• More than five years after Taliban militants shot her in the head for fighting for girls’ right to attend school, Malala Yousafzai returned to Pakistan this week.  The youngest Nobel Laureate in history, Yousafzai, now 20, has been a vocal advocate for girls’ education around the world. [Washington Post]
  • An Italian atheist has claimed that the Pope told him during an interview published Thursday that “Hell does not exist.”  Soon after, the Vatican released a statement confirming that the meeting between the pontiff and Eugenio Scalfari did occur, but denied that the Pope gave Scalfari an interview or made the alleged statements. [National Catholic Reporter]
  • 64 people, many children, died in a fire that engulfed the Winter Cherry mall in Kemerovo, Russia on Sunday.  The mall’s public address system was non-operational at the time of the blaze, and many exits had been illegally blocked, trapping shoppers in the building and leading to their deaths. [New York Times]
  • The city of Atlanta began its recovery from a massive ransomware attack this week, which resulted in the precautionary shutdown of many internet-based municipal services including the area’s court system and online utility payment services.  The individuals behind the attack demanded $51,000 in bitcoin from the city, with a deadline of Wednesday.  Though city officials said that some of the city’s data has been encrypted, the origin of the attack and its extent remain undetermined. [Gizmodo]
  • A malfunctioning Chinese space station is likely to crash into Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday.  Tiangong-1 (“heavenly palace”) will likely largely incinerate as it descends, but a few of the denser pieces of the falling object may make it to the ground.  The conceivable area where pieces may fall covers most of the United States, South America, southern Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and all of Africa and Australia.  [Vox]

FACT OF THE WEEK: The likelihood of being struck by falling space debris is approximately 1 in 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion). [Aerospace]