The office of General Secretary (or First Secretary) is staffed by the chief officer (sometimes also the leader) of:

The official title of the leader of most Communist and Socialist political parties is the "General Secretary of the Central Committee" or "First Secretary of the Central Committee". When a Communist party is in power, the General Secretary is usually the country's de facto leader (though sometimes this leader also holds state-level positions to monopolize power, such as a presidency or premiership in order to constitute de jure leadership of the state).

Matt Wrack is a British firefighter and trade unionist. He was elected General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union in May 2005.

Matt Wrack was born Matthew D Wrack in Manchester on 23 May 1962. He joined the Labour Party Young Socialists in Salford in 1978 and was a member of Farnworth Constituency Labour Party during the period in which the local MP John Roper left labour to join the SDP: Social Democratic Party (UK). Wrack subsequently moved to London, working for a time in the DHSS before joining the fire service.

Service in the London Fire Brigade

Wrack joined the London Fire Brigade in 1983 and after training was posted to Silvertown Fire Station in the east London borough of Newham. He rapidly became involved in the Fire Brigades Union and by 1984 he had become a branch secretary of the FBU. Between 1988 and 2005 he served as a member of the FBU London Regional Committee and was Regional Organiser in 2002. In 2004 he was elected Regional Secretary and later Assistant General Secretary Wrack once served as a firefighter with the former fire minister, Jim Fitzpatrick MP, at Silvertown fire station, east London.He subsequently spent most of his fire service career at Kingsland fire station in Hackney.

Pallewatte Gamaralalage Maithripala Yapa Sirisena (known as Maithripala Sirisena)Sinhala: මෛත්‍රිපාල සිරිසේන is a member of the Parliament of Sri Lanka. He joined mainstream politics in 1989 and has held several ministries since 1994. He is also the Cabinet Minister for Agricultural Development & Agrarian Services Development and the General Secretary of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. He escaped an assassination attempt carried out by a suicide cadre of the LTTE in 2008.

Sirisena was born on 3 September 1951. He has studied agriculture from the School of Agriculture in Kundasale. He has also worked as a Grama Sevaka. Sirisena was jailed after the 1971 JVP Insurrection, although he was not involved in it.

Sirisena joined the Sri Lanka Freedom Party 1979 as the secretary of its district organization. He became the president of the All Island Sri Lanka Freedom Party Youth Organization.

In 1989, Sirisena contested for the general elections from the Polonnaruwa District and became a member of the parliament. In the general elections of 1994, he obtained the highest number of preferential votes. After this, he was made the Deputy Minister for Irrigation and Mahaweli Development.

Krishna Prasad (died 2010), was a Fijian politician of Indian descent, who held the Nadi Open Constituency in the House of Representatives for the Fiji Labour Party in the parliamentary election of 2001. Initial results showed him losing the seat by 82 votes to Prem Singh of the National Federation Party, but on 8 February 2002, Judge Anthony Gates ruled that more than a thousand votes, most of them for Prasad, had been wrongly disqualified.

Prasad retired from politics at the general election held on 6–13 May 2006. Prasad died from a heart attack on 27 April 2010.

The Syrian uprising is an ongoing, violent internal conflict in Syria. It is part of the wider Arab Spring, a wave of upheaval throughout the Arab world. Public demonstrations across Syria began on 26 January 2011 and developed into a nationwide uprising. Protesters demanded the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad, the overthrow of his government, and an end to nearly five decades of Ba’ath Party rule.

Since spring 2011, the Syrian government has deployed the Syrian Army to quell the uprising. Several cities have been besieged, but nevertheless the unrest continues. According to witnesses, soldiers who refused to open fire on civilians were summarily executed by the Syrian Army. The Syrian government denied reports of defections, and blamed "armed gangs" for causing trouble. Since early autumn 2011, civilians and army defectors began forming fighting units, which began an insurgency campaign against the Syrian Army. The insurgents unified under the banner of the Free Syrian Army and fought in an increasingly organized fashion; however, the civilian component of the armed opposition lacks an organized leadership.