Wednesday, May 19, 2010

'Power' Article MashUp

Angela Merkel, the front runner to become Germany's next Chancellor, developed her style early. As a 12-year-old growing up in the communist eastern part of the country, she was asked by a swimming teacher to experiment with a low diving board at the local pool. She edged to the end and stopped. Forty minutes passed before she jumped in. "I need a lot of start-up time," Merkel told a local journalist. "I am not spontaneously courageous."
I can say the word see. I can speak the language of the sighted. That's part of the first great achievement of Helen Keller. She proved how language could liberate the blind and the deaf. She wrote, "Literature is my utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised."
Now she's turning her beauty into a brand that she owns, rather than hires out.
Kerr's new organic skin-care range KORA was launched at David Jones this month and is available exclusively at David Jones stores and online. She has also licensed the KORA name to include a clothing line and is set to exploit her appeal in other products, including her first book Treasure Yourself: Power Thoughts for My Generation.
"Ten years ago, the idea that we'd have a female Chancellor from East Germany would have raised nothing but laughs," says political analyst Alfons Söllner. "Today it will make people proud."
She was impatient and hungry for words, and her teacher's scribbling on her hand would never be as fast, she thought, as the people who could read the words with their eyes.
"These girls continuously re-invent themselves... it's like Elle, it started with print and then she went into lingerie and now she is doing cosmetics," he says.
"They have to continuously reassess things, work on things, and (improve) the brand so they have something else to offer."
She established herself as both ambitious and willing to learn, outmaneuvering a succession of male colleagues to take the party leadership in 2000. "She's criticized for being timid," says political scientist Gerd Langguth, her biographer, "but she's a political panther."




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