10 things you need to know today: August 30, 2015

(Image credit: Gerald Herbert/Associated Press)

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1. Bernie Sanders gains on Hillary Clinton in latest Iowa poll
2. New Orleans commemorates 10-year Katrina anniversary
3. Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks dies at 82
4. Chris Christie said he wants to track immigrants like FedEx packages
5. Houston sheriff blames deputy's death on Black Lives Matter movement
6. Austrian police reportedly find 26 refugees crammed into van
7. Fan dies after falling from upper deck during Yankees-Braves game
8. NASA begins year-long Mars mission simulation
9. Landfill haul of Atari games sells for more than $100,000
10. Miley Cyrus to host 2015 MTV Video Music Awards

published 30 August 2015

1. Bernie Sanders gains on Hillary Clinton in latest Iowa poll

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is gaining ground on Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton in Iowa, which will hold the country's first caucuses. The latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll shows Sanders just 7 percentage points behind Clinton's 37. She's lost a third of her Iowa support since May. Vice President Joe Biden, who is rumored to be considering a campaign, took 14 percent out of the 404 likely caucus voters polled. On the Republican side, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson sits in second at 18 percent to Donald Trump's 23 percent.

On Saturday, New Orleans residents commemorated the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people and cost $151 billion in damage across the region. "We saved each other," Mayor Mitch Landrieu told dignitaries at a memorial for the unidentified and unclaimed dead. "New Orleans will be unbowed and unbroken." Residents and activists gathered for speeches and a parade in the city's Lower 9th Ward, where a levee broke. In Mississippi, also hit hard by Katrina, coastal church bells rang out to remember one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history.

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British neurologist and author Oliver Sacks died at 82 on Sunday, months after being diagnosed with terminal eye cancer. Sacks was a practicing doctor and a professor of neurology at New York University. He was also well-known for his best-selling books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. Awakenings, his autobiographical account of treating patients with encephalitis lethargica, a condition that renders people motionless, was later adapted in an Oscar-winning film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.

Presidential hopeful and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) spoke to a crowd in Laconia, New Hampshire, on Saturday about the need to crack down on illegal immigration. He said as president, he'd use FedEx's package tracking strategies to monitor immigrants. "I'm going to ask Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express, to come work for the government for three months at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and show these people," Christie said. Smith's daughter, Samantha, serves as Christie's campaign spokeswoman.

Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman linked the fatal shooting of his deputy in a Houston suburb to ongoing nationwide protests of police brutality. "We've heard black lives matter; all lives matter. Well, cops' lives matter too," Hickman said. "At any point where the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated cold-blooded assassination of police officers happen(s), this rhetoric has gotten out of control." Deputies arrested 30-year-old Shannon Miles on Saturday in the gas station shooting of Darren Goforth.

Austrian police found 26 people thought to be refugees crammed into a small van Friday, one day after they discovered 71 decomposing bodies in an abandoned truck on the expressway near Vienna. Three children were hospitalized for severe dehydration. Their conditions are no longer considered life-threatening. The van driver, 29, was arrested. Four men appeared in court Saturday on charges of aggravated people smuggling connected to the truck found with 71 bodies.

A fan died after falling from Turner Field's upper deck Saturday in the seventh inning of the Atlanta Braves game against the New York Yankees. The Braves season ticket holder, in his early 60s, was reportedly yelling at Alex Rodriguez when he lost his balance and fell 50 feet. Stadium medics gave him CPR, but he was pronounced dead after arriving at the hospital. No other fans were injured in the man's fall.

Six NASA recruits locked themselves in a dome Friday to start a year-long simulation of a Mars mission, the longest such experiment yet. Based in Hawaii near a barren volcano, the team will live in isolation together with almost no privacy. They'll survive in cramped living quarters on basic foods and can only venture outside the dome by donning a spacesuit. NASA is looking to see what kinds of interpersonal conflicts could arise during a Mars trip, which would take significantly longer than missions to the International Space Station.

The hundreds of Atari games discovered in a New Mexican landfill have sold for $108,000 total. Joe Lewandowski unearthed the cartridges in April 2014 as a documentary crew filmed, proving an urban legend that Atari once deposited games there. Among the haul were cartridges of E.T. The Extraterrestrial, widely considered the worst video game ever made. Lewandowski sold 881 cartridges on eBay for $108,000, and he's still holding 297 others in an archive.

Miley Cyrus will host MTV's 32nd Video Music Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday night. It's a show typically known more for its raunchy performances and meme-able moments than the Moonmen trophies handed out, but Nicki Minaj made headlines in July by tweeting about the network's perceived bias toward white artists. Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran are this year's most nominated stars. Watch the action go down at 9 p.m. ET on MTV.

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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.