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• Both suspects are then shot
• Police raid property where Michael Adebowale is registered
• Rigby family pay tribute to murdered soldier
• RAF jet escorts diverted Pakistani plane
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1. London attack: police make two further arrests after Woolwich killing – live updates
2. Woolwich murder: aerial footage shows police search – video
3. Video shows moment police shot Woolwich attack suspects

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2. Picture desk live: the best news pictures of the day

The owners of video allegedly showing Toronto's mayor smoking crack go missing in the middle of crowdfunding campaign

The effort by news site Gawker to bust Toronto mayor Rob Ford for allegedly smoking crack is crack journalism work. Toronto is Canada's biggest city. Canada has a $680bn trade relationship with the United States. We can't have them high on crack.

The spangers Gawker has deployed outside New York subway stops to raise money to buy a video purportedly showing Ford crack-smoking, however, smell bad and obstruct pedestrian flow. We exaggerate; Gawker has not deployed spangers. But the website is begging for money from the public to supplement its news gathering budget, so it can afford to pay off the drug dealers who own the video.

It's not a traditional news-gathering technique. It's the kind of thing that causes ethicists of journalism to stroke their chins at double-speed and could outright kill the more delicate newsroom ombudspeople. Gawker doesn't care about all that.

What Gawker might care about, however, is its reputation as a street-smart media machine, and the present episode has so far not burnished that.

For starters, the drug dealers appear to have disappeared, taking the video – the big payoff – with them. Gawker editor John Cook on Thursday notified potential contributors to the crowd-funding campaign, called Crackstarter, that Gawker may no longer be able to deliver the goods.

"The last time we established contact with the people who are in possession of the video was this past Sunday, and we have not been able to reach them since," wrote Cook, who knows the video exists because he enterprisingly traveled to Canada to see it for himself. "… If you are considering contributing, you should be aware that our confidence that we can get a deal done has, on account of the foregoing, diminished since we came up with this idea."

The faith of thousands of Gawker readers who have collectively contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the effort is on the line. As of midday Friday, the Crackstarter had raised $163,000 toward its goal of $200,000, which is how much the drug dealers want for the video. More than 6,000 individuals had contributed. Gawker says that if it raises the $200,000 by the deadline, 11.59pm Monday, but is unable to obtain the video, "every penny" of the money will be given to "a Canadian non-profit that helps people suffering from addiction".

Many readers of Gawker may personally be gratified at having contributed to charity. But a lot more would probably rather see mayoral crack-smoking footage.

Next, for a media conglomerate such as Gawker, the money in question would seem to be rather – how to put this – small. If Gawker's editors deem the story worth $200,000 to break – as they patently must, for the only alternative is they take their readers for fools – couldn't they find it in their budget? David Karp farts $200,000. Jonah Peretti just pulled $200,000 out from behind this gentleman's ear. Nick Denton needs to pass the hat?

(Beyond what it says about Gawker, the episode points to the relative innocence of Canadian politics. In its first week, Crackstarter barely cracked $150,000. How fast do you think the internet could come up with $200,000 to buy a video of a mayor of a comparably sized US city – Rahm Emanuel, say – smoking crack cocaine? [Rahm Emanuel has never done that.] Faster than you can say "Sheldon Adelson is urinating on America's gift to the world its open democracy.")

Finally, the Crackstarter campaign looks hypocritical, because, as the site's own commenters have pointed out, Gawker has given the full Gawker treatment to well-heeled Kickstarter users. (Crackstarter uses Indiegogo.) In a post last month tagged "crowdfarcing", Sam Biddle of the Gawker subblog Valleywag made fun of actor Zach Braff's Kickstarter campaign to run his new movie.

"Kickstarter has the potential to make some very neat stuff happen for people of modest means who need a little boost for a good idea," Biddle wrote. "But for every lazy, exploitative, Give-This-Successful-Person-Cash-Just-Cause campaign, the startup loses credibility and gains a legion of rolled eyes."

Here's hoping the drug dealers start returning Cook's middleman's calls, and we get to see the evidence and judge for ourselves whether Toronto mayor Rob Ford smokes crack, an allegation he has called "ridiculous".

Or one big lucky day may be coming up for an unnamed Canadian charity.

1. Rwandan health minister hits back at critics of drug company deal
2. Gawker, the mayor of Toronto and the crack cocaine video
3. Why this global fascination with the Toronto mayor’s alleged cocaine use? | Colin Horgan

Despite the IMF's criticism, the chancellor is confident the UK economy will improve by 2015, but is he being too optimistic?

In the middle of a week the government will want to forget, George Osborne was in upbeat mood when the International Monetary Fund delivered its verdict on the UK economy.

The message from the IMF was simple. Britain had overcooked the austerity and it was time to turn down the heat. But the chancellor knew the criticism was coming, was grateful that it was couched in polite language and took the view that it could have been worse.

Osborne takes much the same view of the state of the economy: things could be worse and may be about to get better. The dreaded triple dip has been averted and there is reasonable hope that revisions to past economic data by the Office for National Statistics will expunge the double-dip downturn of 2011-12 from the record books. Inflation is coming down, new car sales are strong and, with a bit of help from the Bank of England, activity is starting to return to the housing market.

Osborne is not getting carried away by any of this. When he arrived at the Treasury in May 2010, he thought the economy would be humming by now and it clearly isn't. Even so, he thinks there is time between now and the next election for the government to win the economic argument, not least because after two years in which output has barely grown at all, the Conservatives still score higher than Labour in opinion polls for economic competence.

The chancellor's approach to winning the 2015 election was summed up in three brief sentences in the speech he made welcoming the IMF team to the Treasury on Wednesday. "There are no easy answers to problems built up in the UK over many years." (Loose translation: Labour left the country in a right state so it's not our fault life is so tough.) "It's a hard road to recovery." (Loose translation: the upturn due to arrive three years ago has been delayed due to problems in the eurozone; we apologise for any inconvenience caused.) "But we're making progress." (Loose translation: things are starting to get better, so think twice about handing power back to the people who screwed things up in the first place.)

Expect to hear more of these arguments over the next couple of years, particularly if the modest 0.3% expansion in the economy in the first three months of 2013 proves to be the harbinger of better times ahead.

The improvement has been a long time in coming. Britain's national output remains more than 2% below where it was at its peak in early 2008: by this stage after previous recessions – even the Great Depression of the 1930s – all the lost ground had been recouped.

Osborne and Sir Mervyn King, the outgoing governor of the Bank of England, believe the economy's weakness in 2012 was exacerbated by problems in two specific sectors – construction and North Sea production. With both looking healthier in 2013, the expectation is that growth will accelerate, not spectacularly but by enough to support the chancellor's narrative that better times are coming.

Osborne's other reason for optimism is that Mark Carney's arrival at Threadneedle Street from the Bank of Canada on 1 July is expected to lead to further stimulus measures, offsetting the drag on growth caused by deficit reduction. The chancellor fought hard to persuade Carney to take the job; he has high hopes that an overseas Bank governor can do for the economy what overseas managers never achieved for the England football team.

There are those who think Carney has been overhyped and that like Sven-Göran Eriksson and Fabio Capello his plans will run up against deep-seated structural problems. These include the economy's over-reliance on the City and the housing market; the concentration of prosperity in London and the south-east; the UK's inability to pay its way in the world; decades of underinvestment in productive capacity; and the low level of skills. Osborne is nowhere near cracking any of them, and plans to rebalance the economy towards manufacturing and exports have been abandoned for now in favour of attempts to kickstart the housing market. Any growth will do at this stage of the electoral cycle.

Yet, Osborne has a battle on his hands to generate a feelgood factor by 2015. One of the strongest correlations in British politics is between electoral support and real incomes: when wages and salaries are rising faster than prices incumbent governments do well; when inflation is higher than earnings growth, they are shown the door.

The government has presided over a squeeze on real incomes unprecedented in recent times and needs to end falling living standards if it is to have a chance of being re-elected. Osborne's problem is that with earnings rising at 0.4% a year and prices at 2.4% a year the squeeze is still going on and shows no sign of ending any time soon.

1. Will IMF repeat anti-austerity call? | Larry Elliott
2. George Osborne puts his pride before the national interest | Ed Balls
3. Austerity is a task for another day, IMF tells George Osborne

A veteran of London's bike-share scheme debunks the myths surrounding Citi Bikes as New Yorkers gear up for launch

They have arrived! Glowing in Citbank blue, hundreds of Bloomberg Bikes emerged from nowhere onto the streets of New York in the early hours of Friday, greeted with a combination of curiosity, puzzlement, and not a little suspicion.

Which is hardly surprising, as it's not been plain cycling so far. Residents of the West Village think the docking stations will destroy the area's historic character. In Brooklyn, treasured parking spots have been usurped. Tabloid columnists fear the city's streets will be littered with the bodies of mown-down cyclists. And the whole scheme was delayed for months because of various technical problems.

As a veteran of the London scheme, I've heard it all. The three-year build-up ran to much the same script. Conventional wisdom before the launch in July 2010 had one overarching theme: it'll never work. But it did.

So, New York, with the benefit of experience, let me guide you through the myths.

This is a disaster! All these inexperienced cyclists wobbling around on the streets of the city that never sleeps! 

London's Cassandras had to wait a whole five days until one of our hire bikes ended up being squashed against some railings by a truck (the rider survived ). But the accident statistics show that those on the hire bikes are no more likely than any other cyclists to be hurt. In the first 11 weeks of our scheme, Transport for London (TfL) received reports of ten cyclists being injured – not bad given that 1.6m journeys had been made on the bikes in that period. Initially, the kind of folks you'll get using the bikes at the start are confident sorts who are more than capable of executing an arm signal without losing control and are probably just fed up of their own wheels getting stolen all the time. But in time more newbies will start to saddle up. According to TfL, nearly 8 in 10 members either started to cycle (49%) or cycle more often (28%) as a result of the scheme. With any luck, the Citi Bikes will have a civilising effect on New York streets. There is lots of evidence which shows that cycling gets safer the more people do it.

It's too expensive! 

Actually, New York's scheme is a bit of a rip-off, at least for casual users. $9.95 plus tax for 24-hour access does seem a little steep. Until London's bike-mad mayor put the prices up in 2013, it used to cost Londoners just £1 (about $1.60) for 24 hours of unlimited journeys of 30 minutes or less. Now we pay £2 ($3). Still cheaper than a single journey on the tube. But I've seen Wall Street – you guys are loaded! People often misunderstand the pricing structure by complaining about the high cost of holding onto a bike for more than an hour – if you're on the day rate you'll get whacked with a $9 charge for every 60-90 minutes you keep a bike over your "free" first 30 minutes, and it's a whopping $12 for every additional 30 minutes after that. But the point of a public bike hire scheme is to share bicycles, not hog them. They're not for pootling around Manhattan all day as you flit from deli to cafe to office to bar. They're a substitute for one subway ride, an alternative way of getting from A to B with no stopping in between.

But there is no lock! How dumb!

Again, the bikes are for simple journeys. The Citi Bike folks don't want you chaining up their hardware outside the bakery while you pop in for a bagel. They know how many bikes are stolen in New York each year. No locks means you can only leave a bike in one of the secure docking stations across the city. You have a very good incentive to keep your hire bike at close quarters: the $1,000 fee if you don't return it within 24 hours. 

All the bikes will get stolen!

No they won't. Sure, thousands of bicyclettes disappeared when Paris launched its Velib scheme years ago. But that's because the Frenchies trusted their users with in-built locks, les cretins. In London, where bikes do not have wheel locks, only 24 have disappeared since the scheme began in July 2010, and that's over 21 million journeys. "We are confident that the number of stolen bikes will remain low through effective policing," said a spokeswoman for TfL. The majority of bikes that are reported stolen are later recovered, she added.

The commercial sponsor is antithetical to the free-wheeling spirit of cycling! 

Get over it. Barclays bank sponsors London's scheme and from day one literally no one other than the bank's PR woman has ever has referred to the bikes as Barclays bikes. They are Boris Bikes, named after our flaxen haired mayor, Boris Johnson, who arrives to all meetings helmet in hand, his suit -a-crumple. He really can't claim credit for the initiative. It was the brain child of his predecessor, Ken Livingstone: Boris just pedalled into City Hall a few months before launch and stole the glory. If you don't like the sponsor, get creative with some stickers, like this.

1. New York City FC has Manchester City and the New York Yankees as backers but there are still big obstacles
2. Bike Share in New York, Built From Ideas Around World
3. Afghan interpreters’ resettlement scheme ‘does not go far enough’

Google's Eric Schmidt has suggested they will be used for surveillance, but those who make them insist they have benefits

"It was always a dream to build one, after having built helicopters in my bedroom for a while. I mostly like flying for fun, seeing whether I can get the device to auto-stabilise. As opposed to a plane or helicopter, you don't need a lot of knowledge to control them. They fly themselves. Something like this – you can put in a backpack and carry it with you." Electronic circuit designer Matt Lloyd is talking about building his first quadcopter, a type of drone popular with the growing number of DIY drone makers in the UK.

He's not alone. Hobbyists with backgrounds in electronics and robotics are kitting out home-built drones with expensive cameras for activities as diverse as extreme sports, aerial photography, guerilla film-making – and making videos of cats.

Amateur drones rarely resemble the sleek silver drones used by the US military. One of the first videos of a home-made drone to circulate widely online featured a taxidermied cat named Orville strapped to a quadcopter, flown by Dutch artist Bert Jansen last year.

It didn't spark off an aeriLOL cats meme, but home drone building has continued to rise in the UK, supported by lively online forums and the emergence of companies selling hardware components to individuals. The capability to fly a pre-programmed flight path is what distinguishes a drone from other "unmanned aerial vehicles" (UAVs) such as model planes. The software which enables this is freely available online. Arduino, known as "electronics prototyping software", has been used to develop the platform ArduCopter, widely adopted by most amateur drone makers to power their vehicles.

Off-the-shelf drones such as the Parrot AR have been around for a couple of years, and cost on average £200 – about the same price as building a fully customisable, upgradeable version at home. A Gizmodo reviewer said flying the Parrot "makes you feel like a robotic peeping Tom crossed with a cybernetic monk with a splash of soon-to-be-killed Call of Duty side-story operative".

But amateur drone makers are less open about any illicit thrills had when flying home-made devices, though they're keen to point out the limitations of the models available in shops. The basic camera, the limited Wi-Fi range and small sizes make shop-bought drones less exciting, especially when it comes to using them outside. Home-made versions can be programmed for extended flights, and to take professional-quality footage. Drones are also being built on a smaller scale to be used around the home, whether it's for gaming or for "tracking children and pets", according to London drone builder Anish Mohammed.

In the UK, drone makers have affiliated themselves with the much bigger "maker" movement, which includes sewing, baking and amateur robotics. This is the idea that's been championed by former Wired chief and robotics evangelist Chris Anderson, who has called the US hobbyists the "homebrew drone class" – and it's catching on over here.

For the first time in its three years, the Maker Faire held last month (27-28 April) at Newcastle's Life Centre featured a live flying demonstration field for makers of unmanned aerial vehicles alongside workshops for bunting, knitting and bookbinding. Event organiser Marisa Buckingham says: "We've seen an increase in popularity for UAVs since we started the Faire." Exhibitor Universal Air, of Wallingford, Oxfordshire, which showed off its first mass-market quadcopter drone at the show, wants to get one of its devices into "every household" in the country, according to its website.

"I started flying model aircraft when I was about 16, maybe 14," says Universal Air co-founder Henry Fletcher, 23. "I went on to study engineering at university and to specialise in aerodynamics. After I got into autonomous flight, I was keen to make the field of study into my work. I met my business partner Yuan and we started building these drones – or whatever you'd prefer to call them – from scratch. The be-all-and-end-all of this is that people do love creating things themselves, but it's quite a formidable challenge to get something to fly."

The company's Kickstarter-funded quadcopter is the most basic self-assembly model out there. It can be assembled with just an Allen key and controlled with an XBox. While the GPS technology and free software used to develop the drone is relatively new, the quadcopter design is as old as the aviation industry itself.

It was one of the earliest helicopter models, originally built in 1920, but repeatedly failed to live up to its promise as a commercial flying vehicle. The quadcopter's appeal for drone makers lies in its scalability – it can be designed to fit into a palm, or large enough to mount expensive cameras and other gadgets.

However, Fletcher admits most people imagine sinister aircraft "swinging over battlefields in Afghanistan" when they think of drones, rather than something they can fly for fun in their spare time. He and 24-year-old co-founder Yuan Gao believe that the only way to diffuse the connotations of the term is to replace it with a brand name that becomes synonymous with the device itself, such as Google for internet search or Hoover for vacuum cleaner.

To that end, Universal Air named its first mass-market UAV "Pam" – which stands for Personal Air Machine. According to Gao, the feminine name "really brings out the character, the kind of thing we're trying to portray, that it is a device that assists you".

But the word "drone" is less likely to offend Mohammed, a self-confessed "UAV addict", former moderator of DIY Drones, and organiser of the London-based meet-up group Drone Zone. Mohammed started making his own aircraft after finding model planes too difficult to remotely control. His main interest is in building the craft but he has seen them used for "tracking children, and pet dogs and cats" around the home.

While the average household is still some way off from being able to build their own UAV, people are starting to accept that they are here to stay – and they might actually be a force for good in the right hands. Everyone I spoke to was dismissive of the idea that private "surveillance drones", as Google chief Eric Schmidt has described them, threaten privacy any more than do smartphones, Facebook or Google, which we happily use every day.

Mohammed also believes that Schmidt might be better off looking closer to home. Drones pose "much less of a threat than Google or Facebook – if some action needs to be taken, it should be aimed at them first", he says.

Fletcher says: "One of the critical reasons for trying to drive a change in the way [drones are] viewed – even a change in what they're called – is to make people understand these things aren't roaming around trying to spy on their personal privacy. The amusing thing is that the state and the police department have every recipe in the book for getting information about people right now. Something like this may well reduce the amount of prying and intervening they do because they can just spot-check rather than following people around."

According to Mohammed, the media's view of drones as spybots – or worse, as targeted killing machines – has made it harder for the public to understand their social benefits. In particular, he points to the work of the startup Matternet which delivered chocolate via a fleet of drones to children in Haiti last year.

He says: "The association of drones with military use is a bit of a disservice, in my view. Given I'm Muslim, I'm not going to be in favour of drones being used to kill people in the Middle East. Drones could provide eyes and ears for all situations where it's risky for humans – which could be anything from delivering food to medicine or providing the internet."

However, the biggest debates on personal drones have centred around immediate threats to personal safety and the misuse of video footage. A recent neighbourhood blog report in the US of a drone pilot operating his device outside of people's windows sparked a huge online discussion of the potentially criminal uses of drones. The Digital Journal listed each of blackmail, murder, kidnapping, coercion, rape and paedophilia as a possible "nasty side of drones" in its op-ed calling for legislation.

The arrival of self-assembly drones on the mass market will make it harder to tell which drones are licensed for commercial purposes and which are being operated by civilians.

The UK's long tradition of model flying – that most innocuous and British of hobbies – means that there are very strict rules governing where UAVs can be flown. Martin Toovey, who sells hardware for building personal drones at the UK company Build Your Own Drone, says: "I think the UK is the one of the best in the world at keeping up and not being restrictive with rules, good and bad."

1. Obama to address Guantánamo and drones in major defence speech
2. The reality is Americans aren’t that concerned about drones | Harry J Enten
3. Obama curtails use of drones

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2. Eurozone crisis: time for France to step up | Kenneth Rogoff

Scotland's transport policy has done agonisingly little to encourage cycling, so hopefully our pedal protest will be heard

Just over a year ago I was sitting in a remote corner of Scotland watching with a mixture of admiration and envy as cyclists in London took to the streets in a series of flash rides over cycle safety, culminating in the "Big Ride" on parliament just before the mayoral election. It seemed as if cycle campaigning was finally taking off south of the border and cyclists' voices were being heard, while here in Scotland the cycling and walking budget was actually declining despite the government's target of 10% of journeys being undertaken on a bike by 2020.

So when David Brennan, a helmet-camera cyclist in Glasgow better known as Magnatom, tweeted that we should hold a Scottish Big Ride of our own, I jumped at the chance, along with a handful of others, and Pedal on Parliament was born.

None of us had ever organised a demonstration of this scale in our lives, half of us had never even met each other until the day before the first demo, and we were astounded when somehow – through a mixture of determination, tweeting, mass flyering, blogging and countless emails – we managed to assemble 3,000 cyclists on the Meadows in Edinburgh to lobby Scotland's politicians for more investment and better conditions for cyclists of all kinds.

We were delighted to be joined not only by the "lycra brigade" but by hundreds of families, with several kids even completing the ride on balance bikes. The day was both moving and joyful, a carnival of cycling and a serious attempt to show the politicians that investing in cycling wasn't just something for existing cyclists, but for everyone.

Fast forward a few months, and essentially nothing had changed – for all the warm words from our politicians about how we were "pushing on an open door". While the walking and cycling budget had at least stopped declining, it was nowhere near the level that was needed to see real growth in cycling across Scotland.

We were invited to meet the minister for transport, Keith Brown, but although he listened, it didn't translate into any real action. He recently told the BBC that modernising Scotland's transport meant building more motorways, and they've managed to find the money for a programme of road building while cycling has to wait to see if it gets a few crumbs out of "Barnett consequentials" (windfall money from the Westminster budget).

While Westminster's all party cycling group's recent Get Britain Cycling report laid out a realistic roadmap of how mass cycling could be achieved, Scotland is stuck with the Cycling Action Plan for Scotland, a document that is neither a plan nor provides much in the way of any action. Though Scotland's health, pollution and carbon emission reduction policies rely on achieving a growth in bike use, it doesn't seem to have any real idea of how to achieve it, other than yet another campaign urging road users to be nice to each other. Once again, Scotland was getting left behind.

With no leadership coming from the top, we knew we were going to have to supply the political will ourselves. Following the lead of the Dutch and the Danish who took to the streets repeatedly in the 1970s to get their cycle paths, we started planning the next mass demonstration. This time our message was explicit: "we are everyone".

Fuelled by anger over the recent Gary McCourt case (where a motorist was given a community sentence for causing McCourt's death), and buoyed by a promise of attendance from Graeme Obree and support from Sir Chris Hoy, suddenly we had real momentum behind us. Despite monsoon downpours the day before, and the haar (fog) descending on Edinburgh on the morning of the ride, an estimated 4,000 cyclists joined us in the Meadows last Sunday.

Once more the mood was a mixture of sombre – a 21-year-old man was killed on his bike near Inverness just a few days earlier – and joyful. Once more there was a real cross section of people there from roadies in their club kit to those who looked as if they'd only recently disinterred their bike from the shed. For me, though, it was the children who really made the protest powerful. They were everywhere: wobbling along on the cobbles of the Royal Mile on tiny bikes, in child seats, on tagalongs and in trailers, their faces painted, or dressed up, their bikes decorated with balloons and homemade signs.

What will change now? Once more we have a meeting scheduled with Brown, who will be going on a fact-finding mission to the Netherlands. We hope that as a result we'll see the sort of Damascene conversion that has transformed cycling policy in London, although we're not holding our breath.

But what has already changed is the will among cycle campaigners and ordinary cyclists to start asking for real change. We're already getting offers coming in to help with the organising of Pedal on Parliament 3. We will need it. If we've learned anything this year, it's that we're in this for the long haul.

How likely are you to see a piece of art in a London gallery created by a woman? An art audit by the East London Fawcett Group has attempted to find out
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An audit of more than 100 commercial galleries in London has found that only 5% represent an equal number of male and female artists.

East London Fawcett's (ELF) art audit also found that not a single woman appeared on the top 100 auction performances list in 2012. The audit which looked at works from April 2012 – April 2013 gathered data on 134 commercial galleries in London, which collectively represent 3,163 artists.

Of this total, just 31% of the represented artists were women, with 78% of the galleries representing more men than women. Kira Cochrane writes today:

Here's a teaser. How many women artists featured in the top 100 auction sales, ranked by price, last year? Gemma Rolls-Bentley, an independent curator, decided to find out.

One day, not long ago, she sat down with the 2012 list, "and spent a couple of hours writing M next to the artists. I got to the end and there wasn't a single F." Some of those artists were alive, some were dead, all were highly valued - clearly considered "great" or "genius" - and all were men.

ELF, the East London branch of the Fawcett Society, also turned their attention to gender representation in solo shows featured in the exhibition programmes of 29 non-commercial galleries in London. Nearly a third of the galleries presented no female solo shows during this period and only one of the gallery programmes featured all female shows.

Public art also came under scrutiny from the ELF audit. Of the 386 public works of art that were recorded in Westminster and the City of London, a mere 8% were created by female artists. That may not come as much of of a surprise if you take into account that a large proportion of the pieces of art date back many years.

So if we look at the modern day, do female artists fare better? A quarter of the artists selected for the Fourth Plinth, situated in the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square, were female, as Kira Cochrane writes today "far from brilliant, but much better than those other statistics for public art".

Frieze Art Fair, an annual showcase of leading international artists, provided some interesting results. 27.5% of the artists represented at the art fair in 2012 were women. The results are a reflection of a survey that took in 3,441 artists across 135 international galleries that were represented in the commercial section of Frieze Art Fair 2012.

However, 23.3% of solo exhibitions hosted by commercial galleries in the capital during Frieze week presented female artists – an increase on the 11.6% figure that Laura McLean- Ferris found in 2008 when she conducted a similar survey.

Gemma Rolls-Bentley, arts director at ELF, is optimistic despite the gender gap displayed by the results:

The ELF art audit results provide statistical evidence that gender inequality still persists in London's art world. However, these results also demonstrate that significant positive progress has and is being made.

By raising awareness of the challenges specific to female artists, we hope that the campaign will widen the dialogue around this issue and that as a result the gender balance will continue to improve. The art audit's message is one of optimism.

Campaign group, UK Feminista, published results in 2010 of a similar piece of research looking at gender inequalty in the art world. They found that 83% of the artists in the Tate Modern and 70% of the artists in the Saatchi Gallery were male.

But the gender gap is the reverse when you look at university stats. In her Datablog piece examining the gender gap at universities by institution and subject, Rebecca Ratcliffe found that 61.7% of the undergraduate creative arts and design intake in UK universities in 2011-12 was female. So why are so few female artists being represented in art galleries? We'd love to hear your views in the comments below.

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1. Women in art: why are all the ‘great’ artists men?
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Report reveals work on road in remote Peruvian rainforest is underway, and alleges corruption and government involvement

The local government in one of the remotest parts of the Peruvian Amazon has allegedly funded the illegal clearing of rainforest at the start of the proposed route for a controversial highway that would run through the country's biggest national park.

According to a report by Global Witness, released in Lima last week, the highway would stretch for 270km and connect the remote Purus region in south-east Peru to the rest of the country, ending at a town called Iñapari on the Brazilian border where it would link up with the existing Inter-Oceanica Highway. It would pass through a conservation concession, a communal indigenous reserve, the Alto Purus National Park, a reserve for indigenous peoples in "voluntary isolation" and one indigenous community.

Opponents fear the highway will destroy one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, increase the illegal mahogany trade, narco-trafficking and gold-mining, and decimate the "isolated" indigenous peoples if contact is made with them.

Supporters of the road say it will reduce the cost of living in a region otherwise inaccessible from the rest of Peru except by plane from a town called Pucallpa, increase trade and standards of living, and make it easier to transport people out of the region in medical emergencies.

According to the report, titled "Rocky Road: How Legal Failings and Vested Interests behind Peru's Purus highway threaten the Amazon and its People", the start of the proposed route leading from Purus's biggest town, Puerto Esperanza, has already been cleared. It extends for 15-20km, says Global Witness, and is known in Peru as a "trocha":

Former local government workers told Global Witness that the Purus municipality gave 10,000 Soles (almost US$4,000) to a pro-highway group to pay for this illegal road clearing in 2012. The road clearing does not have the necessary authorisation as the parliamentary bill has not yet been passed.

Global Witness claims the pro-highway group is led by a Catholic priest, Miguel Piovesan.

"Piovesan showed me the illegal "trocha" himself," says Global Witness's Billy Kyte, "Rocky Road's" author and in Peru for its launch. "He's proud of it."

According to a complaint by the Environment Ministry to a public prosecutor's office in Pucallpa, the "trocha" had reached as far as the conservation concession and the buffer zone of the Purus Communal Reserve (PCR) by last September. Rafael Pino, the PCR's director, says that no progress has been made since then, but there are plans for 20 people to extend the "trocha" next month in the direction of the PCR, the national park and the "isolated" peoples' reserve.

"There's a latent danger that it will enter protected natural areas without any kind of prior authorization," Pino says.

A bill proposing that "terrestrial connection" between Purus and the rest of Peru by a highway – or even a railway – should be declared in the "public necessity and national interest" was submitted to Congress in April 2012, and approved by Congress's Commission for Transport and Communications in June.

The bill's biggest supporter is widely believed to be Congressman Carlos Tubino, who calls it "my bill." However, at a press conference launching "Rocky Road" last week, Tubino's chief adviser, Juan Carlos Torres Figari, claimed there was now "no risk of any highway."

At the end of the conference another of Tubino's team handed out two statements, one of which was titled, "Know the truth about Congressman Carlos Tubino's Bill 1035" and read:

It does not suggest building any highway running for 270km from Puerto Esperanza to Iñapari. The bill that Congress's Commission for Andean and Amazonian Peoples will vote on has been modified and the phrase "terrestrial connection" has been deleted.

Tubino has followed that with a series of tweets calling the highway a "phantom", accusing Kyte of "lying", and saying that his bill now makes no mention of a "highway" – only "connection."

When I asked what this would consist of, Tubino said:

Currently the flights from Pucallpa to Puerto Esperanza are very long, dangerous, make essential goods excessively expensive, and are exploited by a monopoly. If the state considers it appropriate, it could build an airport at Iñapari and establish an aerial route to Puerto Esperanza. There's no doubt this would have a positive impact: it would be a much shorter route and would substantially reduce the price of essential goods. All this would benefit the people who live in Purus, the majority of whom are poor.

But Kyte dismisses Tubino's backtrack on the highway as "absurd", arguing that the bill has already been approved by the Transport Commission and therefore can be scheduled for debate in Congress. He says:

The risk of a highway being built is as strong as ever. The original ruling by the Transport Commission supporting it is still active and will be discussed in Congress no matter the decision by the Peoples Commission. Congressman Tubino is well aware of the implications of this ruling, and his efforts to deflect attention from it are extremely concerning and put Purus' indigenous people and forests at risk.

According to the Peoples Commission and the Transport Commission, both their rulings can go before Congress. However, Tubino says he can guarantee that only the Peoples' Commission's ruling will be debated and that it is the only one he is now backing.

"Rocky Road" makes a series of other claims including one that the local government stands accused of faking indigenous backing for the highway and another that an official tried to bribe one of Purus's indigenous organizations, FECONAPU, with around US$10,000 to support it.

The report also highlights "possible conflicts of interests" of the highway's main supporters, including Tubino, saying it "would ease access to illegal timber" and that he was once "Political Military Head of Ucayali" – the department in which Purus is situated – when the Armed Forces were accused of profiting from the illegal timber trade in that region.

Tubino told me he "categorically denies the accusation" and will take legal action against Global Witness for starting a "smear campaign" against him.

"I will file a criminal complaint for defamation in Peru," he says, "and will make an appeal to the appropriate international courts."

Miguel Piovesan and the Purus government could not be reached for comment.

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