Word: ruler
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Finding himself one moment a rebel, the next the de facto ruler of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi allowed himself a wry comment during a press conference in London last week. Asked about the banner hanging behind him, a red flag emblazoned with the image of an AK-47, the modern guerrilla's weapon of choice, the leader of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front smiled. "I suppose we won't use the Kalashnikov anymore," he said, giving voice to widespread hopes that the decades of civil war in Ethiopia were finally over...
Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers to climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made of clusters of spirits (or "thetans") who were banished to earth some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named Xenu. Naturally, those thetans had to be audited...
...immediate cease-fire. Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali declared a "day of mourning in memory of the innocent civilian victims," while Sudan's Foreign Ministry called the episode a "hideous, bloody massacre." Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, however, sounded a different note. "It is inconceivable for a ruler to make propaganda from the corpses of his citizens," he said. "I am very sorry to see civilians dying, but unfortunately, these things happen sometimes...
...including its long-oppressed Shi'ite Muslim majority and its rebellious northern Kurds. "When the Iraqis stop fighting us," says a senior Bush adviser, "they may turn to fighting each other." The advisers believe postwar stability in Iraq and the region is better served if the country's next ruler is "someone in the clan" -- one of Saddam's close associates, probably a relative from his hometown of Tikrit...
Havel's moral authority defused a crisis of faith in Slovakia, the country's rustic eastern wing. But his remedy -- asking for the temporary right to rule by fiat if necessary -- differed only in degree from Walesa's ideal of an almost mystically righteous ruler who, as Poland's new President put it, can take "an ax" to obstacles. And Slobodan Milosevic, the steely leader elected by Serbs, won by virtue of his frank jingoism...