As news of Lee Kuan Yew's passing in the wee hours of March 23, 2015, slowly but surely disseminates to the rest of Singapore that is waking up to the inevitable -- as well as the start of a new work week -- the local media is already in overdrive publishing stories celebrating the life of our nation's first prime minister.

The Straits Times, for example, has published a piece written by none other than the editor himself, Warren Fernandez, while announcing that all coverage of Lee's passing can be had for free.

Channel News Asia, on the other hand, has spared no effort recounting Lee's life in their article announcing his passing.

So what are non-local media saying then?

The foreign media, which are not obliged to toe any official line, have cast the spotlight on Lee's quirks, which are manifested as Singapore's quirks, besides reporting on Lee's achievements and iron-fisted rule.

Some of these major news organisations have provided deeper analysis of Lee's death on Singapore's future (The Wall Street Journal), while others have done a fairly poor job glossing over his achievements and faults (Time), and then there is the characteristically critical (CNN), while at least one outlet is downright quirky (Quartz).

Here goes (Click on headline link or picture to go to article):

1. The Wall Street Journal

Singapore Prepares for World Without Lee Kuan Yew

Under the younger Mr. Lee, who took office in 2004, the government has attempted to shake off Singapore’s fusty image and rebrand it as a cosmopolitan center for culture and commerce. It recently started introducing higher taxes on the wealthy and greater welfare spending, part of a longer-term push to remold the country’s economy and adjust to changing social demands.

“With profound changes in Singapore’s economic context and a more plural political environment, some of Lee Kuan Yew’s policy ideas and style may have become less relevant,” said Yeoh Lam Keong, an economist and adjunct professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

2. CNN

Lee Kuan Yew: Modern Singapore's founding father, dead at 91

While Lee has been lauded for his economic accomplishments, he also created a Singapore bound by stringent laws and regulations that dictated most, if not all, aspects of society -- including media and political freedoms, censorship and even the selling of chewing gum.

The country ranks 150th in Reporters Without Borders' 2014 Media Freedom Index, putting it just above the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico and Iraq.

The New York Times, The Economist, the International Herald Tribune and the Asian Wall Street Journal have all been targeted with the "judicial harassment" employed by the Lee family, according to the media watchdog.

3. BBC

Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew dies at 91

The city-state's prime minister for 31 years, he was widely respected as the architect of Singapore's prosperity.

But he was criticised for his iron grip on power. Under him freedom of speech was tightly restricted and political opponents were targeted by the courts.

4. The New York Times

Lee Kuan Yew, Founding Father and First Premier of Singapore, Dies at 91

The nation reflected the man: efficient, unsentimental, incorrupt, inventive, forward-looking and pragmatic.

“We are ideology-free,” Mr. Lee said in an interview with The New York Times in 2007, stating what had become, in effect, Singapore’s ideology. “Does it work? If it works, let’s try it. If it’s fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one.”

The formula succeeded, and Singapore became an international business and financial center admired for its efficiency and low level of corruption.

5. Quartz

How Lee Kuan Yew made Singapore the most prosperous, efficient, and quirkily repressive country in Asia

Worried about overpopulation in Singapore’s early days, Lee launched the “Stop at Two” campaign that included subsidies for vasectomies. When the program succeeded a bit too wildly, it was replaced by the “Three or More” campaign, with subsidies for having vasectomies reversed. To improve the local gene pool, the “Graduate Mothers Scheme” offered special incentives to would-be moms with college degrees (most of them ethnic Chinese, whose fertility rates lagged those of the other major ethnic group, Malays). When the government concluded that young people were not marrying in sufficient numbers, it introduced the “Romancing Singapore” campaign, which sponsored river cruises and other match-making events for singles.

Romance and Singapore are words not often heard together in that famously nonsense-free zone, but Lee was clearly a man of passion—for his country and especially his vision of it. So convinced was he of his rightness that opposition was deemed not just unpatriotic but, worse, stupid. Lee’s results speak for themselves, but he rarely missed an opportunity to do it for them. In frequent articles and books, he expounded on matters great and small—like the proper room temperature for sleeping (66 degrees Fahrenheit).

6. Time

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew Made Modern Asia

But that didn’t mean that Lee Kuan Yew was stuck in the past. In fact, during that interview he offered up his views on some of the most newsworthy issues of the day, from the rise of China to the threat of radical Islam. And though he admitted some faults — he should have fostered free enterprise more, he said — he was defiant in the face of other criticisms: “I’m not guided by what Human Rights Watch says. I am not interested in ratings by Freedom House or whatever. At the end of the day, is Singapore society better or worse off? That’s the test. What are the indicators of a well-governed society? Look at the humanities index in last week’s Economist, we’re right on top,” he told TIME.

Update: March 23, 2015, 3pm:

7. The Guardian

Lee Kuan Yew obituary

Lee has been described as many things. To Chinese, particularly during his days fighting Chinese chauvinism in the name of a multiracial Singapore identity, the Cambridge-educated lawyer brought up to believe in English education if not in British institutions, Lee was a “banana” – yellow on the outside, white inside. However, later in life, as Chinese identity and Confucian attitudes emphasising education, discipline and hierarchy became more important, he would be criticised for presenting himself as a fount of wisdom, a convincing articulator of modern Asia to western audiences, while actually behaving with all the intolerance of a Chinese emperor. At his worst, he could combine imperial hauteur with extraordinarily petty spite, relishing the destruction of irritating but unthreatening critics. At his best, he had an incisive mind and clear political judgment. For an avowed elitist, he had a remarkable ability to talk to a crowd.

8. The Economist

Commander of his stage

In some ways, Mr Lee was a bit of a crank. Among a number of 20th-century luminaries asked by the Wall Street Journal in 1999 to pick the most influential invention of the millennium, he alone shunned the printing press, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the internet and chose the air-conditioner. He explained that, before air-con, people living in the tropics were at a disadvantage because the heat and humidity damaged the quality of their work.

Now, they “need no longer lag behind”. Cherian George, a journalist and scholar, spotted in this a metaphor for Mr Lee’s style of government, and wrote one of the best books about it: “The air-conditioned nation: Essays on the politics of comfort and control”. Mr Lee made Singapore comfortable, but was careful to keep control of the thermostat. Singaporeans, seeing their island transform itself and modernise, seemed to accept this. But in 2011 the PAP did worse than ever in a general election (just 60% of the vote and 93% of the seats!). Many thought change would have to come, and that the structure Mr Lee had built was unsuitable for the age of Facebook and the burgeoning of networks which it can no longer control. They began to chafe at the restrictions on their lives, seemingly no longer so convinced of Singapore’s fragility, and less afraid of the consequences of criticising the government.

9. The Washington Post

Lee Kuan Yew, who led Singapore into prosperity over 30-year rule, dies at 91

Critics also charged that Mr. Lee’s administration permitted detention without charge or trial, censored the press, harassed political opponents and turned a blind eye to police mistreatment of suspects.

Some Singaporeans complained that the avowedly “paternalistic” government treated them like children, forbidding private citizens to own home satellite dishes, fining and humiliating people caught failing to flush public toilets, and even imposing a nationwide ban on chewing gum.

When a BBC reporter once suggested to him that allowing people to chew gum could help spur creativity, Mr. Lee retorted: “If you can’t think because you can’t chew, try a banana.”

10. Foreign Policy

Long Live Lee Kuan Yew’s Lion City

Lee was stubborn, but not afraid to change course. From socialism to libertarianism, he flip-flopped pragmatically until the country found a model that works: a freewheeling nanny state. He believed that one cannot be afraid of contradictions in a complex world. “I always tried to be correct, not politically correct,” goes another of his memorable aphorisms.

Even if Lee found it hard to let go of power — first to Goh Chok Tong, who served as prime minister from 1990 to 2004, and then to Goh’s replacement (and Lee’s son), current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong — he would prefer the world focus on this system rather than himself. Indeed, it only mattered whether you think Lee was a strongman or a visionary (or both) while he was alive. Now the yardstick is not personality but institutions. Lee Kuan Yew-ism, not Lee Kuan Yew. This is why the 21st century belongs to him more than to icons of Western democracy like Thomas Jefferson or even Jean Monnet, the founding father of the European Union.

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