Aran A.

THE MASH-UP
Miranda started her career in modeling before she left high school, when she won the Dolly Magazine competition in 1997. "She is very competent person - she has leadership qualities and we expect her to be a good leader.". Idolized for her angelic temperament, her courage and joy and generosity, she played unwittingly into the hands of those who would sentimentalize all women as better than men, too saintly to be shown the whole picture. In 2008, Victoria's Secret signed Miranda as its newest Angel. She was the first Australian model ever to appear in a Victoria's Secret runway show. "She is a really intelligent and bright woman" he says. Miranda now lives in New York and has established herself as one of the top 10 models in the world and someone who cares passionately about health and well-being. Later this year Miranda has a book coming out "Treasure Yourself". It focuses on encouraging young women to embrace themselves and their individuality. "Its a breakthrough for women" she said. She wrote defiantly that she took solace in Descartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am."

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MIRANDA KERR

About Miranda:

Miranda started her career in modeling before she left high school, when she won the Dolly Magazine competition in 1997. Her young age, at the time, sparked controversy but Miranda went back to her home town in country Australia and finished her studies and then went on to study Nutrition and Health Psychology, at the Academy of Natural Living.

Miranda's career has consisted of a mix of high profile runway shows, fashion and beauty shoots, as well advertising in television and print. She has appeared on the covers and inside pages of numerous magazines, including British Harper's Bazaar, British GQ, Vogue, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair, the cover of Rolling Stone, Harpers Bazaar, Madison, Italian Glamour, Elle and recently editorial in V magazine, US Marie Claire, US Glamour and the cover of Harpers Bazaar Australia and Pirelli calendar.

In 2008, Victoria's Secret signed Miranda as its newest Angel. She was the first Australian model ever to appear in a Victoria's Secret runway show. She consistently appears in print and television advertising campaigns as well as their runway shows. Her campaign work includes Victoria's Secret, Maybelline, Levi's, Blumarine, Clinique's "Happy" fragrance and she is the face of the Australian department store David Jones. Miranda has also graced the runways for designers such as, Balenciaga, Anna Molinari, Roberto Cavalli, Comme Des Garcons, Blumarine, Issey Miyake and many more.

Miranda now lives in New York and has established herself as one of the top 10 models in the world and someone who cares passionately about health and well-being. She balances her hectic lifestyle with yoga, meditation and regular exercise. Later this year Miranda has a book coming out "Treasure Yourself". It focuses on encouraging young women to embrace themselves and their individuality.

http://www.koraskincare.com.au/the-kora-story/about-miranda (accessed 10 June 2010)

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ANGELA MERKEL

The rise of Angela Merkel

Angela Merkel first came into prominence during the darkest days of the party-slush scandal.
She strongly denied allegations that bribes were paid for the supply of tanks to Saudi Arabia, describing them as "totally absurd". But, as the crisis deepened and the full scale of former chancellor Helmut Kohl's role in it became apparent, she was the first to turn on the man who had plucked her from obscurity and brought her into the cabinet. The gamble paid off. For Vera Lengsfeld, an East German Green who switched to the CDU, the choice of Merkel to lead the party represents a mini revolution: "Its a breakthrough for women" she said. "She is very competent person - she has leadership qualities and we expect her to be a good leader."

Eastern influence:
Angela Merkel's success has been meteoric. Only months ago it seemed unthinkable that the CDU - a traditional party with its roots in Catholicism - could chose an East German, female, Protestant as leader. Now members of the party elite, like the former General Secretary Peter Hintze, are queuing up to show allegiance:
"She is a really intelligent and bright woman" he says.
"That she comes from the East is a sign that the reunified Germany is coming back together".

New Thatcher?
Her rapid rise on the back of the scandal has been noted by the satirists. But jibes about her casual appearance have failed to dent her new-found popularity with the party.CDU people-power effectively turned a series of mood-testing conferences into US-style primary elections...and she swept the board. But commentators and politicians alike are at a loss to define what she stands for. Ulrich Klinkert, her deputy when she headed the Environment Ministry in the mid-1990s, says she is a highly competent professional, but says comparisons to Britain's Margaret Thatcher are wide of the mark:
"Its too easy to say she is Germany's Margaret Thatcher - she is a little bit Margaret Thatcher and a little bit Tony Blair."

Star quality:
She remains something of an enigma - a circus ringmaster capable of holding various party acts together, but not as yet the star of the show in her own right.Karl Feldmeier, senior correspondent with the Frankfurter Allgemainer Zeitung newspaper, says party members have rallied to her cause - not because of what she stands for, but because she is "convincing" as a person. "She doesn't have a group of close allies in the party, as has been typical in the decades before," he explains. "She is supported by the sympathy of a growing part of the membership of the party - and that's all."

New liberalism:
Some members of the CDU see Angela Merkel as something of a role model. Katerina Reiche, the youngest CDU MP in the Bundestag, says Mrs Merkel stands for family values, but not as the party has known it before."In former times, being married was important - now we talk of families being important, but not necessarily the marriage as an institution. Even in a gay relationship people take care of each other - that's a switch for a conservative party"

The party right-wing is troubled by such liberalism but has failed to block her progress. Becoming leader does not necessarily mean Angela Merkel will become the CDU candidate for chancellor in 2002, but a female head of government is at least a real possibility.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/683187.stm (accessed 10 June 2010)

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HELEN KELLER

She remains not quite 7 years old for many of us, suspended in the revelatory moment in 1887 that crowns William Gibson's play "The Miracle Worker." Helen Keller stands ignorant at the pump while her teacher, Annie Sullivan, works it rapidly, and with the simultaneous spilling of water and spelling of water into her palms, she suddenly intuits that everything on this earth has a name. The well of knowledge! Still a child when I first watched a child actress enacting Helen's real-life epiphany, I hardly understood the well's literary aptness. But Helen's cry - that elemental wa - pumped water up from some deep source into my own eyes and briefly blinded them.

It's doubtful that a good play will ever be written about the next discovery, thrilling but messy, in Helen Keller's life. She learned that everything does not have a name; it has many. Long before she entered Radcliffe in 1900, she had mastered the manual alphabet and manual lip-reading and the typewriter and several forms of Braille, in which she read Greek and Latin and French and German. By the time of her cum laude graduation (she'd gone through in four years, like everybody else - though perhaps unlike them she had already published her autobiography), she was still struggling with her most difficult language of all: speech. Even her friends said she spoke as with an unidentifiable foreign accent.

What country was Helen Keller from? People felt she hailed from Heaven - which was a mixed blessing. Idolized for her angelic temperament, her courage and joy and generosity, she played unwittingly into the hands of those who would sentimentalize all women as better than men, too saintly to be shown the whole picture. Even her great friend, the unsentimental Mark Twain, said he was certain Keller's inner visions were more beautiful than reality.

Yet an ugly suspicion lodged at the core of Keller's life. At 11, she unconsciously plagiarized a story she'd been told, and never again would she be entirely confident about which of her ideas were her own. As a world-famous adult, she read arguments by educators and psychologists that her very self was in some way not her own but the gifted Sullivan's - handed down, as it were. By writing beyond her direct experience, with words like "pink" or "whisper," had Keller erected a wall of conventionality that effectively shut her soul off from knowing itself? Nearing 50, she wrote defiantly that she took solace in Descartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am." But one fears she was never sure.

Her valiant life continues to raise complex questions - about dependency, originality, the development of the brain. Thinking about her, one's own brain goes only so far. Those of us with five senses are missing a sense of how Helen Keller thought with three.

http://www.nytimes.com/specials/magazine4/articles/keller.html (accessed 10 June 2010)