Popular Elsewhere
15:42 UK time, Friday, 22 July 2011
A look at the stories ranking highly on various news sites.
Never underestimate the power of a cat video to shoot up the most-read list of a news site. Readers of Ireland's Independent watched a while cars whizzed past. The text heightens the drama, reporting he was "frozen to the spot" while an "extraordinary rescue operation swung into operation, a task that was a race against the clock" but essentially he was just sitting there. Until he was taken away, that is.
? New Yorker readers clearly want to find out the answer as the question is in the title of the New Yorker's most read article. Apparently, the answer is if it is based in the woods, the founder meditates at his desk and aspires to become a sort of world philosopher. The article tackles the tricky question of accusations the hedge fund Bridgewater being a tad "creepy". Even if it were true, it doesn't seem to have done it any harm as the magazine points out last year alone, the founder earned between $2-3bn.
When a basketball star retires what is their concern? Chinese star that despite getting $18m (£11m) when becoming an NBA player, he is still a worker. Yao Ming makes his case in a popular Xinhua Net story:
"When I was a kid, I was told communism was everything was shared by all. So, I could be called capitalist with so much money 30 years ago, but in fact I earned the income through hard... work, so I am still a blue collar,"
A new form of parental neurosis is being spread on a popular Newsweek article. It starts "It is no longer enough to raise children who are brave, curious, hardworking, and compassionate. Nor is it sufficient to steer them toward the right sports, the right tutors, the right internships, and thus engineer their admittance to the right (or at least a good enough) college." Because now, it says, you have to start worrying about how you are going to raise a "". "America" it panics "is so far utterly failing to produce a generation of global citizens." The comparison it makes is a quarter of US public schools not teaching language skills while 200 million Chinese children are learning English.
If US parents reading the Newsweek article decide to up sticks and bring up their children in another country, they could do worse than Finland. That's according to a popular Salon article which argues . Back in the 1970s it made teaching highly esteemed and a difficult profession to get into - with only one out of 10 people applying for teaching jobs being appointed. So they don't compare teachers in national tests, instead relying on trust.
