Highly-paid footballers are setting a bad example among Britons.

Britons are ruder than they were a decade ago, according to a survey that showed almost three-quarters of people in the country think manners should be taught at school.
Highly-paid footballers and celebrities are setting a bad example, according to the survey.
Britons traditionally liked to think of themselves as superior to foreigners at things like queuing and giving up their seats on public transport to disabled people or pregnant women.
But the rise of football culture--and football hooligans creating mayhem--has long dented this image abroad, and now Britons themselves acknowledge that they have a major problem.
A third believe bad manners are the catalyst for much of the anti-social behavior in Britain, the poll by ITV found.
Experts interviewed by the television network blamed a lack of respect for authority.
More than 90 percent of respondents believe parents are failing to ensure their children learn proper manners and that bad behavior of celebrities and soccer stars set a poor example for impressionable youngsters.
Spitting and swearing were the most offensive behaviors, it found, while queue-jumping and not saying “please“ or “thank you“ were the other main gripes.
Almost 75 percent of the 3,000 people surveyed believed manners should be taught at school.
“I suppose it’s part of the breakdown in society--the fact that we stopped having respect for figures in authority partly because those in authority didn’t command it,“ etiquette coach Diana Mather told the “Tonight Show with Trevor McDonald,“ which commissioned the survey.
The head of the Campaign for Courtesy, broadcaster Esther Rantzen, said a lack of discipline was also to blame.
“I think my generation has a lot to answer for because I think the youth culture in the 60s and early 70s threw out every rule book and thought it was really clever to use four letter words,“ she told the program.
“But I think things should go back, not to the old deference, not to groveling, not to any of that but just to feeling respect, because I think that would make everyone’s life more pleasant,“ she added.

High-tech gyms, free breakfasts, and programs to help people lose weight or stop smoking: modern Swedish companies pamper their employees in a bid to combat one of Europe’s highest absenteeism rates.
Swedish companies are faced with a paradox. Their employees claim to be happy in their jobs yet they don’t hesitate to call in sick often, backed up by strong collective labor agreements that protect employees’ rights, AFP reported.
As a result Sweden’s large multinational corporations like Scania, Ericsson and Volvo and hip sectors such as consultancies and IT companies do whatever they can to attract employees and keep them happy in the workplace.
Some companies bring a masseur to the office to help staff get rid of back and shoulder pain, while others offer gym memberships or free breakfasts and fruit baskets in the office.
“And nobody would imagine that the fruit basket would ever be withdrawn, even though there are always people who complain that the fruit is not fresh enough or not organic,“ says Olga Cara, an employee at the state-run certification agency Swedac.
“It’s very common in Sweden to care about the employees,“ adds Lars Jilmstad, a spokesman for the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise.
“When you’re happier, when you’re more satisfied with your working conditions, then you perform at work,“ says Magnus Verke, a psychology professor at Stockholm University.
But employers aren’t just being nice. A driving factor is that healthy and happy employees take fewer sick days and are therefore more productive.
Equally important is a government incentive that offers employers generous tax breaks for efforts to keep employees healthy in a bid to reduce the burden on the health care sector.
In Sweden, which has a workforce of around 4.34 million, including 65 percent in the private sector, the number of people absent due to sickness remains the highest in the European Union, at 2.9 percent compared to an average of 1.6 percent--outdone only by non-EU member Norway at 3.4 percent.

A retired electrician who allegedly imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her in a windowless cell likely suffered from psychiatric disorders, experts say, AP wrote.
Josef Fritzl, 73, appears to have been driven by pronounced narcissism and a need to exercise power over others--and that may help explain how he got away with the abuse for so long--said Austrian psychiatrist Reinhard Haller.
“This man must have been insane and must have felt he was far superior to others,“ Haller said. Court psychiatrist Sigrun Rossmanith said Fritzl essentially had two personalities: and the one that existed above.“
Police said Fritzl confessed Monday to holding captive his daughter--now 42--sexually abusing her, fathering her children and tossing into a furnace the body of one child who died in infancy. He was to appear in court Tuesday.
Investigators say they believe his wife, with whom he had seven other children, was unaware that the daughter she believed ran away to join a religious cult in 1984 was living below her in the basement cell that Fritzl built beneath their apartment in Amstetten, 75 miles (120 kilometers) west of Vienna.