More emerges on yesterday’s story about offenders being cautioned for rape, none of it reassuring:
RAPISTS who are cautioned are being put on the sex offenders register for a maximum of two years after the Government relaxed registration rules three years ago.
Young rapists go on the register for only a year from the date on which they are cautioned after admitting the sex attack, The Times has learnt. Yet a rapist convicted in the courts and given a jail term of 2½ years is on the register for the rest of his life.
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The NHS might be bad at managing dying, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the private sector nursing homes are even worse. This is something as a society we really, really have to get better at.
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And I won’t give away the ending, but if you want to hear a detailed tale of the death of a mammoth in England about 700,000 years ago, Fascinating Deaths from Radio Four is well worth a listen. (Not a podcast – you can only do it through the computer, and it doesn’t say how long the link will work for, but usually it is at least a week.)
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Australia has new draconian employment laws. One of the effects:
Unions will take legal action after workers were docked four hours’ pay for stopping work for 15 minutes to collect money for the family of an employee killed on a construction site.
The workers were docked for taking unprotected industrial action under the Government’s new workplace legislation.
CFMEU organiser Martin Kingham said about 25 workers stopped for up to 15 minutes last Friday to take up a collection for the family of building worker Christos Binos, 58, who was fatally crushed by a concrete slab in Melbourne last month.
The company says the law gives it no choice, and if it did not dock the pay, it could lose government contracts and be fined itself.
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