“I was really quite grumpy about it, I didn’t want to put myself on display like that,” he says. But as chief executive of Profusion, a data science consultancy, he had been urging his team of number crunchers to plan more ambitious internal projects — and this was the one they had come up with.

For 10 days, Profusion’s data scientists used Fitbits and other apps to track 171 personal metrics for 31 staff who volunteered (including the somewhat reluctant Mr Weston). Combing through the data, the analysts found they could group the staff into clusters, based on shared patterns of behaviour. They labelled one group “Busy and Coping”; another “Irritated and Unsettled”.

Technology has made it possible for employers to monitor employees more closely than ever, from GPS trackers for delivery drivers to software that tracks which websites office workers visit. Companies such as Profusion think wearable gadgets could open a new frontier in workplace analytics, albeit one that would further blur the lines between our work and private lives.

Speaking on the sidelines of a seminar in Florence, Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar in Cairo, strongly criticized Western powers and particularly the United States. Describing himself as "an ordinary citizen" given that the Sunni Muslim seat of learning has no political role, the imam said: "The emergence of Daesh (an Arabic term for ISIS) in such a spontaneous manner leads us to ask what are the deep causes.

"And the man in the Arab street thinks that the West has something to do with it. The arms Daesh has are American, they are not made in the Arab world. ISIS developed so quickly and that required enormous amounts of capital. Where did these enormous sums of money come from? The man in the street says the West is not serious about taking on Daesh."

Trying to support his conspiracy theory, Tayeb cited three parachute drops of arms which ended up in the arms of ISIS fighters. "They said it was a mistake," he said, while sidestepping a question about the documented role of some Arab states, notably in the Gulf, in the development and financing of ISIS.

The movement wants a referendum by December at the earliest, and for it to be done by January 2016. The movement’s main message is not an exit from the European Union, but from the euro as a currency.

From when the senate receives the signatures, “there are no more excuses,” Grillo wrote on his page. He explained that the citizens and political parties have two options before them: “ignore the signatures of citizens, as has happened before, or allow them to express themselves on a topic fundamental to the economic life and social development of the country, which has never seen real debate.”

He warned that there are people in parliament willing to “do battle” for M5S, and “to take care that all the stages that lead to the referendum are… observed.” “The euro referendum is a vote on the future of Italy. Do not let it go to waste!” he added. According to M5S MP Carlo Sibila, Italy’s debt increased dramatically after the introduction of the euro. He also noted that Italy’s unemployment rate hovers around 12.7 percent, the sixth-highest in the EU.

No fewer than three serving European prime ministers will be attending, from the Netherlands, Finland and Belgium. They will be discussing “European strategy” with the head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, and the president of Austria, Heinz Fischer. Two European finance ministers are on the list: one Dutch, the other George Osborne. The UK chancellor is a regular attendee of the Bilderberg summit, and this year he will be showing off his post-election glow.

Europe’s hottest financial potato, Greece, is on the conference agenda, and it’s good to know Benoît Coeuré, a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank, will be there to discuss it in strictest privacy with interested parties, such as the heads of Deutsche Bank, Lazard, Banco Santander and HSBC.

The scandal-hit HSBC and everyone’s favourite vampire squid, Goldman Sachs, are both extremely well represented at this year’s conference. HSBC in particular by its chairman, its busy chief legal officer, and board member Rona Fairhead, who is also on the board of PepsiCo and chair of the BBC Trust. Good to know the BBC is in such safe hands.

Finally, it’s worth noting the growing presence of Google at Bilderberg. The company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, is on the group’s steering committee; he’ll be joined in Austria by his vice-president for engineering, advanced technology and projects, and the vice-president of engineering for the not-at-all terrifying sounding Google DeepMind. They, presumably, will be leading the session on artificial intelligence.

"This morning as we celebrate one of the strongest alliances the world has ever known my message to the German people is simple: We are grateful for your friendship, for your leadership. We stand together as inseparable allies in Europe and around the world," Obama said as he addressed the timeless Bavarian scene, complete with the sounds of alphorns.

Obama is closer to Merkel than most heads of state, although their relationship has been tested in the past couple of years, particularly after it emerged that the National Security Agency had tapped Merkel's cellphone. The revelation was particularly chilling in Germany, with its oppressive history of secret government surveillance. But Merkel seemed eager to move on. She said in interviews that she didn't bring the spying controversy up with Obama since they've already discussed what needed to be said in previous meetings. In her speech in Kruen, she addressed him as "dear Barack."

"Although it is true we sometimes have differences of opinion today from time to time, but still the United States of America is our friend, our partner and indeed an essential partner with whom we cooperate very closely," Merkel said through a translator. "We cooperate closely because this is in our mutual interest. We cooperate because we need it. We cooperate because we want it."

Athens-listed equities fell by a further 2.7 percent on Monday, as the Greek economy moved closer to debt obligations it appeared unable or unwilling to meet. The tumble followed a 5 percent fall on the Athens Stock Exchange last Friday, its largest since January. The slide came before Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, said that the country's creditors were demanding austerity so severe that Greece would be unable to grow.

Speaking in Berlin after stock market trading hours, Mr Varoufakis said that the primary surpluses Greece was instructed to produce would require him to reach "into the guts, into the heart, into the substance of the private sector and extract so much out of it, that the private sector cannot produce the growth".

"One reason that we haven’t reached an agreement, privately we’re being told that there’s a logic to what we’re saying, but politically, it’s very hard for the institutions to come out and admit it," he said. Attendees of the G7 summit made clear on Monday that resolving the Greek standoff was now an international priority. Speaking at the meeting in Germany, Angela Merkel, the country’s chancellor, said: “There’s not much time left. We have to work very hard on this.”

The ruling was a victory for the administration of President Barack Obama, which said the law unlawfully encroached on the president's power to set foreign policy and would, if enforced, undermine the US government's claim to be a neutral peacemaker in the Middle East. In a ruling by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court said the president has exclusive power to grant formal recognition to a foreign government.

"Congress cannot command the president to contradict an earlier recognition determination in the issuance of passports," Kennedy, a conservative who often casts the deciding vote in close cases, wrote in the majority opinion.

"They told me that because I have a lot of money, I have to pay my share," said Ammar, who’s asked that his real name not be used. "They analyse your income and take a percentage." As Isil works to establish its empire, the jihadists have become fastidious bureaucrats: imposing taxes, paying fixed salaries and imposing trading standards laws in a bid to create a healthy economy that will sustain their autocratic rule.

Yet despite brutal punishments for those who break the laws, many Syrian businessmen see ISIL as the only option when compared to the anarchy that prevails in areas controlled by other rebels, including Western-backed groups.

A resident of Al-Bab, an ISIL held territory whose market last month was decimated by a regime barrel bomb, killing up to 50 people, said: "Civilians would rather live under monkeys than under Bashar al-Assad. They would choose anything than a regime that has been bombing its own people. Under ISIL we can exist, but still, we live in fear.”

That sounds like a lot of sleazy money, but this figure pales in significance to the amount of corruption and criminality attributable to Wall Street banks and other Western financial institutions. For example, British bank HSBC alone has been caught running tax evasion, money-laundering for drug cartels and other illicit schemes that is estimated at $180 billion – or more than a thousand-fold the scale of criminality alleged at FIFA.

Wall Street banks, including JP Morgan, are accused of massive, systematic rigging of gold price markets all in a shady bid to shield the US dollar value. That criminality, affecting the price of basic commodities and livelihoods for billions of people worldwide, is estimated to be in the order of trillions of dollars – or a thousand, thousand-fold the FIFA debacle. Moreover, these same banks, along with a slew of other global names – Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Credit Agricole among many others – were all directly responsible for the explosion in toxic financial derivatives that made their executives multimillionaires but which led to the global financial and economic meltdown in 2008.

That meltdown – which persists seven years on from its inception – has resulted in millions of lives ruined from unemployment and the collapse of pensions and savings funds. Added to that are the myriad social hardships and crippled lives from the ensuing austerity imposed on the general Western public to pay for the financial catastrophe – a catastrophe that was deliberately and recklessly engineered by the major banks, hedge funds and other capitalist investment agencies.

Until Washington and London governments go after priority financial crime in their midst, then anything they say about FIFA can be taken as very wide off the mark.

According to Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, who covered the event, it featured speeches by Saudi General (retired) Anwar Majed Eshki, and Israeli career diplomat Dore Gold. Eshki is a former adviser to Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Gold is Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and is currently seen as a strong candidate to lead Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lake notes that Eshki gave his speech in Arabic, Gold gave his in English, and that no questions were taken from the audience.

At least five meetings appear to have taken place between senior Israeli and Saudi officials since early 2014, in secret venues located in Italy, India and the Czech Republic. The main purpose of the clandestine meetings was to discuss what Tel Aviv and Riyadh see as Iran’s increasingly powerful role in Middle Eastern affairs, and to explore ways of stopping Tehran from building nuclear weapons.

This admission, however, does not mean that the Saudis are about to recognize Israel, or that the Israelis are any closer to accepting the Saudis’ 2002 Arab-Israeli peace plan, which Tel Aviv has flatly rejected, says Lake. Admittedly, the rising power of Iran can only do so much to bring Israelis and Arabs closer.

Research by the House of Commons Library found that defence spending has increased in some of the biggest recipients of British taxpayers' aid cash. The cash could have helped at least four developing countries keep their defence budgets above the international benchmark of 2 per cent of gross national income.

Sir Gerald Howarth MP, a former defence minister in the Coalition government who is campaigning against defence cuts, said: “By continuing to provide aid to countries with increasing defence budgets the UK is effectively subsidising their defence budgets whilst we are ramping up overseas aid and cutting our own defence budget. It simply does not make sense.”

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the Commission, has vented his frustration at Mr Tsipras for rejecting the lenders' proposals last week without telling his parliament that sticking points such as income support for pensioners had been put on the table for negotiations. "He didn't tell parliament that we did address that subject already," said Mr Juncker, adding that he is yet to receive a revised proposal from the Greek leadership following Mr Tsipras' "disappointing" comments.

"I don't have a personal problem with Alexis Tsipras, quite the contrary. He was my friend, he is my friend. But friendship, in order to maintain it, has to have some minimum rules," he said at the G7 summit in Germany. Meanwhile, the President of the European Parliament has put further pressure on Greece to agree a deal with its international creditors and unlock rescue funding, warning of “dramatic consequences” if the indebted country resists compromise.

Mr Tsipras took a defiant stance on Friday by postponing a €300 million payment to the International Monetary Fund and describing the latest reforms and funding proposal from the troika of lenders as an “unpleasant surprise” and “absurd”. Mr Schulz echoed Mr Tsipras’s foreboding tone about how quickly Europe needs to come to an agreement. "Time is running out and the consequences would be dramatic,” he said, warning Greece against “turning down the outstretched hand again”.

On his way back from the Victory Day Parade in Moscow last month, the Cuban leader Raul Castro stopped off in Rome to thank Pope Francis for his role in Cuba's rapprochement with the United States. "If the Pope continues this way," Castro said afterwards, "I will go back to praying and go back to the church - I am not joking."

In September Francis will return the compliment with a stop-over in Cuba when he travels to the United States. And the American visit could turn out to be the most difficult overseas trip of his pontificate. Raul Castro's endorsement is unlikely to recommend Francis to the American right, many of whom responded with visceral rage to President Obama's Cuban initiative.

"There is a lot of scepticism among (US) Catholics," says Stephen Moore, the chief economist at the conservative Washington think tank the Heritage Foundation, and himself a Catholic. "I think this is a Pope who clearly has some Marxist leanings. It's unquestionable that he has a very vocal scepticism (about) capitalism and free enterprise and… I find that to be very troubling."

Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host is blunter. He dismissed Pope Francis's apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospels) as "pure Marxism".

To wit: “Just days after George Soros warned that World War 3 was imminent unless Washington backed down to China on IMF currency basket inclusion, the hacker collective CyberBerkut has exposed the billionaire as the real puppet-master behind the scenes in Ukraine.

In 3 stunning documents, allegedly hacked from email correspondence between the hedge fund manager and Ukraine President Poroshenko, Soros lays out ‘A short and medium term comprehensive strategy for the new Ukraine,’ expresses his confidence that the US should provide Ukraine with lethal military assistance, ‘with same level of sophistication in defense weapons to match the level of opposing force,’ and finally explained Poroshenko's ‘first priority must be to regain control of financial markets,’ which he assures the President could be helped by The Fed adding, ‘I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him out about the swap agreement’.”

Needless to say, there was absolutely no mention of any of this in the broader media.