Word: strongman
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...biggest demonstration seen in Havana for decades; this week tens of thousands of children got a day off school to file dutifully past the U.S. Interests Section in Havana denouncing the yanquis. The Elian case, after all, has been a shot of political Viagra to the aging strongman, and he's in no hurry to see it fade...
...notoriously reclusive head of a notoriously closed communist state, but Kim Jong Il appears to have studied the Ronald Reagan image-management playbook. North Korea's secretive strongman shocked his guests and most observers Tuesday by not only showing up at the airport, but greeting South Korea's President Kim Dae Jung with a winning smile and a two-handed handshake - the Korean cultural equivalent of a hug. By opening the historic first-ever visit by a leader of one Korea to the other with that telegenic gesture, the Dear Leader has given Koreans on both sides...
Syria's President Hafez Assad is dead, and with him any chance of peace between his country and Israel in the near term. The ailing 69-year-old died Saturday, leaving the country in the hands of his politically inexperienced 34-year-old son, Bashar. On hearing of the strongman's death, the country's parliament immediately passed a constitutional amendment putting aside the rule that the president had to be 40 or over. However, the arrival to power of Bashar may intensify a power struggle that has bubbled under the surface since Assad, who ruled from 1970, first brought...
Although nobody really believes that two of the strongman's intelligence agents would have independently conceived and executed a terror attack of such dramatic consequence, Ghaddafi appears to have somehow satisfied himself that the current trial would be unlikely to implicate him directly. And while it was conceivable, given the cycle of Libyan-sponsored terror attacks and retaliatory U.S. bombings of Libya during the '80s, that the attack on Pan Am 103 was authored in Tripoli, analysts have long speculated that the Libyans might have been subcontracted by a third party such as Iran or Syria. But with proceedings focused...
...drive to "save" Elian may, in fact, reflect a generational concern, even if it contains mixed messages - exile activists insist that sending Elian home to grow up in Castro's Cuba would be profoundly inhumane, and yet it's hard to imagine that a strongman who's about to turn 74 will maintain his grip much longer. But the decline of the embargo and emboldening of home-based dissidents and institutions such as the Catholic Church - as well as the considerable hostility toward the Miami leadership displayed on Cuba's streets during protests over Elian - suggest that post-Castro Cuba...