We will strike with an Iron Fist!

Abou Omar is an Egyptian cleric who used to live in Italy until the CIA and the Italian Intelligence kidnapped him and deported him to Egypt to snatch confessions out of him.

Putin has ruled the company with a firm hand as both President and Prime Minister.

After a few minutes which felt like a lifetime, the officer left the cell, and I used the known communication method of tapping the wall with my fist. I could tell he was a first timer .

Maybe our neighborhood will return to the regime. But we will hold on to our land! The shame is on the United Nations and all international organizations who could rescue the wounded but simply refuse to do so!

When China confronted this moment during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the Communist state repressed the students with an iron fist, but has since maintained a single minded focus on economic growth.

MADRID Just five months ago, Osama bin Laden was alive, Hosni Mubarak was firmly in control in Egypt, and Zine el Abidine Ben Ali ruled Tunisia with an iron hand.

When a government falls violently, the new regime usually rules by force, not by democratic procedures, if only to keep at bay those it has defeated.

Events like this are an almost daily occurrence in Russia, where Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rules the country with a strong hand, and persecution of the government s opponents, human rights violations, and judicial abuses have become routine.

Even though it has democratized some of its local decision making, the Chinese Communist Party maintains a tight grip on national politics and the human rights picture is marred by frequent abuses.

Ever since, the country could be held together only by an iron fist Iraq s history is replete with Shia, Kurdish, and even Christian Assyrian revolts, all put down in bloody fashion by the ruling Sunni minority.

Having overthrown Hosni Mubarak s iron fisted 30 year old regime in a remarkably quick and relatively peaceful manner, Egypt s revolutionary masses were to leave the streets and pursue an all out drive for economic prosperity and social justice.

Leonardo da Vinci. And further, I should invite him to meet my oldest trustee, who had majored in French history at Yale some 70 odd years before and, at 89, still ruled the world's largest privately owned textile empire with an iron hand.

It is tempting to dismiss other countries experiences, particularly after Egypt s youth led grassroots movement delivered something that no one thought possible (toppling in just 18 days a president that had ruled with an iron fist for 30 years).