Word: council
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...doctor makes an incision in a man's scrotal sac and, deftly wielding his scalpel, quickly removes both testicles. In the Czech Republic, that simple operation is the punishment for male sex offenders. But to the Council of Europe, the region's leading human-rights body, the procedure is "invasive, irreversible and mutilating." In a report issued last week, the council called the punishment "degrading" and demanded it be scrapped immediately...
...Council of Europe - whose Committee for the Prevention of Torture investigated the Czech policy - says it can be described as medical intervention only if the genitalia are diseased or damaged. "Surgical castration is no longer a generally accepted medical intervention in the treatment of sex offenders," the council's report said...
...report, the Council of Europe also criticized the fact that the Czechs often use the punishment on first-time, nonviolent offenders, like exhibitionists. Another issue: the Czech penal system effectively forces many prisoners into accepting the procedure out of fear they will be jailed for life if they do not, according to the council. "Given the context in which the intervention is offered, it is questionable whether consent to the option of surgical castration will always be truly free and informed," it said. Investigators found five cases of it being performed on legally incapacitated offenders who were not capable...
...China. The government recently estimated that 20 million migrant workers have lost their jobs as the global slowdown forces tens of thousands of factories to close. The response has been a government-led effort to prevent even more widespread losses. Last week, the central government's powerful State Council ordered companies throughout the country to notify local government-backed labor unions if they planned to cut either 10% of staff or more than 20 employees. The directive also urged companies to use any proceeds from China's $586 billion economic stimulus package to create as many jobs as possible...
...State Council's directive came after several months of vigorous initiatives to keep people employed. Last month, Wang Dong, head of Beijing's Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, announced that all state-owned enterprises in the Chinese capital are forbidden from laying off any of their 750,000 employees in 2009. In December and January, Premier Wen Jiabao visited local businesses in the city of Chongqing and in Jiangsu Province and pleaded with them not to "resort to redundancy easily, and to try to stabilize the employment situation by all means...