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There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. Its that we always put our survival first. This is true of other species. When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest great stanley cup resources into avo gourde stanley iding or withstandin stanley cup g it: migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter.When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise our survival. We convince ourselves that its not so serious, or even that it isnt happening. We double down on destruction, swapping our ordinary cars for SUVs, jetting to Oblivia on a long-haul flight, burning it all up in a final frenzy. In the back of our minds, theres a voice whispering, If it were really so serious, someone would stop us. If we attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament. It is impossible to discern, in our response to what we know, the primacy of our survival instinct.Here is what we know. We know that our lives are entirely dependent on complex natural systems: the atmosphere, ocean currents, the soil, the planets webs of life. People who study complex systems have discovered that they behave in consistent ways. It doesnt matter whether the system is a banking network, a nation state, a rainforest or an Antarctic ice shelf; its behaviour follows certain mathematical rules. In normal conditions, the system regulates i Zqil Coalition politics: Conflict of Tory loyalties
The US supreme court announced on Tuesday that Floridas death penalty sentencing system is unconstitutional, in a ruling that could spark challenges from hundreds of death row prisoners and reignite the national debate about capital punishment.Is this really the end for Americas death penalty | Nick CohenRead moreIn an eight-to-one decision, the supreme court justices declared that Florida cannot legally continue its habit of sentencing a person to death on the word of a judge rather than a jury.The court ordered a new sentencing hearing for murderer Timothy Hurst, who stabbed a co-worker to death in a Popeyes restaurant in Pensacola in 1998.Florida is breaching a defendants sixth amendment stanley fr right to have their ultimate fate decided by a jury, when the death penalty is involved, the court ruled. This is yet another significant moment in the long, slow death rattle of the use of capital punishment in America, Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University, told the Guardian. There are both con termo stanley servatives and liberals on the supreme court who, no matter what they think of the de stanley cup ath penalty in principle, believe that the sixth amendment requires a jury to be involved in the ultimate decision on death, and that is critical here, he added.In Floridas death penalty system, a jury makes a recommendation to the judge at sentencing about whether it supports execution. For a defendant to get the death penalty rather than life in prison there must be aggravating facts in the
