WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday floated a theory that the Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot dead in the streets of Washington last month had been targeted because the operative was an informant. In an interview on Dutch television, the Australian cyberactivist invoked the unsolved killing of Seth Rich, 27, earlier this summer to illustrate the risks of being a source for his organization. Citing WikiLeaks protocol, Assange refused to confirm whether or not Rich was in fact a source for WikiLeaks, which has released thousands of internal DNC emails, some of them politically embarrassing.

1. Hanks took the role 1.5 hours into reading the script, but he said he'd only take it if ...
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.
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.
Under the ruling by U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, Wisconsin voters who did not have photo identification would have been able to vote in the Nov. 8 presidential election. A Justice Department statement said that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit issued a stay concluding "both that the district court’s decision is likely to be reversed on appeal and that disruption of the state’s electoral system in the interim will cause irreparable injury.” Wisconsin is one of several Republican-led states that have passed voter ID laws in recent years amid fear of fraudulent voting by illegal immigrants and others.

Spy tech goes cheap. Track your vehicle with your smartphone.
Amid heightening tensions over the South China Sea, China’s state-run newspaper reported Thursday that a recently launched satellite would help safeguard the country’s maritime interests in the disputed region. The Gaofen 3 satellite includes a radar system that can generate images from space with a resolution down to 1 m, the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense told the China Daily. China claims most of the rocks and reefs of the South China Sea as its own, but the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam also stake disputing claims to various parts of the territory.
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.
Aided by the slow but steady economic recovery, low interest rates and depressed gas prices, the 2015 economic environment was a carmaker's dream. Glancing at U.S. vehicle sales in 2016 thus far, you'd see no particular reason to predict gloom and doom. The state of traditional automakers only appears ominous when you look at the long term -- and notice how legacy carmakers are behind the ball on some of the industry's most powerful and inevitable trends.
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.
Police in Kentucky are in search of an arsonist who appears to accidentally light himself on fire in surveillance footage. "He did more damage to himself than the building," Madisonville Fire Chief Ray Wyatt told InsideEdition.com. The Madisonville Police Department shared footage of the bumbling fire bug to its social media on Monday.