Free Republic

When Jonny Frostick realised he was having a heart attack this month, the first thing that occurred to the HSBC Holdings Plc contractor was: “I needed to meet with my manager tomorrow, this isn’t convenient.” Then he thought about funding for a project, his will, and finally, his wife. Frostick, who manages more than 20 employees working on regulatory data projects, chronicled his near-death experience in a viral LinkedIn post that had been viewed almost eight million times. The 45-year-old Briton is the latest financial employee to weigh in on the work-till-you-drop culture during a pandemic that’s obliterated the lines...

(PHNOM PENH, Cambodia) — Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue of the communist Khmer Rouge regime that destroyed a generation of Cambodians, died Sunday, the country’s U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal said. He was 93. Nuon Chea was known as Brother No. 2, the right-hand man of Pol Pot, the leader of the regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The group’s fanatical efforts to realize a utopian society led to the death of some 1.7 million people — more than a quarter of the country’s population at the time — from starvation, disease, overwork and executions. Researchers believe Nuon Chea was...

Overwork had caused the death of a 31-year-old NHK female reporter in 2013, according to the labor standards inspectors, the public broadcaster said Wednesday, providing further evidence of the extreme working conditions many Japanese employees endure. Miwa Sado, who belonged to the broadcaster’s center in Tokyo and died of congestive heart failure in July 2013, worked 159 hours of overtime with only two days off in the one-month period prior to her death, a local labor standards office concluded in May 2014. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration has been seeking to improve working conditions in the country following the suicide...

... A survey by the Families and Work Institute in New York found that 1 in 3 Americans feels chronically overworked, and a study by the American Sleep Institute found that 50 percent of Americans would be willing to work fewer hours for less pay. As companies across the nation feverishly downsize and restructure to improve their bottom lines, overtime hours have crept up and now average four to five hours a week, 25 percent more than a decade ago, says Lonnie Golden, an overtime expert at Pennsylvania State University. A lot of that is forced overtime, and 50- or...

Lack of Sleep May Lead to Excess WeightStudy Finds Link Between Hours of Sleep and Risk of Obesity(Las Vegas, NV) - November 16, 2004 - The less you sleep, the more likely you are to become obese, according to a study being presented at the North American Association for the Study of Obesity (NAASO)'s Annual Scientific Meeting held November 14-18. The study, by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the Obesity Research Center, demonstrated a clear link between the risk of being obese and the number of hours of sleep each night, even after controlling for...