What happened
A Syrian court yesterday sentenced ousted President Bashar al-Assad to death, finding him guilty of murder, torture and crimes against humanity committed before and during Syria’s bloody 14-year civil war. Assad, his younger brother Maher and six of the seven other former officials handed death sentences by the Damascus court were tried in absentia. Assad’s cousin Atef Najib stood in a cage in the courtroom for the verdicts.

Who said what
Yesterday’s verdicts were the “first against Assad or any members of his inner circle since his family’s five decades in power came to an end 20 months ago,” The Associated Press said. They are “mostly symbolic” for Assad and his brother, who both fled to exile in Russia after their government’s “stunning collapse.” The sentences were nonetheless “met with celebrations” across the country, The New York Times said. Many Syrians have become “increasingly resentful and impatient at the lack of accountability” and the “pace of trials,” even as legal experts “cautioned that transitional justice takes time.” 

What next?
The verdicts handed down by Syria’s “transitional authorities” should “set a strong legal precedent for others accused of crimes” under the previous regime, said Al Jazeera. Syria’s National Commission for Transitional Justice said Najib can appeal his verdict but the absent defendants forfeited that right.

What happened
A federal judge in Boston yesterday issued a second preliminary injunction, this one nationwide, barring the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out President Donald Trump’s executive order to limit mail-in voting before the November midterms. The president “has no authority to regulate elections,” U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled, and protecting voters from “chaos” and confusion “heavily outweighs the executive’s attempt to unconstitutionally insert itself into the domain of election regulation.”

Who said what
Under Trump’s order, “USPS is supposed to compile lists of eligible voters from states and deliver absentee ballots only to people on those lists,” NPR said. Talwani initially blocked the order in the 23 Democratic states that had sued, and Trump appealed that ruling last month. Her expanded injunction “creates another legal hurdle”, should Trump “get the initial injunction lifted by the U.S. Supreme Court,” The Associated Press said. 

What next?
Trump has pushed Congress to limit mail-in ballots and other voting rules, but the Senate “bowed to political reality” early Saturday and adjourned for five weeks “without any concrete steps toward passing the voting restriction bill,” The New York Times said. Right-wing broadcaster Wayne Allyn Root yesterday urged Trump to enact his voting limits by declaring a “national security emergency for elections.” Trump, calling in, replied that “stranger things have happened.”

The total solar eclipse in parts of Europe today is bringing out all the scientists. During a total eclipse, the moon completely covers the face of the sun, darkening the sky and revealing just the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona. This astronomical ring provides a unique opportunity to learn more about the sun and its effect on Earth.

Researchers around the world are investigating the eclipse in different ways. NASA is taking its WB-57 research aircraft to the skies with the mission of “chasing an eclipse,” said The Guardian, though “in reality the eclipse is chasing them.”

The aircraft’s cameras will “capture at least 20 images per second” to “learn more about the formation of prominences (solar material that gets suspended above the sun’s surface), better understand the corona and how it gets heated,” and “investigate how material in the corona and the solar wind are related,” said NASA. Scientists at the European Space Agency will be studying the eclipse to learn more about solar winds.

We are “incredibly lucky” that the moon is “400 times smaller than the sun,” as well as “400 times closer to us,” Allan Sacha Brun, an astrophysicist at France’s Atomic Energy Commission, said to Agence France-Presse. “Our work aims to understand the physical mechanisms underlying the sun’s activity” and “put the sun back into context within its evolutionary timeline, from its birth to its death.”