Gideon Lichfield

I still remember the moment I first discovered the World Wide Web. It was in 1994 or 1995, at a row of desks that held the handful of computer terminals then available in the university library of the London School of Economics. On the Windows 3.1 desktop (so old there wasn’t even a Start button) I saw an unfamiliar icon—a crude, pixellated picture of a string instrument, with “Cello WWW” below it. I clicked.

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Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, has become the latest billionaire to get into the news business. But while parallels will inevitably be drawn with other recently minted media barons like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (the Washington Post), Chris Hughes (the New Republic), John Henry (the Boston Globe), and Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev (Britain’s Independent and Evening Standard), those could be misleading. Omidyar is not buying a venerable institution with a legacy, audience and print edition to protect, but starting up a new venture—and if done right, it has the potential to challenge the UK’s Guardian for a left-leaning global audience.

Elon Musk’s commercial space company, SpaceX, has just launched a Falcon 9 rocket into orbit carrying a Canadian Space Agency satellite, CASSIOPE. Part of the satellite’s payload is Cascade, a prototype for a super-fast space-borne file-transfer system—a kind of digital courier service.

Humans cause climate change. Scientists agree we do. This is not news. The fact that they agree was itself first scientifically established back in 2004, when a survey of 928 published papers (pdf) on climate science found not a single one that disputed the consensus. A more recent survey of over 12,000 papers found 97% support among those that took a position.

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Tim Cook laid a little-remarked bombshell on Microsoft at Apple’s event today.

Egypt’s military never liked Hamas. It saw the Palestinian movement that has run the Gaza Strip since 2007, close cousins to Egypt’s own Muslim Brotherhood, as a beachhead in the Islamist project to take over all of the Middle East and North Africa. And now that Egypt’s generals have pushed the Islamists out of power in their own country, they’ve apparently set their sights on doing the same in Gaza.

The media tied themselves into knots on Thursday (Aug. 22) when the person they had known until then as Bradley Manning, sentenced a day earlier to 35 years for leaking government secrets to Wikileaks, announced that she was a woman named Chelsea. Reporting this, some newspapers ended up where you least expected them to be: the oh-so-liberal New York Times stuck doggedly to “Bradley” and male pronouns, while Britain’s conservative gossip rag the Daily Mail called her “Chelsea” and “she/her” throughout. One article from Reuters went to extraordinary lengths, writing “Manning” more than a dozen times and even breaking rules of grammar just to avoid using any pronouns at all.

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When we tried out a weekend version of the Daily Brief a while back, the response was enthusiastic. So from today we’ll be in your inbox each Saturday morning too, with some thoughts on the week’s big themes and the best writing we’ve seen on Quartz and around the web. Please give us your feedback, as always, by replying to this email. We hope you enjoy it.

For some years, it’s been possible for anyone to follow the position of thousands of airline flights minute by minute. Flight-tracking site FlightAware has posted a set of links to all its data for Asiana Airlines (OZ) flight 214, which crash-landed at San Francisco airport yesterday (July 6) after coming in short of the runway’s edge, killing two of the 307 people on board. (USA Today has a useful visual guide to the crash site.)

Updated July 4, 11:30 a.m. ET

The head of Egypt’s armed forces, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has just made a statement on Egyptian television. The armed forces, he says, have heeded the call of the Egyptian people “not to hold the reins of power or to rule but to discharge its civil responsibility. This is the message received by the Egyptian armed forces from all the corners of Egypt.” And he has announced a “road map” that he says was agreed at a meeting by all the main political forces, consisting of the following moves:

If you want to keep up with events in Egypt as they unfold but not be overwhelmed, here’s our carefully selected list of the best sources.

At first glance, people power looks to be alive and well in Egypt. Just two-and-a-half years after toppling their dictator, Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians were out in force again yesterday to protest the heavy-handed rule and economic stagnation under his successor, president Mohamed Morsi. On Twitter the #June30 hashtag—the anniversary of Morsi’s inauguration—crackles with energy and hope, an echo of the #Jan25 hashtag around which the opposition rallied against Mubarak. And today the armed forces gave Morsi an ultimatum: Respond to the protestors’ demands within 48 hours, or the armed forces would impose their “own road map for the future.”

The waiting game is on in France. More than 600,000 people in France have just wrapped up the test needed to secure a high-school diploma, the baccalauréat (better known as le bac) and results should be out next week. Today’s New York Times reports on general disillusionment with the exam, saying it “focuses too little on logic or creativity … and too much on rote knowledge and the esoterica that thrill the Parisian cultural aristocracy.”

Edward Snowden—the man behind what the Guardian is calling, with only a little hyperbole, “one of the most significant leaks in US political history”—was not what you would call a high-level agent.

A link from Guardian

It’s been a heady few months for Israeli social mapping startup Waze. In January Apple was reportedly courting it with a $500 million offer (Corrected: we originally wrote “billion”); last month it was Facebook, for $1 billion. Now Google is planning to offer $1.3 billion, sources have told Globes, an Israeli newspaper.

Amid revelations (confirmed) that the US National Security Agency has been collecting basic data on most of the phone calls made in the US, and new claims (so far strenuously denied) that it can directly pull users’ information from most of the biggest online firms, one inevitably wonders what else it might be monitoring.

The $3 billion bid by Russian state oil giant Rosneft for the 49% it doesn’t already own of gas producer Itera seems, on the face of it, to be overpriced. A 49% stake in Itera’s natural gas assets is worth only $2.7 billion, says Sberbank. The discrepancy indicates that Rosneft is after bigger game: not merely some more gas assets, but the lucrative right to export natural gas from the country. And perhaps bigger game still: political power.

In the United States, it seems, corporations are people too—except when it suits them not to be. In this week’s Congressional brouhaha over Apple’s overseas tax-avoidance schemes, the chief solutions proffered have been either to give firms like Apple a one-time tax holiday so they can bring some of their cash back home, or else stop taxing them on their overseas earnings altogether. Nobody seems to have suggested a surely more rational choice: Treat Apple as if it were a US citizen or permanent resident, and tax it on all its worldwide earnings.

It’s been a tiring week for anyone in the media—and a sobering one for anyone in the media with a conscience. The coverage of the Boston Marathon saga, from the bombing on Monday to the capture of suspected bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Friday, brought out some of the very worst features of news in the digital age. Here are the ways the media fail when they cover a big, breaking story—and a simple reason why.