From London's Telegraph, (via Theo Spark):
She is a former Marxist guerrilla whose organisation once stole $2.5 million from the safe of the governor of São Paulo.
Locked up and tortured by the dictatorship which ran Brazil during the 1970s, she was once branded by a prosecutor as the "Joan of Arc of subversion".
Yet in less than a month's time Dilma Rousseff is on course to become Brazil's first woman president, entrusted with running the largest and fastest-growing economy in Latin America ....
For someone who was once an active member of an armed Marxist group, fighting to overthrow the dictatorship, it is quite a change.
The daughter of a middle class Bulgarian immigrant and a schoolteacher in Belo Horizonte, southeastern Brazil, she realised upon leaving a privileged school that the world was "not a place for debutantes".
She was 16 when Brazil fell prey to a military coup in 1964 and like many was soon drawn into the world of underground opposition.
Introduced to Marxist politics by the man who became her first husband, Claudio Galeno, she helped build up one of the guerrilla organisations trying to overthrow the government - at one point spending three years in prison.
After democracy was restored she had a daughter, Paula, now a 33-year-old lawyer, with her second husband Carlos Araújo, a revolutionary leader who had met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. She trained as an economist she entered conventional left-wing politics and professional public service.
In 2001, by now divorced again, she joined Lula's Workers' Party and her experience in the country's energy ministry quickly impressed the new president. A cabinet job as energy minister followed before she was appointed his chief of staff in 2005.
But many have questioned how she can be running for the presidency.
Critics say she was simply the last senior Lula crony standing since one aide after another was forced to quit in scandals over alleged slush funds, bribery or blackmail - including, last week, her own former aide who had followed in her footsteps as Lula's chief of staff.
Her lumbering speaking style and lack of personal charisma do not make her an obvious candidate and - in what was seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to protect Ms Rousseff - the government made it illegal for television and radio broadcasters to make fun of the candidates.
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