1 . This week the Portuguese parliament attracted headlines around the world after we banned bosses from contacting their employees outside of working hours. Under the new laws, employers will now face punishment if they text-message, phone or email their workers when they are off the clock.

There should be a boundary between the time in which a worker is a resource in the service of the person paying their salary, and the time in which they should be the owner of a life that is not all about work. We have introduced these new labour laws to avoid the blurring (模糊) of the boundary needed for a good work-life balance.

In the age of the industrial revolution, workers could be little more than workers. The demand for shorter working hours was a central tenet of the labour movement from the very beginning. Long working hours can cause poor health. The worry has been that the rise of remote working is threatening to take us back to that period before trade unions won protections for their members, when the working day stretched out endlessly. Remote working has to be step forward, not a step back. When more and more of us are working remotely, it is all the more essential to establish clear boundaries.

Labour market regulation cannot ignore the inequality between the parties: employers and employees. A work relation is not one between equals that can be freely regulated by the individual contract. Between the weak and the strong, the state must be involved to regain the balance.

In an unequal relationship such as that between boss and worker, it is not enough to establish the latter has a “right to disconnect”; to switch off their mobile phone, close their laptop, or ignore phone calls that arrive in the middle of dinner with their family. Any abuse that conflicts with that right must be stopped through punishment. This is why we have prohibited employers from contacting workers outside working hours, and imposed potential fines for breaking the rules.

The word justice is usually associated with courts of law. There is no doubt     1     justice has been done when a man’s     2     (innocent) or guilt has been proved. Justice is part of the complex machinery of the law. Those     3     seek it undertake a hard journey and can never be sure that they will find it. Judges, however wise or famous, are human and can make mistakes.

There are rare instances when justice almost ceases to be an abstract concept. Reward or punishment are given quite independent     4     human interference. At such times, justice acts like a living force. When we use a phrase like “it serves him right”, we are, in part, admitting that a certain set of circumstances has enabled justice to act automatically.

When a thief was caught in a large jewellery store one morning, the shop assistants must have found it impossible to resist the temptation to say “it serves him right”. The shop was an old house with many large, disused fireplaces and tall, narrow chimneys. Towards midday, a girl heard a muffled (捂住) cry coming from behind one of the walls. As the cry     5           (repeat) several times, she ran to tell the manager who promptly rang up the fire brigade(消防队). The cry had certainly come from one of the chimneys,     6     as there were so many of them, the fire fighters could not be certain which one it was. They located the right chimney by     7     (tap) at the walls and listening for the man’s cries. After chipping (凿) through a wall which was eighteen inches thick, they found that a man had been trapped in the chimney. As it was extremely narrow, the man was unable to move, but the fire fighters were eventually able to free him by cutting a huge hole in the wall. The sorry-looking, blackened figure that emerged,     8     (admit) at once that he had tried to break into the shop during the night but had got     9     (stick) in the chimney. He had been there for nearly ten hours.     10     we can learn from the story is that justice had been done even before the man was handed over to the police.

5 . We’ve all been there, trying our best to do our bit to help save the planet, when a really essential item that you had to order online arrives in such an unbelievable amount of packaging that it makes you feel like it’s an unprepared game of passing the parcel.

It’s made even worse by the fact that some of the packaging can’t be recycled. In fact, 10 million tonnes of packaging waste are produced in the UK every year. A lot of this ends up in landfill, two-thirds of which could have instead been recovered.

The good news, however, is that how packaging waste is managed is in for a BIG shake-up in line with the “polluter pays principle”. By placing the main point of duty to pay on brand owners, they will be encouraged to choose more sustainable packaging options which are recyclable and reusable as much as possible. Otherwise, they will have to pay higher fees.

This is a system known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) — meaning that those who have control over packaging design decisions will be encouraged to do the right thing for the planet at the beginning and consider what happens at the end of the packaging’s life from the start.

What this means is that instead of local authorities picking up the bill for household waste management, companies will have instead to pay for managing your household packaging waste as well as the form businesses, and they will be met with the associated little costs too.

And, as an added bonus, the new EPR laws on packaging will also mean that producers are required to put clear mandatory (强制性的) labelling on packaging, for example, this could be “RECYCLE” or “DO NOT RECYCLE”. Of course, we hope that the “DO NOT RECYCLE” category labelling is the minority. It is aimed that by 2030, 78% of packaging will be recycled in the UK.

6 . More than 20,000 drivers and front seat passengers are killed or seriously injured each year. At a speed of only 30 miles per hour it is the same as falling from a third floor window. Wearing a seat belt saves lives; it reduces your chance of death or serious injury by more than half.

Therefore drivers or front seat passengers over 14 most vehicles must wear a seat belt. If you do not, you could be fined up to $50. It will not be up to the drivers to make sure you wear your belt. But it will be the driver’s responsibility to make sure that children under 14 do not ride in the front unless they are wearing a seat belt of some kind.

However, you do not have to wear a seat belt if you are reversing(倒退) your vehicle; or you are making a local delivery or collection using a special vehicle; or if you have a valid(正当的) medical certificate(证书) which excuses you from wearing it. Make sure these cases supply to you before you decide not to wear your seat belt. Remember you may be taken to court for not doing so, and you may be fined if you cannot prove to the court you have been excused from wearing.

8 . Too many deaths and injuries occur while mobile phones are being held. Tougher new laws will come into force in a further severe action on using a mobile phone behind the wheel from next year.

It is already illegal to text or make a phone call, other than in an emergency, using a hand-held device while driving. From 2022, laws will go further to ban drivers from using their phones to take photos or videos, or play games. This will mean anyone caught using their hand-held device while driving will face a fixed penalty notice and six points on their license. Drivers will still be able to continue using a device “hands-free” while driving, if it’s secured in a cradle (支架).

The government will also revise The Highway Code to explain the new measures. It will also be more precise about some facts, making it clear that hand-held mobile phone use at traffic lights or in motorway jams is illegal except in very limited circumstances.

There will be an exemption (豁免) to the new law for drivers making a contactless payment using their mobile phone. This will cover, for example, places like a drive-through restaurant or a road toll, and will only apply when payment is being made with a card reader. Anyway, it will not allow drivers to make general online payments while driving.

Mary Williams, chief executive of Brake — the road safety charity, said, “If drivers take their attention away from driving, this can be deadly. Using a hand-held phone at the wheel is never worth the risk. This important road safety decision by government, along with Road Safety Week, is very welcomed. The theme for Road Safety Week is road safety heroes — we can all be road safety heroes by giving driving our full attention.”

9 . New Zealand has announced it will outlaw smoking for the next generation, so that those who are aged 14 and under today will never be legally able to buy tobacco.

New legislation (法规) means the legal smoking age will increase every year, to create a smoke-free generation of New Zealanders, associate Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall said on Thursday. “This is a historic day for the health of our people,” she said.

The government announced the rising age alongside other measures to make smoking unaffordable and inaccessible, to try to reach its goal of making the country entirely smoke-free within the next four years. Other measures include reducing the legal amount of nicotine in tobacco products to very low levels, cutting down the shops where cigarettes could legally be sold, and increasing funding to addiction services. The new laws will not restrict vape (电子烟) sales.

New Zealand's daily smoking rates have been dropping over time - down to 11.65% in 2018, from 18% a decade earlier. But smoking rates for Maori and Pacifika were far higher - 29% for Maori and 18% for Pasifika. “If nothing changes, it would be decades till Maori smoking rates fall below 5%,” Verrall said. She said to end smoking in the next four years was within reach: “I believe it is. The issue is, though, if we don't change what we’re doing, we won’t make it for Maori - and that’s what the plan is really focused on”.

Smoking has already been widely replaced by vaping among teenage New Zealanders, which is also attracting many young people who would never have taken up smoking - according to surveying of 19,000 high school students this year, nearly 20% were vaping daily or several times a day, the majority with high nicotine doses. That’s compared to 3% of those aged 15-17 who smoked daily in 2018, or 13% who smoked a decade earlier.

Verrall said the legislation would be introduced in 2022, with the age limits coming in in 2023.

10 . In the USA, youth curfews (宵禁) are traditionally issued by a parent in the interest of safety. This type of curfew is personal, and rightfully so. However, to stop teenagers committing crimes, some officials have turned youth curfews from family decisions into public laws.

The idea may have been thought to have good intentions. In practice, however, these policies have been shown to be unfair and unconstitutional, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In the town of Sumner, Washington, a father allowed his fourteen-year-old son to go to a convenience store after 11:00 p.m. Sumner had adopted a curfew law that prohibited people under the age of eighteen from being in public places past that hour. The father was fined, and then he pursued a legal challenge against the town. The ACLU, which filed the case on behalf of the father, claimed the curfew laws had violated (侵犯) parents' rights. In the end, Sumner's curfew laws were struck down.

But isn't it irresponsible not to enforce a curfew on teenagers? Curfew laws supporters argue that officials should provide a curfew to ensure teens are home by a reasonable hour. The risk of a serious accident is three times as high for drivers aged sixteen to nineteen as for drivers over twenty. And dangers only increase at night. This indicates to some that a law keeping teens off the road late at night is a positive safety measure. Still, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says that the best ways for drivers to increase safety are by obeying the speed limit, wearing a seat belt, and paying attention. The NHTSA makes no mention of youth curfews making driving safer.

In cities, curfew enforcement has been ineffective or even had a negative impact on communities. Most crimes committed by teens actually happen around 3：00 p.m. , right after school. On non-school days, that time shifts to between 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. The curfew hours, usually between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. , occur at a time of day when teenage crime is at its lowest. Meanwhile, violent crime rates peak around 10:00 p.m. for adults. When law enforcement performs the teen curfew sweep, policemen are distracted from the more serious violent crimes being committed by adults at that time. Also troubling is the racial discrimination in cities with curfews. For example, recent data have found that in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 56% of youths charged with breaking curfews were African American. Other law enforcement department reports show similar problems. Curfew laws are criticized because they are enforced in a racially discriminatory way.

The ACLU has succeeded in striking down at least one curfew law because of concerns over parental rights. Along with other community and civil rights groups, it continues to pursue other cases, arguing that curfew law enforcement can only increase tension and crime. To arrest teens for driving home from the movies, playing basketball in the park, or simply walking their dog is to punish them for being outside their homes—a policy inconsistent with the individual rights established in the U. S. Constitution.