Louisville

For minors with life sentences, US sentencing reform brings hope for rehabilitation

When Marshan Allen was a teen in Chicago, he says he faced a tough choice: go to class or help his older brother. The youngest offenders have “diminished culpability and greater prospects for reform,” and to require those mandatory sentences without considering features of youth constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, Justice Elena Kagan wrote.

Witty repartee still features in Parliament. But does it persuade anymore?

Night had fallen when Sarah Jones rose from the green-upholstered bench in the House of Commons. Ms. Jones, the member of Parliament for Croydon, noted the late hour and what Oliver Cromwell had said in 1653 on dissolving the so-called Long Parliament. Recommended: Will British politicians OK a Brexit bill that few are happy with?

Look who’s ponying up for climate change

One answer may lie in a dramatic shift in private financial institutions to see gold in going green. In a survey released last month of 500 investment officers in five countries (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan), 63 percent reported that this change has taken place in the past year.

Book lovers fill gap left by tainted prize, but will Nobel be back in 2019?

This weekend, Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Conde arrives in Stockholm to collect the New Academy Prize, the so-called “alternative Nobel” conjured up by an ad hoc group of Swedish writers and artists as a replacement for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The organizers of the impromptu New Academy, founded by journalist and author Alexandra Pascalidou, hope that their “people’s choice” prize and the transparent manner by which the winner was ultimately chosen, will help stanch the wound to Sweden’s reputation that the scandal caused.