Oregon’s largest school district says it has reached a tentative agreement with its teachers union and its roughly 45,000 students will be back in class on Monday after more than three weeks

Saturn’s rings might disappear pretty soon astronomically speaking, according to new research. A new analysis of data captured by NASA’s Cassini mission, which orbited the planet between 2004 and 2017, has revealed new insights into when the seven rings were formed and how long they might last. During Cassini’s Grand Finale, when the spacecraft completed 22 orbits in which it passed between Saturn and its rings, the researchers observed that the rings were losing many tons of mass per second, which means the rings will only be around another few hundred million years at most. “We have shown that massive rings like Saturn’s do not last long,” said Paul Estrada, research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and a coauthor of the studies, in a statement. “One can speculate that the relatively puny rings around the other ice and gas giants in our solar system are leftover remnants of rings that were once massive like Saturn’s. Maybe some time in the not-so-distant future, astronomically speaking, after Saturn’s rings are ground down, they will look more like the sparse rings of Uranus.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Saturn’s rings are made mostly of ice but have a small amount of rocky dust created by broken asteroid fragments and micrometeoroids colliding with the rings. The research also found that the rings appeared long after Saturn’s initial formation, and were still forming when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. “Our inescapable conclusion is that Saturn’s rings must be relatively young by astronomical standards, just a few hundred million years old,” said Richard Durisen, professor emeritus of astronomy at Indiana University Bloomington and lead author of the studies in a statement. “If you look at Saturn’s satellite system, there are other hints that something dramatic happened there in the last few hundred million years. If Saturn’s rings are not as old as the planet, that means something happened in order to form their incredible structure, and that is very exciting to study.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The families of two transgender teenagers are suing Idaho officials to block enforcement of a ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito agreed on Friday to temporarily freeze a lower court order that bars the government from regulating so-called ghost guns -- untraceable homemade weapons -- as firearms under federal law.

The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday against the Navajo Nation in a dispute concerning the tribe’s access to the drought-stricken Colorado River. Critics says the decision harms a community where an estimated one-third of tribal members lack running water and furthers the history of the US government breaking its promises to tribes. The case, Arizona v Navajo Nation, centres on the obligations of an 1868 treaty, which established the Navajo reservation as the tribe’s permanent home, following their forced removal from their ancestral lands by the United States military. The tribe argued that under the treaty, the US government has an obligation to evaluate the tribe’s need for water and factor that analysis into how it divides up water access to the Colorado River, which serves over 40 million people and passes through seven states. The US government, as well as the states of Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado, and various water districts in California, argued against the tribe in consolidated appeals. They claimed that the tribe’s interpretation of the treaty would undermine existing agreements on sharing the water from the Colorado and create and impose unsubstantiated obligations on the US government to develop water infrastructure for the tribe. In a 5-to-4 decision, all but one of the high court’s conservatives ruled against the tribe. “In light of the treaty’s text and history, we conclude that the treaty does not require the United States to take those affirmative steps,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion. “And it is not the Judiciary’s role to rewrite and update this 155-year-old treaty. Rather, Congress and the President may enact — and often have enacted — laws to assist the citizens of the western United States, including the Navajos, with their water needs.” The court’s three liberal justices, as well as the Trump-appointed Neil Gorsuch, an advocate for tribal rights, dissented. “The Navajo have waited patiently for someone, anyone, to help them, only to be told (repeatedly) that they have been standing in the wrong line and must try another,” he wrote in his dissenting opinion. He argued, alongside the tribe, that the Navajo weren’t forcing the US government to immediately start building water infrastructure or changing water claims on the river, but rather begin the process of fully accounting for what the nation needed. Navajo representatives criticised the ruling. "My job as the president of the Navajo Nation is to represent and protect the Navajo people, our land, and our future,” Navajo Nation president Buu Nygren said in a statement after the ruling. “The only way to do that is with secure, quantified water rights to the Lower Basin of the Colorado River.” With a population of about 175,000 and a land mass larger than West Virginia, the Navajo Nation is the largest US tribal reservation, and the Colorado River and its tributaries flow alongside and through the tribe’s territory. “The US government excluded Navajo tribal citizens from receiving a share of water when the original apportioning occurred and today’s Supreme Court decision for Arizona v. Navajo Nation condoned this lack of accountability,” John Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, one of the many Indigenous groups that filed briefs in support of the Navajo Nation, said in a statement. “Despite today’s ruling, Tribal Nations will continue to assert their water rights and NARF remains committed to that fight.” In 2003, the Navajos sued the federal government regarding access to the Colorado River, while the tribe has also fought for access to a tributary, the Little Colorado River, in state court. As The Independent has reported, many on the Navajo nation struggle for basic water access. “If you run out [of water] in the evening, you have to get up earlier the next day to make sure that there’s water for the kids to wash hands, brush their teeth, make breakfast,” Tina Becenti told The Independent. “It was time-consuming and took a lot of energy.” Tribes were cut out of initial deals made to allocate the water on the Colorado River, leaving many to rely on thousands of unregulated wells, springs, and livestock troughs that are spread across the reservation, which can pose a serious health risk. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, these sources may contain bacterial or fecal contaminants, along with unsafe levels of uranium and arsenic – a legacy of mining on Navajo land which began with the US military’s Manhattan Project for nuclear weapons in 1944 and continued until 2005. The fate of the Colorado River has become increasingly contentious, as the vital waterway dwindles under heavy demand and a changing climate. In May, following years of tense negotiations, Arizona, California, and Nevada agreed to cut their use of water from the Colorado in exchange for $1.2bn in federal funding, a last-minute compromise that staved off catastrophic impacts to agriculture, electricity generation, and water supplies to major cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles. The high court decision follows a ruling this month on another topic with a long and complicated history involving tribal groups: adoption. Last week, a 7-2 majority ruled to preserve the Indian Child Welfare Act, defending the law’s preference for the foster care and adoption of Native children by their relatives and Tribes, which was implemented following investigations that revealed more than one-third of Native children were being removed from their homes and placed with non-Native families and institutions, cutting off important family and cultural ties. Louise Boyle and Alex Woodward contributed reporting to this story. Read More Father of 13 dies in Colorado rafting accident after saving his children from danger Feds announce start of public process to reshape key rules on Colorado River water use by 2027 Nevada fight over leaky irrigation canal and groundwater more complicated than appears on surface Supreme Court rules against Navajo Nation in Colorado River water rights case Feds announce start of public process to reshape key rules on Colorado River water use by 2027 Vegas water agency empowered to limit home water flows in future

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By David Shepardson WASHINGTON (Reuters) -United Auto Workers (UAW) union President Shawn Fain on Friday harshly criticized the U.S. Energy

A group of Chinese citizens living and working in Florida is suing the state over a new law that bans Chinese nationals from purchasing property in large swaths of the state