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BEIJING (Reuters) - The man who was selling fake Rolex watches for $1 in Beijing's Forbidden City the other day is hardly an endangered species, but China is quietly starting to win plaudits for its efforts to protect intellectual property. Last month police detained the operator of a website, "Tomato Garden," from which millions of pirated versions of Microsoft software had been downloaded, according to media reports, while in the spring courts passed trademark judgments in favor of Italian chocolate maker Ferrero and luxury goods label Gucci. China is becoming a bit less of a counterfeiters' paradise.

In the govern- ment's vision, "Made in China" should not stand for knock-off DVDs and artificial Christmas trees but for clean, creative, cutting-edge industries. After all, this is the country that dazzled the world with its Olympic stadiums and is preparing for its first spacewalk this week.  read more »

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BAGHDAD — Days after top Iraqi and American officials suggested that a draft of the security pact between the countries was close, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki toughened his language, reiterating earlier Iraqi demands for a fixed date for the withdrawal of American troops. “It is not possible for any agreement to conclude unless it is on the basis of full sovereignty and the national interest, and that no foreign soldiers remain in Iraqi soil after a defined time ceiling,” Mr. Maliki said in a speech to Shiite tribal leaders in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

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Swiss voters rejected a plan that would make it even harder for foreigners to obtain citizenship in a referendum, called by the far-right Swiss People's Party. Some 64 percent of voters rejected the measure, meant to approve candidates for citizenship by secret ballot.

Lead candidate of the Swiss People's Party (SVP), Christoph Blocher, head of Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police and Minister of Justice, has come under heavy international criticism for leading a campaign that emphasizes sharp measures against immigrants.

Switzerland's population of 7.5 million includes about 1.6 million foreigners, including many workers from southern Europe and refugees from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

The People's Party claims foreigners are responsible for much of the crime in the country. Party posters featuring white sheep kicking out a black sheep sparked outrage blamed in part for a riot two weeks before the election -- a rare show of violence against a political party. The party became the largest in Switzerland four years ago under the leadership of charismatic billionaire Christoph Blocher.

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SACRAMENTO - On Thursday, July 31, California’s Republican Governor Schwarzenegger signed an executive order cutting the pay of up to 200,000 state employees to the federal minimum of $6.55/hour and firing over 10,000 part time and temporary workers until the state’s budget impasse is resolved. The order exempts public safety agencies but will have an immediate effect everywhere else: Hiring, overtime and contracting will be halted, and tens of thousands of employees will feel the squeeze. It covers 22,000 retired state employees who work under contract, temporary and part-time workers such as those who fill in at the Department of Motor Vehicles, seasonal employees and student assistants. The order affects the approximately 10,000 state employees in San Diego and Riverside counties. They work at Department of Motor Vehicles offices, highway offices, state parks and beaches, unemployment offices, fish hatcheries and agriculture inspection stations.

The state controller, who cuts the checks, has said he will not comply with it. State Controller John Chiang, a Democrat, sent a letter to Schwarzenegger on Thursday saying he will defy the order and issue employees their regular paychecks. He said the governor's executive order was based on "faulty legal and factual premises."

Controller John Chiang challenges the governor’s claim of legal authority in ordering the cut, and warns the move will cause payroll problems for months after a budget is finalized. Speaking to 100 union members outside the Ronald Reagan State Office Building in Los Angeles, Chiang called them "innocent victims of a political struggle." "The state of California, the elected leadership, cannot put the important public servants of California in harm's way," he said. "We put people first, we make sure we protect their interests, and that's why I have to tell the governor, with all due respect, I am not going to comply with this order." Even if he wanted to comply, Chiang said, it would take 10 months to configure the agency's outdated computer systems to do what the governor is asking.

The Democratic controller and the Republican administration also differ over the state's financial condition. Chiang maintains that California has enough money to meet all its expenses through September. If it's later determined that California has insufficient money, Chiang said he is authorized to borrow until a budget is approved. Chiang's refusal to comply sets up a potential legal skirmish between his office and Schwarzenegger's. If the administration decides to sue, Chiang said it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers remain divided over how to close a $15.2 billion deficit, with Democrats favoring $8.2 billion in new taxes on corporations and the state's wealthiest residents. Republicans want a spending cap and oppose tax increases. Adding to the fiscal mess has been an unprecedented number of wildfires this year, costing the state far more for emergency response than it had budgeted.

State Treasurer Bill Lockyer this morning criticized Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to cut state worker pay via executive order on Thursday. He listed four reasons that the plan is a bad idea: "legal challenges, logistical challenges, bad management, and no political punch".

The workers, members of Service Employees International Union Local 1000, were dressed in purple and chanted in protest against the governor's move. "People are going to get put out of their homes," said Debra Martin, a union steward. The group is filing a lawsuit to fight the governor's executive order. Derek Pettersen, 21, a student who was working full time this summer for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing in Sacramento, was told not to show up Thursday. "It's not my fault that the budget hasn't been signed yet, and I'm the one paying for it," said Pettersen, who will forgo $1,600 if he remains unemployed for all of August. "I don't really understand why I had to lose my job temporarily because someone else isn't doing their job."

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Photos courtesy of Al Seib/LA Times, AP /Rich Pedroncelli, and California State Controller's Office

Original Source: North County Times, LA Times

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PARIS: Ten years after it was introduced, France has ended the compulsory 35 hour work week. Legislators in France have voted to allow companies to sidestep the 35-hour workweek by negotiating individual overtime agreements with their employees. The new legislation, which was passed by Parliament late Wednesday night and which will take effect in September, is the boldest step yet in stripping what many view as an emblematic labor law, without quite getting rid of it. While the workweek limit is as good as buried, every hour beyond 35 that is worked will be considered overtime and will therefore be more expensive.

Labour Minister Xavier Bertrand denied that people would have more working hours imposing on them and said now "everything will be negotiated company by company." Under the new legislation no one in France can work more than 48 hours in a given week, including overtime. Right now, despite the current law, many French employees work longer than 35 hours a week but accumulate time off or overtime. They actually average 41 hours, compared with 41.7 in Germany, 43.1 in Britain, 41.3 in Italy and the EU average is 41.9. In terms of paid annual leave, the French are in the mid-range in Europe with 25 days holiday as guaranteed non-working days.

The new legislation opens the way for company-specific negotiated agreements between employers and labor unions about the number of hours a week and days a year an employee works. The new limits are more generous than before: For manual workers who are paid by the hour, the weekly maximum limit rises to 48 hours, in line with European Union legislation. For white-collar staff members, paid by the day, the annual maximum of days they can be asked to work will rise to 235 days from 218. Also up for negotiation is the amount of time an employee gets in compensation for the extra hours worked, as opposed to being paid for the overtime.

The new changes are likely to affect small and medium-sized businesses most. Many large companies benefited from the additional flexibility that the 35-hour week provided by allowing them to annualize work time, making staff members work more in high season and less in low season without having to pay costly overtime. Blue-collar workers have periodically complained that this practice ended up reducing their income.

But most employees, and particularly those with comfortable incomes and a preference for additional time off, have grown attached to the shorter workweek. Professionals, whose salaries are calculated on a daily basis rather than hourly, fear that they will lose a dozen extra holidays a year that they had enjoyed in compensation for working more than the legal 35 hours a week. Their dismay at the changes was on display Wednesday afternoon when hundreds protested outside the Senate building, sporting banners with slogans like "There is life after work." And the union that represents white-collar employees and management staff, CFE-CGC, published an open letter in French newspapers complaining about the changes.

The new legislation also includes rules to make labor unions more representative. Any union participating in negotiations on work time needs to have obtained at least 10 percent of the vote in company elections. But any union representing 30 percent or more of the internal vote is allowed to sign a binding agreement with management.

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Photos courtesy of The Economist, Reuters/Charles Platiau, and AFP

Original Source: euronews and International Herald Tribune

Images courtesy of Britt/State Journal-Register, Britt/The State Journal-Register, Sherttius / Boulder Camera, and CAM/Ottawa Citizen/Copley News Service, Mike Smith/Las Vegas Sun/King Features Syndicate, and Jones/Creators Syndicate

Original Source: Time

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Google expressed disappointment and privacy groups voiced outrage Thursday after a judge ordered Google to give entertainment giant Viacom details of video-watching habits of visitors to its popular video-sharing website YouTube. On Tuesday US District Court Judge Louis Stanton backed Viacom's request for data on which YouTube users watch which videos on the website. Viacom is seeking the data as potential evidence for a billion-dollar copyright suit against Google, which Viacom charges acts as a willing accomplice to Internet users that put clips of Viacom's copyrighted television programs on YouTube.

The US court has ordered Google to hand over the "logging database" which is updated each time a video is watched on YouTube. The database contains the unique login ID of the user who watched it, the time when the user watched it, the IP address (unique online identifier) of the computer used to watch the video and the identifier for the video. The database is stored on live servers at Google and equates to 12 terabytes of storage. The judge also ruled that Google should divulge the details of every video that has ever been removed from YouTube, for whatever reason. If you've ever watched a video on YouTube then the details of that viewing will be stored somewhere in that database. This copyright case might be taking place in the US but it would appear the logging database makes no distinction between users in different countries.  read more »

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Google and Yahoo face intense U.S. Justice Department scrutiny of their deal to share some advertising revenue, and the heat will likely increase under a new administration, antitrust experts said. Google, with more than 60 percent of the Web search market, and Yahoo, with 16.6 percent, announced a deal last week that would allow Yahoo to place Google ads on its site and collect the revenue. The firms said Yahoo's cash flow could grow by $250 million to $450 million (127 million to 229 million pounds) in the first year under the deal, which Yahoo sought as an alternative to software giant Microsoft's $47.5 billion buyout offer.

Yahoo and Google describe the deal as very limited. "These are still independent companies who will continue to compete aggressively," said Yahoo lawyer Hewitt Pate of law firm Hunton and Williams. But the deal has raised eyebrows among antitrust lawyers. Bruce McDonald, a Jones Day antitrust attorney and former deputy assistant attorney general, pointed out that the arrangement could lessen Yahoo's incentive to compete vigorously against Google because Yahoo would collect revenue no matter which company placed an advertisement.

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration’s handling of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prisoners there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that, at the administration’s behest, stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the truncated review procedure provided by a previous law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, “falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute” because it failed to offer “the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus.”

Justice Kennedy declared: “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

'Habeas corpus' (Latin: [We command] that you have the body) is the name of a legal action, or writ, through which a person can seek relief from unlawful detention of themselves or another person. The writ of habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action.

On Oct. 17, 2006, President Bush signed a law suspending the right of habeas corpus to persons "determined by the United States" to be an "enemy combatant" in the Global War on Terror. President Bush's action drew severe criticism, mainly for the law's failure to specifically designate who in the United States will determine who is and who is not an "enemy combatant."

To President Bush's support for the law -- the Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- and its suspension of writs of habeas corpus, Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law at George Washington University stated, "What, really, a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the president signed today essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values."

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Photos Courtesy of Todd Heisler/NY Times, Wikipedia, and elcivics.com

Original Source: The New York Times and About.com

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