Word: soft-spoken
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Even before jan. 12, 2010, life was pretty good for Robin Li. The soft-spoken 41-year-old is the co-founder and chief executive of Baidu.com, the dominant search engine in China, the country with the most Internet users in the world. His stake in the company - started in 1999, five years after getting his M.S. from SUNY Buffalo in 1994 - is worth about $2.8 billion now. That makes him the seventh richest man in China, according to the annual rankings in Forbes magazine. Though he's been a computer geek since his undergraduate days at Peking University...
Douglas Elmendorf doesn't look like the kind of guy who could intimidate those at the pinnacles of power. A soft-spoken academic who coaches his daughters' soccer team, he is described by virtually everyone who knows him as a genuinely nice guy. But consider some of the things that have been said about the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and his ideas during the past year. "Off the wall," fumed Dave Obey, the famously volatile chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has suggested - and not in a nice way - that Elmendorf...
...head against a toilet, masturbates naked in a forest and mutilates her own genitals. "The film was so dramatic and so extreme that it took all my thoughts away," she says. "It helped me recover." Von Trier still struggles to reconcile her raw performance in the movie with her soft-spoken manner in person. "Privately she is so shy. You can sit through a meal with her and she doesn't say anything," he says. "How can this very, very shy person do scenes like this?" (Read a Q&A with Lars von Trier...
...comparison to the colorful Fernandez, Cobos seems drab. A soft-spoken family man who was dean of a technological university in the wine-growing province of Mendoza, Cobos became provincial governor in 2003 and then quit the Radical Party so he could run as Fernandez's No. 2. Relations between the two quickly soured. Since assuming office, Fernandez has renationalized companies that were privatized in the 1990s including airlines and public utilities, and privatized pension-fund assets worth $30 billion. She also led the country to the brink of a civilian uprising over her brash attempt to levy a hefty...
...irrigation pumps, with miles of hoses, deliver water through micro-jets from the time the temperature hits 32°F (0°C) until it returns to above freezing in the morning. By 10:30 p.m. on Jan. 10, there was nothing left but hope and luck, and tall, soft-spoken Kyle headed home for a few hours of shut-eye - sleep disturbed by the knowledge that the family had already incurred 1% crop damage. But for the eighth morning in the past 10, he was up before dawn driving through the groves...