By Sonali Paul and James Grubel Editing by Ed Davies and Ed Lane | Reuters

(Reuters) - Australia's labor tribunal, Fair Work Australia, early on Monday blocked Qantas Airways and unions for its pilots, engineers, baggage handlers and caterers from taking any furtherindustrial action against each other.

Following is what happens next:

* Qantas must scrap a plan announced on Saturday to lock out workers from Monday night and get its planes back in the air after grounding its entire fleet over the weekend. The airline resumed flights on Monday afternoon after clearance from the aviation safety regulator.

* The Australian and International Pilots Association, theAustralian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association and theTransport Workers Union, in talks with Qantas over the past 18 months, are no longer allowed to stop work, strike or take other actions like overtime bans.

* The airline and the unions must negotiate an agreement within the next 21 days. If they make good progress but have not reached an agreement in that time, they can seek an extension for a further 21 days. If they fail to reach an agreement, they will be forced into binding arbitration.

* Fair Work Australia would appoint a "full bench" to arbitrate.

* This is the biggest case since the Fair Work Australia law was enacted in 2009 where the tribunal has ordered a halt to industrial action and forced parties to negotiate. "In that sense, it is a test case," said industrial relations expert Joe Isaac, a former professor at Melbourne University.

* Key claims from unions: pay contractors equal wages with same conditions as Qantas aircraft engineers and baggage handlers, keep specific jobs in-house, pay pilots on Qantas code-share flights the same as Qantas pilots.

* Two industrial law experts said Fair Work Australia would not be able to stop Qantas from moving operations offshore and cutting costs.

"I don't think it can prevent Qantas from contracting out services and from moving services. It would be a very brave arbitrator to step across that line," workplace law expert Ron McCallum told ABC Television.

He said Fair Work Australia may give unions a win by saying that Qantas must consult before moving jobs offshore.

Source: 

http://news.yahoo.com/factbox-australias-qantas-unions-ordered-negotiate-065830508.html

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — When Montana-born U.S.-Australian dual citizen Brian Schmidt started studying astrophysics, he wondered if he would end up with a job, much less a Nobel Prize.

"It didn't seem to be a very practical choice, but I decided it would do in the short term while I decided what I really wanted to do," the 44-year-old professor at the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics told The Associated Press on Wednesday, a day after he became one of three scientists awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics.

"I thought it would be hard to get a job — which it is because they're aren't many around — but I haven't looked back," he said.
"When I started out, I didn't even dream about winning Nobel Prizes," he added.

In 1998, Schmidt and fellow American astrophysicists Saul Perlmutter, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Riess, of Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, presented findings that overturned the conventional idea that the universe's expansion was slowing 13.7 billion years after the big bang.

Schmidt said his team's findings that the expansion was actually accelerating initially "seemed wrong, because we were expecting the exact opposite."
Born in the town of Missoula in 1967, Schmidt grew up in Montana and Alaska before embarking on studying cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

He moved to Australia 17 years ago after meeting his future wife, Australian Jenny Gordon, at Harvard University where they were both doctoral students.
He now lives outside the national capital, Canberra, with his economist wife and two teenage children on a farm where he grows pinot noir grapes and makes wine as a hobby.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Apple Inc rejected an offer from Samsung Electronics Co to settle their tablet computer dispute in Australia, possibly killing off the commercial viability of the South Korean firm's new Galaxy tablet in that market.

Apple says Samsung's Galaxy line of mobile phones and tablets "slavishly" copied its iPhone and iPad and has launched an international legal battle which is expected to hurt growth at one of Samsung's fastest-growing businesses.

Samsung, whose Galaxy gadgets are seen as a major threat to Apple's devices, rejects the claims but has been seeking a quick settlement in Australia so that its new Galaxy 10.1 tablets can be launched there in time for Christmas.

But a lawyer for Apple told the Federal Court in Sydney on Tuesday that Samsung's latest offer, made last week, provided no basis for a settlement and it wanted the court to rule on its claim that the Galaxy's touch-screen technology infringed an Apple patent.

"The main reason we are here is to prevent the launch (of the Galaxy tablet) and maintain the status quo," Apple lawyer Steven Burley told the court.

An Apple victory in Australia could hurt Samsung's bid to close the gap with Apple in the global tablet market, with a crucial U.S. court ruling expected next week.

Samsung told the Sydney court that if it could not secure a ruling within about two weeks, the opportunity to launch its new tablets in time for Christmas would be lost and that it might as well take its time to argue the case well into 2012.

"If we can't get a decision out by mid-October, there is no urgency," said Neil Young, a lawyer for Samsung, adding that it might take until March to fully prepare its legal defense.

In that case, he added, the Galaxy 10.1 in the Australian market would be "commercially dead."

Samsung's latest Galaxy tablets, powered by Google's Android operating system, have already been blocked in Germany. So too have some smartphone models in the Netherlands.

CRUCIAL U.S. COURT RULING

Samsung had hoped to launch the new Galaxy tablet in Australia in late August or early September but this has been repeatedly delayed as it awaits the Australian court's ruling.

The ruling could come this week, a federal court judge had said last week.

Last week, Samsung agreed to withdraw two features from the Galaxy 10.1, leaving just one disputed Apple patent over touch-screen display technology. This patent deals with how finger movements are used on tablets to generate a software command.

Samsung and Apple are suing each other in nine countries over 20 cases, with few of them holding as much significance as the California court ruling expected next week.

Samsung may seek legal measures to ban sales of Apple's new iPhone, a source familiar with the matter has told Reuters. The highly anticipated iPhone 5 is set to be unveiled later on Tuesday.

Apple fired its first salvo in April by suing Samsung in California, saying the Galaxy lineup devices infringed on its mobile technology patents and design.

Samsung's smartphone business has been growing furiously, powered by its flagship Galaxy lineups. Some analysts expect Samsung to overtake Apple in unit terms as the world's No.1 smartphone vendor and report record profits from mobile business in July-September.

Samsung, due to report its third-quarter earnings guidance later this week, saw smartphone sales soar more than 500 percent in the second quarter, easily eclipsing Apple's 142 percent growth, though Apple sold about 1 million more units.

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard has launched Christine Nixon's book, urging readers to judge the former chief commissioner's actions for themselves.

Ms Nixon has come under fire for criticising the Bushfires Royal Commission in Fair Cop, and accusing the media of being out to get her after she went out to dinner on the night of Black Saturday.