Two a penny

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Meal and rest breaks from work will become more flexible if legislation introduced into Parliament today is passed, Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson says.

The Employment Relations (Rest Breaks and Meal Breaks) Amendment Bill was introduced today by Ms Wilkinson.

Ms Wilkinson said the new amendment would provide “greater flexibility” and give employers and employees the opportunity to develop breaks at a time best suited to individual requirements.

It seeks to alter legislation passed by the previous Labour government which set aside specific breaks and time for breastfeeding, depending on the length of a work day.”

The bill still has a requirement for breaks but allows for “compensatory measures” – such as earlier or later start times or time off in lieu, she said.

“Everyone needs to take breaks during their hours of work – but the law as it stands is too rigid and makes life difficult for a number of occupations and industries.

“These changes remove the absolutely fundamental right to minimum breaks at reasonably spaced periods during a working day.

Council of Trade Unions (CTU) president Helen Kelly said the amendment was unnecessary.

“The changes provided today will enable employers to determine whether or not a worker should have a break and then how long and when it should occur,” Ms Kelly said.”

Labour’s legislation only came into effect this year and ensured minimum requirements for workers in unorganised workplaces, she said.”

Ms Kelly said it was an example of the Government “pandering unnecessarily” to employers’ interests. .

.The United Nations nuclear watchdog is reporting positive steps at the start of new talks about Iran’s nuclear program. .
The negotiations between Iran, Russia, France and the US build on progress already made at a meeting early this month to end the stand-off over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Western powers fear Iran is trying to develop a nuclear bomb, although Iran insists its nuclear program is entirely peaceful.
Iran had tentatively agreed to ship enriched uranium to France or Russia for processing as a way of increasing international scrutiny of its enrichment activities, although state television is now reporting that Iran will not deal directly with France because it had failed to deliver nuclear materials in the past.

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The meeting will continue today

.Adelaide 18-year-old Sam Willoughby has been crowned this year’s overall season winner in BMX Supercross racing.
Willoughby became the youngest ever person, and the first Australian, to win a BMX Supercross World Cup series overnight in France.
“I don’t know what to say, I’m over the moon,” he said.
He said the win left him speechless.”
He lauded his competition and said it was a tough ride for the finish.
“It was a bit of a rough start to the day but I dug deep and I learnt a lot about myself today, to come back and get that.
“I learnt a lot today.
“The pressure was on but I managed to pull my head back in and refocus on the job at hand,” he said.
“For the final I wanted the inside lane and used that to my advantage. Our approach for this year was to focus on the World Cup events and the World Championships and that worked out.
“It is a privilege to race against such formidable competition. I fought it out on the first straight and it was a drag race to the finish.”
Willoughby’s father Colin says his son fought valiantly for the title. [It was] great to win here and to be the 2009 overall season winner.
“To the point that it’s determination that if something goes wrong, he just grits his teeth and fights back to make sure he atones for it.
“He’s just got that bit of attitude but it’s a good attitude,” he said. .”
Fellow Australian Khalen Young finished seventh.

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AFP – French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand was in the spotlight Saturday for standing as character reference for two rapists after a row over his admission of paying boys for sex.

Mitterrand, an urbane television personality and a nephew of former Socialist president Francois Mitterrand adopted a pugnacious tone and threatened legal action over what he said was a new orchestrated campaign of insensitive calumny.

The latest scandal emerged just after Mitterrand managed to retain his job following a fresh furore over his 2005 autobiographical novel La Mauvaise Vie (The Bad Life) in which the hero describes paying Asian boys for sex.

The minister will launch legal action against those who are complicit in the latest ignominy he has suffered, a statement read out at a news conference in the southwestern town of Bordeaux quoted Mitterrand as saying.

I absolutely condemn sexual tourism (and) I condemn paedophilia in which I have never in any way participated, and all the people who accuse me of that type of thing should be ashamed, the 62 year old told TF1 television.

Mitterrand had angrily denied having ever engaged in paedophile acts or condoning sex tourism.

The minister on Saturday said he was godfather to one of the youths, whose mother is a former make-up artist, and underlined that his letter attesting to their good moral character was a gesture of compassion and generosity to a modest family in great distress.

The latest controversy emerged after a French newspaper said Mitterrand had testified to the good character of two youths in the French overseas territory of La Reunion charged with the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl.

Is it not a shame that this letter has found its way in all the Internet networks? he said, calling it an ignominy, a shame, and manipulation.

He underlined that he had met one of the youths three times in (my) life.

The three youths were charged with rape and sentenced to between eight and 15 years in prison.

Le Quotidien de la Reunion newspaper on Friday published a letter that Mitterrand, who was then director of the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome, had written to the court.

The controversy over Mitterrand’s book erupted this week after his staunch defence of fugitive film-maker Roman Polanski, arrested in Switzerland on a US warrant on child sex charges.

Said Larifou, one of the lawyers for the boys’ families, told he was filing a suit against the leaking of the letter, saying it should never have appeared in the public domain.

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AFP – French agents have arrested an engineer working at the CERN nuclear research lab on suspicion of being in contact with the Al-Qaeda militant network and planning attacks, officials said Friday.

Perhaps we have avoided the worst, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux told journalists, adding that investigators were trying to establish which targets in France or elsewhere the suspect was hoping to strike. .

Security sources in Paris said the suspected Islamist, one of a pair of brothers detained on Thursday, worked at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research on the Franco-Swiss border just outside Geneva.

He had expressed a desire to carry out attacks, but had not got to the stage of carrying out material acts of preparation, one said.

According to officials, the engineer had made contact over the Internet with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a North African offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s loosely organised global Islamist militant movement.

He was not a CERN employee and performed his research under a contract with an outside institute.

CERN confirmed a physicist working at the site had been arrested under suspicion of links to terrorist organisations, and said it was helping the French police with their investigation.

According to a report on the newspaper Le Figaro’s website, the suspects are a 32-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin who has been the subject of a police inquiry for a year-and-a-half and his 25-year-old brother. His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism, it added in a statement.

Judicial sources told that investigators had come upon the pair while monitoring the Internet as part of a separate inquiry into the recruitment of would-be jihadists to send to Afghanistan as guerrillas.

The report, citing sources close to the inquiry, said the elder brother had had several Internet exchanges with figures considered close to Al-Qaeda and had provided a list of suggested French targets for attack. Two laptops, three hard drives and several USD memory sticks were seized from their home, they said.

Intelligence agents recorded several incriminating exchanges between the brothers and suspected Al-Qaeda contacts. We follow statements made by the leaders of certain organisations day by day.

We are in a situation of permanent alert. The danger is permanent, Hortefeux said. We never let our guard down.

Intelligence officials consider it one of the most serious threats to France, which has a large North African diaspora population.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was born in 2007 when a largely-Algerian militant group, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, swore allegiance to Bin Laden and rebranded itself as his organisation’s local franchise. It operates particle accelerators to study the behaviour of atoms at high speed and learn about the basic laws of nature.

CERN is Europe’s leading laboratory for the study of the fundamentals of sub-atomic physics.

The lab said the suspect had been working on the LHCb experiment which its website says will help us to understand why we live in a universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter.

It is a civilian organisation, backed by 20 member states, and is not connected to nuclear weapons technology.

al Qaeda – France – terrorism

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REUTERS – French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 23 year-old son is in line to head the development agency for La Defense business district in Paris, the agency’s outgoing boss said on Thursday, sparking opposition charges of nepotism.

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Jean Sarkozy is a candidate, he will be named director, representative of the board, and he can therefore become president, Devedjian, a government minister and a close associate of President Sarkozy told radio Europe 1.

He is now also be posed to take over as president of EPAD, the public agency in charge of developing La Defense, from Patrick Devedjian, who is leaving his post as he has reached the 65-year age ceiling for the job.

La Defense, a skyscraper-filled zone of banks and corporate headquarters just outside central Paris, is one of the main business areas of the French capital and the government hopes to develop it into a rival for the City of London financial district.

In souls nobly born valour does not depend upon age, Devedjian added, quoting the 17th century play, El Cid. .

Socialist parliamentarian Michele Delaunay decried the young Sarkozy’s candidature as a form of nepotism and provocation and pointed out that he had not even finished his degree.

French magazine Le Point reported on its website on Wednesday that Jean Sarkozy was likely to secure the board’s support on Thursday, paving the way for election to the board on December 4.

Jean Sarkozy – Nicolas Sarkozy – Paris

.Britain’s The Independent newspaper says Gulf Arab states are in secret talks with Russia, China, Japan and France to replace the US dollar with a basket of currencies in the trading of oil.
The US dollar eased after the report, written by veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk and posted on The Independent’s website. It cited unidentified sources in Gulf Arab states and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong.
“Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars,” said the report. .
The article said the plans may help to explain the sudden rise in the price of gold, which is commonly seen as a safe haven in troubled economic times. It added that France had also been involved in the talks.
The Independent said US authorities were aware that the meetings had taken place but had not discovered the details and were “sure to fight this international cabal”.
“I don’t think we will see much concrete actions coming out of such discussions because even when the dollar is weak, it doesn’t mean that commodities are undervalued,” said David Moore, commodities analyst at the Commonwealth Bank.
The issue of shifting oil trade away from the US dollar has been raised occasionally in recent years, but analysts and experts say it is unlikely to occur any time soon.”
Iran began settling most of its crude oil exports in non-dollar currencies – primarily the euro – several years ago, but the actual price for its oil is still set in dollar terms.
“In fact, when the dollar weakens, commodities prices tend to increase by a higher ratio.
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The father of Lower Hutt schoolgirl Karla Cardno, who was brutally raped, tortured and murdered 20 years ago, is due to go on trial today on sex crimes against an underage girl.

Gary John Duffin and his wife Sharyn Lee Hills face five sex offence charges including sexual violation, and rape, as well as 10 counts of supplying a Class C drug to a minor.The offences are alleged to have happened between May 3 and December 31, 1991.Two of the sex charges allege indecent assault on a girl aged between 12 and 16.The pair appealed to have their names suppressed as a result of the risk their case would attract strong media attention due to Duffin being Karla Cardno’s natural father.Their trial is due to begin at the High Court in Wellington earlier today.However, Court of Appeal judge Justice David Baragwanath said in his ruling released in June, there was no basis in which name suppression could be justified and “since eventual publication was unavoidable there is no purpose in deferring it”.They also argued both were suffering medical conditions and name publication would result in significant stress. .Karla Cardno was 13 when she was kidnapped by Paul Joseph Dally in 1989.Dally was sentenced to life imprisonment and was denied parole last year, with the Parole Board ruling that he was a medium- to high-risk of reoffending.

.Irish champion Sea The Stars won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp overnight to complete a unique treble of the English 2000 Guineas, Epsom Derby and the Arc.
Ridden by Mick Kinane and trained by John Oxx – owned by Hong Kong club owner Christopher Tsui – he beat home Youmzain, ridden by Kieren Fallon while seven-time Arc winning trainer Andre Fabre’s Cavalryman, under Frankie Dettori, was third.
Youmzain created his own piece of history in becoming the first horse to finish second in three successive Arcs.
Seamus Levey’s Set Sail headed for home with a 15 length advantage entering the final straight but the wind was taken out of his sails as the more fancied runners swamped him.
Sea The Stars, who had been applauded into the ring prior to the race which is a rare occurrence in French racing, had come here as the 4/6 favourite but early on he had several problems settling down as the Aidan O’Brien-trained pacemakers Set Sail and Grand Ducal set a searing gallop.
Kinane found the gap he needed and once it was seized Sea The Stars seamlessly sauntered to the lead and although the gallant Youmzain and Calvaryman along with Breeders Cup Turf champion Conduit reduced the gap in the final furlong, there was to be no stopping the Irish horse from his moment of destiny.
Unbeaten French filly Stacelita hit the front but all eyes were trained on 50-year-old Kinane and Sea The Stars, and the old stager and his superstar horse did not fail.

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Labour says the Government is paying 39 of its Beehive staff more than $100,000 per year – close toly a quarter of the total 161 on the payroll.

Internal affairs spokesman Chris Hipkins said figures obtained under the Official Information Act showed that in June this year, annual salaries totalled $13,008,803. “In addition, over $165,000 has also been spent on temporary communications staff since November 2008. .”When you factor in the extra money the Government has spent on purchase advisors and communications consultants, it becomes quite clear they are spending more on staffing the Beehive than Labour did,” he said.”Mr Hipkins said the previous Labour government had 162 Beehive staff in June last year, for an annual cost of $13,319,768, but only 16 earned more than $100,000.”

.”This is yet another example of the National Party looking for loopholes to feather its own nest at the taxpayers’ expense