week: 8-14 December
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been named Time’s Person of the Year, praised by the magazine for her leadership on everything from Syrian refugees to the Greek debt crisis.
• Time also cited Merkel’s strong response to “Vladimir Putin’s creeping theft of Ukraine” and on its cover called her “Chancellor of the Free World”.
• Merkel, 61, is just the fourth woman since 1927 to be chosen and the first since opposition leader Corazon C Aquino of the Philippines in 1986.
• She is the first German since Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor named in 1970 for “seeking to bring about a fresh relationship between East and West” during the Cold War.