South Korea reached out to rival North Korea on Thursday, nearly three weeks after the death of the North's iron-fisted ruler Kim Jong-il, saying it wanted to reopen dialogue despite the North's vitriolic outbursts.

Intriguing tales are circulating here about Iraq's iron-fisted ruler, President Saddam Hussein.

The 63-year-old Shula said that when he was a young coach, he remembered being in awe of Halas, the receiver, the Hall of Fame founder, coach and iron-fisted ruler of the Bears.

Her populist ways and her body-hugging fashions win over the children, the peasants and eventually the iron-fisted ruler himself (Mr. Dalton).

So Abu Zaki and his friends aim off a little, as Iraqis do whenever the subject turns to Mr. Hussein, their iron-fisted ruler for 23 years.

Both said they had never heard a bad word about the man who sent millions of his countrymen to exile and death as the iron-fisted ruler of the Soviet Union for three decades.

FORGET the makeup and flashy stagecraft deployed by the members of the Impossible Missions Force in their quest to bring justice to merciless dictators in South America and iron-fisted rulers behind the Iron Curtain.

For a great majority of Palestinians, there was little empathy with the death of a man many had viewed as an iron-fisted ruler of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip both as Defense Minister and then Prime Minister.

Its streets abound with statues of Stalin and of Enver Hoxha, its iron-fisted ruler for 40 years until his death in 1985.

No one could imagine this iron-fisted ruler as a senator, and I've always believed that he had come to the same conclusion by the time he pulled out of the race for health reasons.