Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world, with a cover that features Lady Gaga, Bill Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Conan O'Brien, among others (see the image below).
But the list is full of non-marquee names, too. Here's our rundown of five entries on the list you've probably never heard of.
Jenny Beth Martin : Move over, Sarah Palin. Martin is a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots group, which claims 15 million members. Martin has also worked as a paid Republican consultant. She told USA Today that she became a protester after her husband's business went under and the two were cleaning houses. She helped organize the movement's march on Washington in September. Tea partiers are "not your hippie protesters," she told USA Today. "It's people who are working hard for their families and they don't want their money taken away from them to be given to people who aren't working hard."
Dr. Douglas Schwartzentruber and Dr. Larry Kwak : Time wrote last year about Schwartzentruber and Kwak's work to develop a vaccine against cancer that could eliminate the need for radiation and chemotherapy. The two shocked the medical world in June when they announced positive results in separate studies that inoculated patients who had melanoma or lymphoma.
Reem Al Numery: When she was 12, Reem was forced to marry her 30-year-old cousin, and her own father threatened to kill her when she fought back and ran away. Yemeni officials refused her petition for a divorce, and she was unable to attend a ceremony in her honor in the U.S. because she was forbidden to leave her home country. "While my hair was styled for the ceremony, I thought of ways to set fire to my wedding dress," Reem reportedly told U.S. Embassy officials. "When I protested, my dad gagged me and tied me up. After the wedding, I tried to kill myself twice." She was finally granted a divorce from the Yemeni legal system and is an advocate for ending child marriage. Feminist leader Gloria Steinem's tribute in Time describes Reem as "one of the brave girl children who are risking everything to protest being sold into marriage by fathers and becoming the endangered and uneducated chattel of husbands."
Mark Carney: As Canada's central banker, Mark Carney had the good fortune of presiding over a country that didn't need a single bailout while the U.S. financial sector was in grave peril 2008 and 2009. At 45, Carney is one of Canada's youngest central bankers ever, and the only one with a background in investment banking. He spent more than 10 years at Goldman Sachs, and doesn't get distracted by "populist zeal" while working toward banking reforms with the G-8, Time's tribute says.
Neill Blomkamp: The 30-year-old South African filmmaker blew critics away with his sci-fi flick "District 9," which he wrote and directed. The low-budget movie — Blomkamp's first — was in a quasi-documentary style and won wide praise for its groundbreaking visual effects. "District 9" also employed familiar themes in sci-fi storytelling to develop a sharp allegory about the lingering fallout from apartheid-era South Africa. It earned a best-picture nomination at the 2009 Oscars, and Blomkamp might do a sequel, Empire magazine has reported.
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