It was a long time coming, but former FIFA president Sepp Blatter (I always imagine Daffy Duck saying his name) has been indicted for fraud, stemming from a $2 million payment from 20 years ago. Also charged: former UEFA president Michel Platini. — Read the rest

Jolyon Ralph created a guide to the rocks and minerals of Minecraft: "Have you ever wondered how similar the Minecraft resources are to rocks and minerals in the real world? Let's find out!"

"Wait," I hear you shout, "Dirt isn't a rock!"

Mexican World Cup soccer fans have been banned due to popular chants that are so homophobic even a sports organization had to take a stand.

Insider:

Mexico's soccer fans won't be allowed to attend World Cup qualifiers because they've used homophobic chants at previous events.

Learn something, have fun, and stay safe. That probably sounds like something your mother used to say as you headed out the door for school, but it's hard to argue with any of that. In case you'd like to take those pearls of parental wisdom to heart and make them your new rallying cry, the Digital Daze App and eLearning Bundle can certainly help that pursuit along. — Read the rest

Pepsi has announced plans to contract with the Russian space startup Startrocket to project massive "artificial constellations" spelling out ads for a "nonalcoholic energy beverage" in the night sky; Startrocket is planning to launch a cluster of cubesats with reflective mylar sails in 2021.

Article 13 is the on-again/off-again controversial proposal to make virtually every online community, service, and platform legally liable for any infringing material posted by their users, even very briefly, even if there was no conceivable way for the online service provider to know that a copyright infringement had taken place.

In the years during which the new EU Copyright Directive was being drafted, a variety of proposals were considered and rejected by the EU's own experts, and purged from the draft text, but two of these proposals were reintroduced, slipped back into the Directive on the day the GDPR came into effect, while everyone's attention was elsewhere.

Inside North Korea collects Oliver Wainwright's gorgeous photos of the striking public aesthetic of a brutal dictatorship.

Theresa May's speech to the Conservative Party conference last night was a "nightmare," from the moment when comedian Lee Nelson (last seen showering corrupt FIFA boss with handfuls of money) crept up to the stage and handed the Prime Minister a P45 form (the form that bosses in the UK use to formally fire their employees), telling her "Boris told me to do it."

CSIR-Tech is the commercial arm of the Indian government's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research; after spending ₹50 crore (about USD7.6M) pursuing more than 13,000 "bio-data patents" (patents of no real value save burnishing the credentials of the scientists whose names appear on them), they have run out of money and shut down.

An anonymous source has handed 2.6TB worth of records from Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's largest offshore law firms, to a consortium of news outlets, including The Guardian.

Qatar, one of the worst places in the world to be a worker (even the flight attendants experience human rights abuses), was picked to host the 2022 football world cup by the famously corrupt FIFA organization, despite the physical danger to spectators (and athletes!) — Read the rest

Ole Vlad's figured out how to troll the west: celebrate corrupt, populist strongmen who brazenly lie while fronting for the rich and powerful.

The 2022 soccer World Cup taking place in the 106° heat of the Qatari summer is already a baking examplar of FIFA's corruption; a new study suggests heat stress will make it physically dangerous even for spectators.

AirShowFan sez, "Insightful article about the protests in Brazil, which make clear that it's absurd for a government to spend billions in public funds for sports tournaments that (a) bring no clear benefits to the country and (b) violate citizens' rights. — Read the rest

As a Russian league reserve game in Grozny drew to a close, linesman Musa Kadyrov sprinted onto the field and "launched a vicious assault on one of the players." Reuters:

"The ref blew the final whistle and I started walking to our bench, when suddenly someone came from behind, pushed me to the ground and began kicking and punching me," the 18-year-old Amkar player told reporters.

Here's a brutal, must-read article from Brian Phillips detailing the bizarre, globalized game of soccer-match-rigging, which launders its influence, money and bets through countries all over the world, in what sounds like an intense, sport-themed LARP of a William Gibson Sprawl novel:

Right now, Dan Tan's programmers are busy reverse-engineering the safeguards of online betting houses.

According to a study published in Research in Sports Medicine, woman football (soccer) players are about half as likely to fake an injury as male players. The researchers used a representative sample of match-videos, counted injuries, and noted whether the player left the field for a substantial period or had visible blood, and counted those as definite injuries, then ranked the remaining injuries by their plausibility. — Read the rest

Fifa, soccer's international governing body, has awarded the 2018 football World Cup to Russia and 2022's to the tiny middle-eastern state of Qatar.

Russia, described by the LA Times as "particularly ill-prepared to stage" the massive event, beat out a bid from rich, safe England, which is full of brand-new Olympic venues. — Read the rest

An interesting Slate piece points out a correlation between rates of infection by "cat poop protozoa"—that's Toxoplasma gondii— and success rates in soccer:

If we set aside the qualifying rounds (in which teams can play to a draw) and focus on matches with a clear winner, the results are very compelling.