Zimbabwe's elderly and autocratic president says leaving now would be an "act of cowardice".

Freedom of the press has long since ceased to exist in Tajikistan, where an autocratic president wields vast powers and has all but eliminated the political opposition.

Russian parliamentary leaders said today that they are appealing to Belarus's autocratic president to allow the country's opposition parties to take part in all aspects of elections this fall.

Ten men gathered in a dim three-room apartment one recent evening to plan the unseating of this country's autocratic president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko.

Even before he took the post the Philharmonic's autocratic president, Dorothy Chandler, breached his contract by appointing a deputy music director without Solti's approval.

From 1904, his role in academic politics marked him as an independent spirit-too independent for the university's autocratic president Nicholas Murray Butler.

But his loyalty to Hosni Mubarak, the autocratic Egyptian president, which seemed sometimes to verge on slavish, provoked criticism and contempt at home and abroad.

Syria's aging and autocratic president, Hafez al-Assad, does not travel abroad very often.

In May he helped found a new political party in opposition to Kenya's autocratic president, Daniel arap Moi, a step filled with risk.

Once in office, autocratic presidents can use their powers to grab far more than the usual advantages of incumbency.