Australian batsman Hussey, who has the sobriquet ”Mr Cricket” due to his dedication to the game, believes recent incidents such as the fourth Test controversy between Pakistan and England, as well as the advancement of television coverage, has placed cricketers under intense scrutiny.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s outspoken President, fired an ominous warning at the country’s educated elites on Tuesday by calling for a purge of ”liberal and secular” academics in the universities. In what some analysts interpreted as the start of a clampdown, Ahmadinejad derided secular lecturers as a fifth column of Western colonialism which he said was seeking to expand into Iran.

Indonesia’s supreme court has imposed the death penalty on four members of a nine-person Australian drug-running gang who were appealing against lengthy prison sentences for smuggling heroin out of Bali, officials said on Wednesday. Prosecutors, who had never sought the death penalty for the four men, appealed against the sentence reductions to the supreme court.