this week of Cameron's attempt to sell attack helicopters to India, a deal now mired in bribery allegations, exemplifies his government's biggest single contribution to Shining India.

India has become a model of the imperial cult of neoliberalism – almost everything must be privatised, sold off. The worldwide assault on social democracy and the collusion of major parliamentary parties – begun in the US and Britain in the 1980s – has produced in India a dystopia of extremes that is a spectre for us all and a spectre for us all.

Jawaharlal Nehru's democracy succeeded in granting the vote (today, there are 3.2 million elected representatives), but it failed to build a semblance of social and economic justice. Widespread violence against women is only now precariously on the political agenda. Secularism may have been Nehru's grand vision, but Muslims in India remain among the poorest, most discriminated against and brutalised minority on Earth. According to the 2006 Sachar Commission, in the elite institutes of technology, only four in 100 students are Muslim, and in the cities Muslims have fewer chances of regular employment than the "untouchable" Dalits and indigenous Adivasis. "It is ironic," wrote Khushwant Singh, "that the highest incidence of violence against Muslims and Christians has taken place in Gujarat, the home state of Bapu Gandhi."

Gujarat is also the home state of Narendra Modi, winner of three consecutive victories as BJP chief minister and the favourite to see off the diffident Rahul Gandhi in national elections in May. With his xenophobic Hindutva ideology, Modi appeals directly to dispossessed Hindus who believe Muslims are "privileged". Soon after he came to power in 2002, mobs slaughtered hundreds of Muslims. An investigating commission heard that Modi had ordered officials not to stop the rioters – which he denies. Admired by powerful industrialists, he boasts the highest "growth" in India.

In the face of these dangers, the great popular resistance that gave India its independence is stirring. The gang rape of a Delhi student in 2012 has brought vast numbers on to the streets, reflecting disillusionment with the political elite and anger at its acceptance of injustice and extreme capitalism's pact with feudalism. The popular movements are often led or inspired by extraordinary women – the likes of Medha Patkar, Binalakshmi Nepram, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy – and they demonstrate that the poor and vulnerable need not be weak. This is India's enduring gift to the world, and those with corrupted power ignore it at their peril.

John Pilger

Protect the Mozambique forest found on Google Earth, scientists say

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 11:00 PM PST

Mount Mabu rainforest teeming with new and unique species including pygmy chameleons and bronze-colour snakes

A remote rainforest in Mozambique discovered using Google Earth has so many new and unique species that it should be declared a protected area, scientists say.

Pygmy chameleons, a bronzed bush viper and butterflies with shimmering yellow wings are among the species in the forests covering Mount Mabu in northern Mozambique.

Discovered in 2005 by scientists using satellite images, the forests, previously only known to local villagers, have proven to be a rich ecosystem teeming with new species of mammals, butterflies, reptiles, insects and plants. The mountain forests have been isolated from a much larger forest block for millennia, meaning there has been no migration between this site and the next mountain for tens of thousands of years, allowing unique species to evolve in isolation.

One such species is a golden-eyed bush viper with bronze-edged scales (Atheris mabuensis) which Julian Bayliss, a conservation scientist for Kew Gardens, found by stepping on during a survey. His team is also waiting to describe a further two species of snake. A new species of chameleon (Nadzikambia baylissi) has already been described from the site, and the researchers are also describing another. The size of a human palm, with a warm yellow chest, green eyes and a spiky crest along its back, Rhampholeon sp. are commonly known as pygmy chameleons.

Bayliss's team has identified 126 different species of birds within the forest block, including seven that are globally threatened, such as the endangered spotted ground thrush (Zoothera guttata). There are an estimated 250 species of butterfly, including five which are awaiting to be described, like Baliochila sp., a vibrant specimen which has shimmering yellow wings dusted with black. New species of bats, shrews, rodents, frogs, fish and plants are also waiting to be described.

"The finding of the new species was really creating an evidence base to justify its protection," explained Dr Bayliss, "and now we've got enough to declare a site of extreme biological importance that needs to be a protected area and needs to be managed for conservation."

In first step to making the forest an internationally recognised protected area – such as a national park – the team have submitted an application to have its importance officially recognised . This "gazetting" application has been accepted on a provincial and national level, but is currently waiting to be signed by the government.

If the application is successful, then the forest will be protected from logging concessions seeking valuable hardwoods currently threatening the mountain.

"The people who threaten Mabu are already there, and really what we're trying to do now is a race against time towards its conservation. It's getting there early enough to get the wheels in motion to make it a protected area before it's too late," said Bayliss.

Josh Davis

Tony Abbott's Indigenous adviser speaks out on jailed youth

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 10:56 PM PST

Warren Mundine urges states and territories to direct juvenile offenders towards jobs and education – rather than detention

Daniel Hurst

Bushfire fears as soaring temperatures make North Stradbroke battle tougher

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 10:22 PM PST

As Brisbane prepares for a 41C day firefighters fear a wind change will worsen the Stradbroke fire which has jumped containment lines

Helen Davidson

Tony Abbott’s low-scoring over in the Ashes commentary box

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 10:17 PM PST

Prime minister admits the jury is still out on him as he joins Tubby and Slats at the Ashes

Oliver Laughland

David Cameron's internet porn filter is the start of censorship creep | Laurie Penny

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 10:00 PM PST

The question of who is allowed access to what data is a defining one of our age – and Edward Snowden has taught us to be wary

Picture the scene. You're pottering about on the internet, perhaps idly looking up cake recipes, or videos of puppies learning to howl. Then the phone rings. It's your internet service provider. Actually, it's a nice lady in a telesales warehouse somewhere, employed on behalf of your service provider; let's call her Linda. Linda is calling because, thanks to David Cameron's "porn filter", you now have an "unavoidable choice", as one of 20 million British households with a broadband connection, over whether to opt in to view certain content. Linda wants to know – do you want to be able to see hardcore pornography?

How about information on illegal drugs? Or gay sex, or abortion? Your call may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes. How about obscene and tasteless material? Would you like to see that? Speak up, Linda can't hear you.

The government's filter, which comes into full effect this month after a year of lobbying, will block far more than dirty pictures. That was always the intention, and in recent weeks it has become clear that the mission creep of internet censorship is even creepier than campaigners had feared. In the name of protecting children from a rotten tide of raunchy videos, a terrifying precedent is being set for state control of the digital commons.

Pious arguments about protecting innocence are invariably marshalled in the service of public ignorance. When the first opt-in filtering began, it was discovered that non-pornographic "gay and lesbian" sites and "sex education" content would be blocked by BT. After an outcry, the company quickly changed the wording on its website, but it is not clear that more than the wording has been changed. The internet is a lifeline for young LGBT people looking for information and support – and parents are now able to stop them finding that support at the click of a mouse.

Sexual control and social control are usually co-occurring. Sites that were found to be inaccessible when the new filtering system was launched last year included in some cases helplines like Childline and the NSPCC, domestic violence and suicide prevention services – and the thought of what an unscrupulous parent or abusive spouse could do with the ability to block such sites is chilling. The head of TalkTalk, one of Britain's biggest internet providers, claimed that the internet has no "social or moral framework". Well, neither does a library. Nobody would dream of insisting a local book exchange deployed morality robots to protect children from discovering something their parents might not want them to see. Online, that's just what's happening, except that in this case, every person who uses the internet is being treated like a child.

Every argument we have heard from politicians in favour of this internet filter has been about pornography, and its harmful effect on young people, evidence of which, despite years of public pearl-clutching, remains scant. It is curious, then, that so many categories included in BT's list of blocked content appear to be neither pornographic nor directly related to young children.

The category of "obscene content", for instance, which is blocked even on the lowest setting of BT's opt-in filtering system, covers "sites with information about illegal manipulation of electronic devices [and] distribution of software" – in other words, filesharing and music downloads, debate over which has been going on in parliament for years. It looks as if that debate has just been bypassed entirely, by way of scare stories about five-year-olds and fisting videos. Whatever your opinion on downloading music and cartoons for free, doing so is neither obscene nor pornographic.

Cameron's porn filter looks less like an attempt to protect kids than a convenient way to block a lot of content the British government doesn't want its citizens to see, with no public consultation whatsoever.

The worst thing about the porn filter, though, is not that it accidentally blocks a lot of useful information but that it blocks information at all. With minimal argument, a Conservative-led government has given private firms permission to decide what websites we may and may not access. This sets a precedent for state censorship on an enormous scale – all outsourced to the private sector, of course, so that the coalition does not have to hold up its hands to direct responsibility for shutting down freedom of speech.

More worrying still is the inclusion of material relating to "extremism", however the state and its proxies are choosing to define that term. Bearing in mind that simple protest groups like tax justice organisation UK Uncut have been labelled extremist by some, there is every chance that the categories for what constitutes "inappropriate" online content will be conveniently broad – and there's always room to extend them. The public gets no say over what political content will now be blocked, just as we had no say over whether we wanted such content blocked at all.

Records of opt-in software will, furthermore, make it simpler for national and international surveillance programmes to track who is looking at what sort of website. Just because they can doesn't mean they will, of course, but seven months of revelations about the extent of data capturing by GCHQ and the NSA – including the collection of information on the porn habits of political actors in order to discredit them – does make for reasonable suspicion. Do you still feel comfortable about ticking that box that says you want to see "obscene and tasteless content"? Are you sure?

The question of who should be allowed to access what information has become a defining cultural debate of the age. Following the Edward Snowden revelations, that question will be asked of all of us in 2014, and we must understand attempts by any state to place blocks and filters on online content in that context.

Policies designed for controlling adults have long been implemented in the name of protecting children, but if we really want to give children their best chance, we can start by denying private companies and conservative politicians the power to determine the minutiae of what they may and may not know. Instant access to centuries of information and learning is a provision without peer in the history of human civilisation. For the sake of the generations to come, we must protect it.

Laurie Penny

Tony Abbott urged to rethink climate policy after hottest year on record

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 09:53 PM PST

Prime minister called 'a reckless ideologue who ignores the science and is intent on listening to people who are part of the tinfoil hat brigade'

Daniel Hurst

Snow blankets Boston as north-east US faces storm crisis

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 09:26 PM PST

More than two feet of snow falls early on Friday, with more extreme weather forecast for New York and the rest of the north-east

Cambodian police fire on striking garment workers

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 08:58 PM PST

Second clash in two days as striking workers in the country's key industry clash with military and police

Panama canal expansion in doubt as president confronts European firms

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 08:30 PM PST

Panamanian president Ricardo Martinelli accuses Spanish and Italian companies of 'great irresponsibility' and endangering the massive project

Wet ‘n’ Wild festival customers to get refund after second event cancelled

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 08:14 PM PST

Fair Trading says ticketholders will get their money back after replacement event is also cancelled

Australia's convoluted visa laws force committed gay couples apart | Senthorun Raj

Posted: 02 Jan 2014 07:45 PM PST

Senthorun Raj: A gay man who has been in a serious relationship with an Australian will be deported to Pakistan – where he faces possible jail term. Australia's convoluted visa laws fails gay people

Senthorun Raj