But most of the time strongmen are not vulnerable, and then the judgment becomes more complicated.
At the same time, the United States was backing other strongmen in Latin America against leftists.
Although he knew the implications of criticizing one of Africa's most feared strongmen, Chiurai remained unfazed.
The new local leaders are a mixed bunch: good administrators, regional figures, ideologues, local strongmen.
Only the top ten strongmen are asked to attend, so most were nearly as big as Shaw.
Four of the strongmen declined to try to lift it at all, and four tried and failed.
Mr Varshalomidze bears little resemblance to the grizzly strongmen who have usually run mini-fiefs in the Caucasus.
Both have cultivated Mr Maskhadov, who will be one of the region's strongmen if he prevails at home.
Moreover, Mr Abe's move to tap the party strongmen should be seen as just another sign of his fragility.
If bodybuilders were the ascetics of the festival, the strongmen were its mead-swigging friars, lumbering by with plates piled high.
On the night before the contest, the strongmen were summoned to the convention center for a private audience with Schwarzenegger.
The frame weighed nearly nine hundred pounds more than most strongmen could deadlift and, unlike the previous year, no wrist straps were allowed.
Unlike strongmen and bodybuilders, Olympic athletes are subject to stringent drug tests in this country, including unannounced visits to their homes.
In addition, it is both a cause and consequence of economic torpor that politics in the south remains the province of strongmen.
Mabunda is best known for his "thrones" -- chairs made from the twisted metal of guns, symbolizing the power held by strongmen.
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But President Hamid Karzai has expressed concern that without careful vetting, the program could end up arming local troublemakers, strongmen or criminals.
Up the street, at the hotel where most of the strongmen were staying, the breakfast buffet was provisioned like a bomb shelter.
Two British strongmen, Terry Hollands and Laurence Shahlaei, managed one lift each, while Jenkins, Poundstone, and the Russian Mikhail Koklyaev did two.
The founder, Richard Sorin, liked to collect equipment used by old-time strongmen and had set out a few items for passersby to try.
As the strongmen trudged out one by one to attempt the lift, speed metal blasted overhead, and several thousand people whooped them on.
The NDP, for instance, has its roots in Nasser's single-party socialist state, but its current leaders are business moguls, lawyers and local strongmen.
After years of doing business in dangerous places and cutting fast deals with strongmen, Shnaider is stepping into the unaccustomed glare of public scrutiny.
Around a dozen members of the city council appear to have been elected with the help of blocks of votes delivered by local strongmen.
Once again, Angola's strongmen prosper through the destitution of their people.
Aligning himself with strongmen may serve only to boost Mr Hashimoto's popularity, at a time when many Japanese are fed up with the weak-willed characters in national government.
The athletes, too, seemed to be of a different species from the strongmen: flexible and surprisingly slender, with muscles that had the almost slack look I remembered in Alexeyev.
And its politics has more in common with the old Argentina of caudillos (strongmen) than the modernised democracy that is preparing for a closely fought presidential election in October.
With a new constitution and a shift to a parliamentary system in the summer of 2010, observers, especially Americans, hoped Kyrgyzstan might become a model democracy in a region largely run by unsavoury strongmen.
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