President Barack Obama is a bit of a night owl, known to spend the wee hours in the White House Treaty Room reading briefings, working on speeches, watching ESPN and eating almonds. “It has been a part of his daily routine since taking office in 2009,” White House chief digital officer Jason Goldman writes in a post for Medium.com. Until now, Goldman says, most of the letters chosen by the staff have been handwritten letters or emails sent through WhiteHouse.gov.

1. Hanks took the role 1.5 hours into reading the script, but he said he'd only take it if ...
The 10-year-old boy killed during a ride on the world's tallest waterslide was decapitated in the accident, a person familiar with the investigation said. The person was not authorized to speak publicly about Caleb Schwab's death and spoke Wednesday on condition of anonymity. Caleb died Sunday on the Verruckt raft ride at the Schlitterbahn WaterPark in Kansas City, Kansas.
A former aide to Chris Christie said in a text message that the New Jersey governor "flat out lied" when he said senior staff members were not involved in the "Bridgegate" scandal in 2013, according to a court filing on Wednesday. The details were revealed in a document filed in New Jersey federal court by Bill Baroni, former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who is one of two former Christie allies facing trial next month on Bridgegate-related criminal charges.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday pledged to reinvigorate ties after their first meeting since Ankara shot down a Russian warplane last November. Erdogan's visit to Putin's hometown of Saint Petersburg is also his first foreign trip since the failed coup against him last month that sparked a purge of opponents and cast a shadow over Turkey's relations with the West. "We lived through a very complicated moment in the relations between our states and we very much want, and I feel our Turkish friends want, to overcome the difficulties," Putin told journalists at a joint press conference.

Spy tech goes cheap. Track your vehicle with your smartphone.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on Thursday denied requests to loosen the classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no medical use. The decision is the DEA's response to a 2011 petition by two former state governors who had urged federal agencies to re-classify marijuana as a drug with accepted medical uses. In a letter to the petitioners, the DEA said it had asked the Department of Health and Human Services for a scientific and medical evaluation of the issue.
UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi has resigned following an ethics probe investigating whether she potentially violated nepotism rules, misused student funds and misled administrators about her role in a social media scrub. Katehi drew criticism in 2011 when campus police used pepper spray on student protestors. This year, the controversy was stoked again by a Sacramento Bee report saying the school had spent $175,000 to hire a PR firm to scrub images of the pepper spray incident from social media.
Shifting sands on a Hawaiian beach have revealed — and then concealed again — carvings that Hawaii's indigenous people made on the shoreline at least 400 years ago. Two tourists from Texas stumbled across the petroglyphs last month on Oahu's Waianae Coast on the western side of the island. "It was just a stroke of luck," Lonnie Watson, one of the visitors, said in a statement issued by the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources.
While on "Popcorn With Peter Travers," actor Simon Helberg performed a hilarious impression of Nicolas Cage.
The mother of two of the three girls injured when a Ferris wheel gondola flipped over at a Tennessee county fair said her daughters remain hospitalized two days after the accident. Kimmee Reynolds posted a statement on Facebook that said her youngest girl, 6-year-old Briley Jae, has a concussion, bleeding on her brain and remains on a ventilator. Police are citing a mechanical failure in the accident that dumped three children from a Ferris wheel at Tennessee's Greene County Fair.
Dan Rather, Joe Scarborough and others have joined the bandwagon of people passionately condemning Donald Trump’s provocative suggestion that “Second Amendment people” would be able to stop a potential President Hillary Clinton from taking away their gun rights. “No citizen who cares about the country and its future can ignore what Donald Trump said,” Rather wrote Tuesday in a Facebook post. “Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish — the Second Amendment,” the Republican nominee said.