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.
Ecuador says it will let Swedish officials interview Julian Assange at its embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been sheltering for the past four years. "In the coming weeks, a date will be established for the proceedings to be held at the Embassy of Ecuador in the United Kingdom," the statement read. Prosecutors in Sweden have said they want to interview Assange in connection with a 2010 rape allegation against him.
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.

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A newly launched satellite will help China protect its maritime interests, the official China Daily newspaper reported on Thursday amid growing tensions over disputed territory in the South China Sea. "The satellite will play an important role in monitoring the marine environment, islands and reefs, and ships and oil rigs," the China Daily said, citing project leader Xu Fuxiang. In July, an international court in The Hague ruled against China's claims in the resource-rich South China Sea in an action brought by the Philippines, a decision stridently rejected by Beijing.
Thousands of Portuguese firefighters struggled on Thursday to control nearly 200 forest fires after flames killed at least four people on the mainland and the island of Madeira the previous day. Prime Minister Antonio Costa cut short his holidays and flew to Madeira, where more than 200 buildings in the regional capital and popular resort Funchal had been destroyed or damaged and some 1,000 people including tourists evacuated. “We understand the dimension of this horrible tragedy that devastated various municipalities here in Madeira, and we also know about the calamities affecting other zones of the country that now have to be addressed,” he told reporters.
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.

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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.
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.
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.