Svati Kirsten Narula

This post has been updated.

Come December, FIFA will elect a new president—hopefully one who can lead football’s global governing body out of the mess Sepp Blatter made. Today Michel Platini, who’s currently the president of European football association UEFA, said he’s the man for the job.

Richard “Dick” Bass was a Texas oil baron and rancher who traded cowboy boots for climbing boots, eventually becoming the first man to summit the tallest mountain on all seven continents. He died of pulmonary fibrosis this weekend at his home in Dallas at the age of 85.

The US state department compiles an annual report card scoring countries on their efforts to combat human trafficking. Malaysia rose higher in this year’s rankings, prompting scrutiny from critics who say the state department’s analysis was swayed by political concerns.

At least ten people are dead after a car bomb reportedly detonated outside the Jazeera Palace hotel in Mogadishu, Somalia. Pictures posted on social media show severe damage to the hotel, which is heavily guarded and has been the frequent target of attacks. It often hosts foreign diplomats and government officials.

Fiat Chrysler has initiated a recall of approximately 1.4 million cars and trucks because of the risk that they could be hijacked remotely by hackers—a scenario that was recently described in detail by Wired.

This post has been corrected.

Finnish president Sauli Niinistö’s country is an economic mess, but he has carved out time in his schedule to look into another matter: the spread of wild parsnips near Naantali, a town on the country’s southwest coast where his summer home is located.

A UK-based coalition called Protect has created a body camera to be worn by rhinos so anti-poaching task forces can better protect them.

Nine cases of leprosy, a curable but unsightly disease that can cause nerve damage if left untreated, have popped up in Florida this year. Now health officials in the state are warning people to stay away from armadillos, the only animals that carry the leprosy-causing bacteria Mycobacterium leprae. 

Bill Cosby’s legal team has filed for court sanctions against Andrea Constand, a Temple University employee who accused him of sexual assault in a 2005 lawsuit. Details of his deposition in that case—in which he described his philandering and use of Quaalude tranquilizers—were released to several media outlets this month.

Weeks after being ordered to pay a woman $5 million in damages over a bizarre sex tape lawsuit and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, rapper 50 Cent is trying to reset the public’s perception of his wealth. Many people scoffed at his recent bankruptcy filing—how could a guy with an estimated net worth of $155 million argue that he can’t afford to pay out $5 million?

A study commissioned by the Thai government has found that Bangkok, the country’s capital and most populous city, is seriously endangered by rising sea levels—not just because the city is in a low-lying and flood-prone region, but because of how it is being developed.

There are not that many blue whales left on Earth—perhaps some 10,000, by one estimate—and scientists still know relatively little about them. Now, with help from Isabella, an eastern south Pacific blue whale, scientists are a big step closer to determining where many of these creatures go during their breeding season.

One of the potentially devastating consequences of global warming is that the oceans are growing more acidic—but just how acidic has been difficult for scientists to measure. That may be about to change, as the XPrize Foundation’s year-long competition to develop sensors that can measure deep sea pH levels was won last night by Sunburst Sensors, a small technology company based in Missoula, Montana.

The quintessentially American sport of baseball is becoming increasingly popular internationally, and US teams have established development centers all over the world to cultivate new athletes. Executives from Major League Baseball, the US professional league, are particularly excited about the game’s future in China: ”All the ethereal things about baseball—no clock, the sacrifice, the journey around the bases that starts and finishes at home—it all resonates in Chinese culture,” said MLB executive Jim Small.

Temperatures across the globe last month were higher than any previous June since record-keeping began in 1880. Three meteorological agencies have concluded that June 2015 was the warmest June ever recorded, and that 2015 is on track to have the hottest average surface temperatures in history.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, better known as SETI, has long operated with few financial resources but no lack of hope that astronomers  can someday find intelligent life beyond earth. Today, scientists involved in the search have more reason for optimism than ever: Russian tech billionaire Yuri Milner is investing $100 million to fund the group’s efforts over the next ten years.

The Solar Impulse 2 is grounded in Hawaii and may not fly again until April 2016, its team of pilots announced today—a significant setback in their attempt to make a historic round-the-world trip in a fully solar-powered airplane.

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Ocean explorers recently found sharks at the bottom of Kavachi, one of the most active submarine volcanoes in the Pacific. The waters in and around the volcano are too hot and acidic for human divers to swim—even when the crater is not spewing ash, lava, and steam up to the ocean’s surface—so oceanographer Brennan Phillips and his colleagues deployed disposable robots and cameras into the deep to explore the site, which is located near the Solomon Islands.

An unusually windy day gave Scandinavia another chance to show off its global superiority in clean energy yesterday. On July 9, Denmark’s wind farms generated more than enough power to meet nationwide electricity demands—with a 16% surplus of energy during the day and a whopping 40% surplus overnight.

“Marijuana is literally sucking rivers dry,” California state senator Mike McGuire told his colleagues this week.

Euclid Tsakalotos, Greece’s new finance minister, was in the global spotlight this week as the man ”in charge of saving the euro,” as he tries to negotiate with his country’s creditors. This morning, however, attention turned away from Tsakalotos’s economic policies and toward his handwriting. More specifically, his signature: