In the Persian Gulf, sultans and emirs stifle potential protest with petro hush money.
Although this could be a justified compliment to those who developed this area, at the same time it could also stifle potential new ideas.
His arrest has become a cause célèbre among those who view the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as an authoritarian leader keen to stifle potential opponents.
But in November, he used a presidential decree to temporarily stifle potential legal objections so that his Islamist allies could rush out a new Constitution.
Last week, I spoke to a female staff member at a big union who sees at first hand how unions too often stifle potential.
Rather than try the Gambinos on extortion charges, which would have been tricky to prove and would, in any case, have left their trucking monopoly intact, he filed an antitrust suit, charging the mobsters with stifling potential competition.
If the Rockies looked overmatched then, they did not seem that way in Game 2. Their pitchers kept stifling potential Boston rallies, but their brawny offense could not solve Schilling, Okajima and Papelbon.
Chief among them are the Heritage Trail, a scenic stretch of asphalt that was once home to the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, and Museum Village, a museum of living history that doesn't require a caffeine IV drip to stifle potential yawns.
The Daily NK, an online news service that monitors North Korea from Seoul, said the regime had moved quickly to stifle potential unrest, including the closure of markets and the imposition of a curfew in Musan, a city in North Hamkyung province near the border with China.
