By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to review a Colorado law that requires preschools receiving taxpayer money to enroll children of same-sex couples — setting up an important First Amendment showdown at the high court that pits religious rights against LGBTQ families.

At the same time, the court declined to hear another high-profile case involving a Massachusetts couple who said their school began treating their middle school child as genderqueer against their wishes.

After years of allowing religious schools in some settings to receive state funding alongside secular schools, the 6-3 conservative court will now decide what to do when school leaders assert that anti-discrimination laws intended to protect gay and transgender people conflict with their religious beliefs. The appeal from the Catholic parishes will likely be heard in the fall and a decision is likely sometime next year.

Colorado enacted a ballot provision in 2020 that provides state funding for a universal preschool program, allowing both public and private schools to take part. The state program includes a nondiscrimination provision that requires each school receiving public money to provide eligible children an equal opportunity to enroll, regardless of race, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity and other factors.

Two Catholic parishes in Colorado and a family whose children have attended Catholic school in one of those parishes sued, claiming that the nondiscrimination provision violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, which protects Americans’ ability to practice their religious beliefs without government interference. The family and the parishes are represented by the religious public interest firm Becket.

“This court promised in Obergefell that religious groups would be protected when they dissent from secular orthodoxies about marriage and sexuality,” the Catholic parishes told the Supreme Court, referencing the 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that effectively legalized same-sex marriage. “The free exercise clause simply cannot do that important work – which this court has described as ‘at the heart of our pluralistic society’ — if it can be so easily evaded.”

At a broad level, the case appears ready-made for a 6-3 conservative court that has repeatedly sided with religious interests in other cases in recent years. In one series of decisions, the court has made clear that when the government opens educational funding programs up to public and private schools, it cannot bar religious schools from taking part in those programs just because they are religious.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration submitted an uninvited brief in the Supreme Court supporting the dioceses. Upholding the law, the Justice Department said could “stymie religious exercise in major portions of the country.”

But the religious groups were asking for a decision that could also have sweeping implications for the power of religious interest to challenge other laws beyond education. To begin with, they asked the Supreme Court to overturn a 36-year-old precedent that has been maligned by both Democrats and Republicans but that even the conservative court has, so far, been unwilling to nix.

That precedent allows courts to uphold laws that affect religion as long as they are generally applicable – that is, they apply equally to religious and secular activity.

In a series of m

By Jacopo Prisco, CNN

(CNN) — Mars may have once had an ocean so vast that it covered one-third of the planet before evaporating billions of years ago and leaving behind a telltale sign: a flat band of land, outlining the former ocean — similar to the ring left behind in a drained bathtub.

If confirmed by direct observations, this “coastal shelf,” as researchers call it, would contribute crucial evidence to a long-standing scientific debate, according to a study describing the new evidence. While dried-up river networks, deltas and lakebeds offer proof that Mars had a watery past, there is no consensus among experts on whether it also had a large ocean, which would have made Mars look much more similar to Earth than it does today.

“The question is: If there was an ocean on Mars and it dried up, what signs would it have left?” said Michael Lamb, senior author of the study published last week in the journal Nature. “What we’ve looked for is a band that would wrap around where the shoreline would have been, like a flat bench — because that’s essentially what we see on Earth, which we know as the continental shelf.”

Lamb, a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology, and lead author Abdallah Zaki, a distinguished postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, ran computer simulations to dry up the oceans on Earth and see what geological traces they would leave behind. The continental shelf emerged as the most distinct feature, enduring through time and changing sea levels.

The research team then searched for an analog on Mars using data from NASA’s Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter or MOLA, a probe that mapped the planet’s surface features from orbit using laser. “We looked for a similar feature on Mars and found some evidence that it could be there,” Lamb said. “It doesn’t look exactly like the continental shelf on Earth, however, so there’s some evidence in support of it, but not all the pieces of the puzzle.”

Mounting evidence

The idea that an ocean might have once existed on Mars originated in the 1970s, when the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions launched by NASA detected what some researchers believed was a shoreline — a much narrower band than the newly proposed coastal shelf — and a depression in the planet’s northern hemisphere that was suggestive of an ancient seabed.

However, this older evidence was never considered conclusive: “The shoreline has some issues,” Lamb said. “It doesn’t trace constant elevation as you might expect for a shoreline, but it waves up and down.”

One way to explain this elevation change, he noted, is volcanic eruptions that might have shifted Mars’ crust and deformed the shorelines. “But it’s hard to prove that that’s what happened, and so it remains debated whether those are in fact shoreline features or not,” Lamb said

Another issue is that shorelines are very thin. “If you want to look for long-lived oceans, then there must be something bigger than a shoreline, and we think that’s the coastal shelf,” said Zaki, who conducted the research with Lamb when he was a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech.

The coastal shelf is an improvement on the shoreline data in several ways, according to the new study. The sloping feature is easier to see and much larger, at about 200 to 400 meters wide (650 to 1,300 feet), making it relatively resistant to erosion over billion of years. The formation would have resulted from rivers carrying sediments into the ocean, as well as changing sea levels. “On Earth, the continental shelf is the largest sedimentary sink on the planet, due to the material brought b

Por Aleks Klosok y Amanda Davies, CNN

La leyenda del atletismo Usain Bolt declaró a CNN Sports que espera que el joven prodigio Gout Gout “encuentre a las personas adecuadas” a su alrededor, mientras el joven de 18 años continúa su meteórico ascenso en el mundo del atletismo.

El australiano ha revolucionado el deporte con una serie de actuaciones espectaculares que han llevado a compararlo con el que muchos consideran el mejor velocista de todos los tiempos.

Tanto es así que Bolt ha dicho anteriormente que el joven prodigio australiano “se parece a mí cuando era joven”.

Gout acaparó los titulares internacionales a principios de este mes al ganar el título de los 200 metros en el campeonato australiano sénior de Sydney con un asombroso tiempo de 19,67 segundos.

No solo estableció un nuevo récord mundial sub-20, sino que el oriundo de Queensland superó el tiempo de 19,93 segundos establecido por el jamaiquino en 2004.

Bolt tenía solo 17 años por aquel entonces y nunca mejoró ese tiempo durante su adolescencia.

Con el aumento del éxito y la creciente fama llega un mayor escrutinio y una mayor susceptibilidad a las distracciones, algo de lo que Bolt es muy consciente, ya que estuvo en la misma situación que Gout.

“A esa edad tan temprana, como yo estaba allí, empiezas a sentirte incómodo y a olvidarte del atletismo”, dice, hablando en la feria de relojería Watches and Wonders, en Ginebra, Suiza.

“Esperemos que tenga a las personas adecuadas para guiarlo y mantenerlo concentrado en el atletismo, porque lo demás siempre estará ahí.

“Pero si fallas en atletismo, entonces todo se esfuma”.

Cada mejoría de Gout desata un frenesí mediático en Australia, y ahora el adolescente tiene la vista puesta en el escenario internacional.

Recientemente se confirmó que la joven promesa de la velocidad hará su debut en la categoría sénior en el circuito de la Liga Diamante, la principal serie mundial de atletismo, en Oslo, Noruega, el 10 de junio.

Y no será una carrera cualquiera. Se trata de un duelo de 200 metros contra nada menos que el vigente campeón olímpica, Letsile Tebogo.

El atleta de Botswana ya ha colmado de elogios a Gout. El año pasado afirmó que tiene el potencial para convertirse en uno de los mejores atletas de la historia.

Sin duda, la emoción y la expectativa aumentarán en los próximos meses, pero Bolt es cauteloso a la hora de generar expectativas demasiado altas en su transición a la élite de este deporte.

“Es enorme… Es totalmente diferente”, dijo.

“Recuerdo que al salir del instituto y empezar a competir, me sentía en la cima del mundo porque estaba ganando y corriendo bien.

“Cuando entré en el circuito, ¡no gané ni una sola carrera!”

“Sé que va a ser una experiencia reveladora, y espero que no lo desanime, sino que lo motive a trabajar aún más duro.

“Creo que en el primer año aprenderás mucho y comprenderás lo que necesitas hacer para mejorar.”

Gout no participará en los Juegos de la Commonwealth de este año, ya que está centrado en conseguir la medalla de oro en el Campeonato Mundial de Atletismo Sub-20 que se celebrará en Oregón en agosto.

Fue en 2002, en estos campeonatos (anteriormente conocidos como Campeonatos Mundiales Junior), donde Bolt se dio a conocer como un prodigio de la velocidad.

Al competir frente a su público local en el Estadio Nacional de Jamaica en Kingston, Bolt, que por aquel entonces tenía solo 15 años, Read more

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