Beginning in October 2015, the mandate will extend to businesses with 15 or more workers, providing even more workers with the sick-leave benefit.

WSJ: New City Law Requires Paid Sick Days for Workers

Also consider the likely therapeutic and life-saving benefit to the sick sibling, the benefits to the family as a whole, and a new child free of the disease.

BBC: Paying for a sibling to save Mark

France's Liberation says the committee showed "a hell of a nerve" by awarding the prize to "a very sick patient", but the paper agrees to give the EU the benefit of the doubt and to bet on its "resilience".

BBC: EU's Nobel Peace Prize: Europe's press has mixed response

GPs tend to give their own patients the benefit of the doubt, and a worker who feigns illness and gets a sick-note to wave under the boss's nose is harder to manage than one who has been tackled at an earlier stage.

ECONOMIST: Health

Although some individual companies offer a paid maternity leave benefit, many parents end up using a combination of short-term disability, sick leave, vacation, personal days and unpaid family leave.

CNN: If Marissa Mayer can 'have it all,' can you?

Attorney Guy Neal, who represents creditors, spent a good deal of his trial time showing that for years Stockton had granted bloated labor contracts and benefits, and then allowed employees to boost their retirement benefits further by cashing out vacation time and sick leave in their last year of employment, thus raising their benchmark annual salary for retirement benefit purposes.

NPR: Stockton Bankruptcy Decision Only The Beginning