Things are bad enough for the people of Pakistan with the floods and constant bomb attacks by insurgents.

Now a handful of their heroic national cricketers have been accused of deliberately making bad plays in a match against England in order to profit from its betting.

On 25 July, over 92,000 intelligence reports covering the war in Afghanistan (dubbed the ‘Afghan War Diary 2004-2010’) were released to the public by the online whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

Wikileaks has now released more classified intelligence documents to the public than the rest of the world combined. They have won awards and been heavily criticised; faced many legal pressures and have been blocked in many countries.

For the last two weeks, some of America’s most powerful men have been camping out among the Redwood trees just north of San Francisco.

It’s the annual gathering of the Bohemian Club at Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio.

There, as they have done since 1893, the club’s members of artists, presidents, politicians, businessmen and academics meet to talk about life, business and world issues.

The Bohemian Club

Natural resources like oil and gold are instantly associated with wealth, but there are plenty of other, less glamorous commodities that generate a lot of money – or conflict – for the countries who have them.

Commodities have no real difference in product quality from one unit to the next. They are the raw materials used to make things we buy, from food to electronics to petrol.

The pot has reached $1000. Earp is beginning to sweat. Things are getting tense around the table. Hawke raises. Earp gulps and raises again. Dick throws in his hand. It’s too rich for his blood.

A bunch of card sharps sitting around a table in a casino? Not even close. “Dick” is a mechanic in Iowa, “Hawke” is a corporate lawyer in New York and “Earp” is a mother of two in Sydney, Australia.

Every day trillions of dollars get moved about electronically on the world’s financial markets, the nature of which acts as a heart rate monitor for our global economic health.

In the past couple of years, the world has been obsessed with this heart rate as it has tried to climb out of recession.

So what exactly are these financial markets that play such a crucial role in the economic world?

The financial markets

Iceland, the small European nation with a population of just 320,000 may well become the world’s first ‘media haven’.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) has been discussed and was unanimously supported in the Icelandic Parliament on June 16. The new laws will be written and introduced sometime next year.

The IMMI addresses key issues for free expression in the digital age.

While the business end of the Football World Cup continues this week in South Africa, the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments is in full swing.

Due to a continental rotational policy that was implemented in 2000 by world football’s governing body FIFA, only Africa could host this year’s event and similarly South America will host in 2014 (Brazil).

This policy has since been withdrawn by FIFA. However, Africa is still ineligible to bid for 2018, while South America is ineligible for both 2018 and 2022.

Last week, Apple completed its epic comeback by overtaking Microsoft as the world’s biggest technology company. It’s the first time Apple has been bigger than Microsoft since December 1989.

And the milestone happened to coincide with the global launch of the company’s latest gadget, the iPad.

The takeover

On Wednesday, Microsoft’s share price fell 4% to $25, after an 18% fall throughout May. This put Microsoft’s total value at $219 billion compared to Apple at US$222 billion.

The United States is one of the world’s most popular travel destinations with 55 million tourists arriving on its shores last year.

But numbers are still lower than hoped for. So for the first time ever, they’ve decided to run a national tourism campaign to attract more visitors.

However, rather than paying for it with the usual taxpayer money, they’ll be charging visitors $10 every time they come in.