Obama leads Forbes ranking of world’s most powerful
The US president leads it, of course, and then there’s Pope Benedict XVI, and Angela Merkel, and Facebook’s founder, and other global rainmakers on Forbes’s ranking of the mightiest earthlings.
But the magazine’s 2012 list of the world’s most powerful people also features folks who might raise an eyebrow or two: a Mexican drug baron, and the pudgy-faced young leader of North Korea, a hermit state assailed for pursuing a nuclear program at the expense of feeding its very poor people.
Last year’s No. 2 on the list, Chinese President Hu Jintao, is among those who fall off the rankings altogether this time. In Hu’s case it is because he’s on his way out of office.
The ranking features 71 names, a figure Forbes said it set as a cutoff because there are an estimated 7.1 billion people in the world and thus the ranking works out to one very heavy hitter for every 100 million people.
For the second year in a row, President Barack Obama led the ranking, with Forbes noting that he won both the popular vote and a crucial electoral college majority in the November election.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/05/obama-leads-forbes-ranking-of-worlds-most-powerful/