1. Vladimir Putin:
In 1999, Russian president
Boris Yeltsin dismissed his prime minister and promoted former KGB officer
Vladimir Putin in his place. In December 1999, Yeltsin resigned, appointing
Putin president, and he was re-elected in 2004. In April 2005, he made a
historic visit to Israel. the first visit there by any Kremlin leader. Putin
could not run for the presidency again in 2008, but was appointed prime
minister by his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Putin was re-elected to the
presidency in March 2012. In 2014, he was reportedly nominated for a Nobel
Peace Prize.
2. Barack Obama:
Barack Hussein Obama is
the 44th and current President of the United States, and the first African
American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of
Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the
Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his
law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law
at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three
terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004,
running unsuccessfully for the United States House of Representatives in 2000.
In 2004, Obama received
national attention during his campaign to represent Illinois in the United
States Senate with his victory in the March Democratic Party primary, his
keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July, and his election
to the Senate in November. He began his presidential campaign in 2007 and,
after a close primary campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, he won
sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party primaries to receive the
presidential nomination. He then defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the
general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine
months after his election, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
3. Xi Jinping:
The 60-year-old Xi is the paramount political and military
leader of China, ruling over 1.3 billion people (close to 20% of the world's
population). China owns some $1.3 trillion in U.S. securities, making it the
largest shareholder of U.S. debt. There are 122 billionaires in the country, up
from zero one decade ago. In addition to his title of general secretary of the
Communist Party in China, Xi is also president of the People's Republic of
China and the chairman of the Central Military Commission.
4. Pope Francis:
Pope Francis is the 266th pope of the Catholic Church.
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who took the papal name Francis, was elected as
the new pope on March 13, 2013. Pope Francis is both the first pope from the
Americas and the first non-European pope chosen in more than 1,000 years. Pope
Francis is also the first Jesuit pope.
5. Angela Merkel:
Angela Dorothea Merkel (born 17 July 1954) is a German
politician and a former research scientist, who has been the Chancellor of
Germany since 2005 and the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since
2000. She is the first woman to hold either office, the first German Chancellor
to be born after World War II, and the first post-reunification Chancellor to
be raised in the former East Germany (though she was actually born in the
former West Germany).
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