MOTHER JONES DAILY: Cold as ICE: How Local Sheriffs Are Driving Trump’s Deportation Agenda, The pandemic could create a nightmare at the polls. Here's one way to fix that., Stephen Miller is just like Donald Trump—but competent, The pandemic hasn't slowed America's other public health crisis: gun violence, How did a lawyer who took on big oil and won end up under house arrest?, Nobody Accurately Tracks Health Care Workers Lost to COVID-19. So She Stays Up at Night Cataloging the Dead., A Military Veteran Sentenced to Life in Prison for Selling $30 of Weed Will Finally Be Freed 10AUG20

On this day 30 years ago, the spacecraft Magellan began orbiting Venus, mapping its surface and measuring its gravitational field. NASA made a really cool poster to celebrate the end of Magellan’s mission.

I used to think that thinking about space and the universe was scary, but now that there's not much that's scarier than life on Earth, I'm starting to find it comforting. Whether we get our act together on climate change or not, the sun's increasing luminosity will evaporate Earth's oceans in the next billion years. In about 4.5 billion years, long after life on Earth will have gone extinct, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide, dramatically changing the night sky. And 100 billion years from now, unless our current knowledge of cosmology is somehow passed onto whatever life forms may arise on Milkdromeda, the hybrid galaxy's inhabitants will believe they are alone in the universe, because the rapid expansion of space and time will leave celestial bodies spread out beyond their respective cosmic horizons.

Feel a little bit better about the possible demise of the payroll tax now?

—Abigail Weinberg

 

Cold as ICE: How Local Sheriffs Are Driving Trump’s Deportation Agenda

And it's terrifying immigrant communities.

STORY BY SETH FREED WESSLER · DATA ANALYSIS BY SINDUJA RANGARAJAN AND TAYLOR ELDRIDGE

 

The pandemic could create a nightmare at the polls. Here's one way to fix that.

BY ABIGAIL WEINBERG

Stephen Miller is just like Donald Trump—but competent

BY NOAH LANARD

The pandemic hasn't slowed America's other public health crisis: gun violence

BY JACOB ROSENBERG

How did a lawyer who took on big oil and won end up under house arrest?

BY REX WEYLER

 

Nobody Accurately Tracks Health Care Workers Lost to COVID-19. So She Stays Up at Night Cataloging the Dead.

Researchers and industry professionals say the lack of good official data on these deaths is “scandalous.”

BY NINA MARTIN

 

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SOME GOOD NEWS, FOR ONCE

A Military Veteran Sentenced to Life in Prison for Selling $30 of Weed Will Finally Be Freed

After spending nine years in prison for selling $30 of weed—0.69 grams—to an officer in Louisiana 12 years ago, Derek Harris will be released. He’d initially faced 15 years for the sale, but a life sentence came down under a habitual offender law that allows judges to impose even harsher sentences. Harris was recently resentenced to time served. Whether you count this as encouraging news of a kind or just another page in a perniciously unjust, cruel chapter in the criminal justice system, a wave of national attention is increasingly focused on the need for course corrections like Harris’, and the celebration of his release is spreading. His lawyer says Harris will move closer to his family in Kentucky and looks forward to spending time with his brother. The broader movement to improve the scales of justice is growing, including in Nevada and Los Angeles, where 66,000 cannabis convictions were scheduled to be dismissed earlier this year. If you have personal stories of progress, broadly defined, drop a line to recharge@motherjones.com.

—Daniel King

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