AHS Comparative Government

This morning's New York Times reports on the Mexican government's mixed success in providing universal health care to its citizens, and on the important role played by Mexican state governments in delivering health services:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/world/americas/30mexico.html?_r=1&ref=world

An article in the 22 January issue of The Economist argues that China's hukou (residence pass) system, which limits legal migration from China's countryside to China's cities, helps perpetuate the disparity in income between China's rural and urban populations:

http://www.economist.com/node/17929037

Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan has won the nomination of his party, the People's Democratic Party (PDP), for the presidency; he is favored to win Nigeria's presidential election in April. Jonathan has promised to clean up the country's famously corrupt elections, increase the reliability of Nigeria's electrical service by privatizing much of the power industry, and negotiate an end to armed militancy in the Niger Delta:

http://www.economist.com/node/17963295?story_id=17963295

A suicide bomber attacked Domodedovo Airport near Moscow on Monday, killing 35 people and injuring more than 180 others. The bomb was set off in an area of the airport where taxi and limousine drivers, and friends and family members, meet arriving passengers. While no terrorist organization has claimed responsibility for the attack, speculation has centered on Chechen and Ingush separatist groups. In recent years, Chechen insurgent targets have included flights originating from Domodedovo, Moscow subway lines and the main train line between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has attributed the attack to lax airport security measures, though few airports anywhere secure areas where people wait to pick up arriving passengers. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, characteristically, has promised to avenge the attack:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/25/MN2I1HDJQG.DTL

The Iranian government has long subsidized flour, cooking oil, gasoline, natural gas and electricity prices, spending nearly 10% of the country's GDP on such subsidies. Last month, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that these price subsidies would be phased out; since then, prices have gone up dramatically. (The price of gasoline, for example, has increased 75%). The funds saved by the government will be spent on cash transfers to the poor and on infrastructure spending; President Ahmadinejad claims that (the poorer) 60% of the population will be better off under the new system of allowing prices to be set by the market and giving cash to the poor than they were under the former system of price subsidies. But the change in economic policy will undoubtedly add to the discontent of Iran's middle-class, already alienated from the Islamic regime by the apparent announcement of fraudulent results in the country's 2009 presidential election and by the subsequent brutal silencing of all protests of those results.

The Iranian regime is also growing more repressive: having silenced the political opposition, the government is seizing control of private universities, increasing press censorship and imprisoning human rights lawyers and film directors. Iran's diplomatic isolation, the sanctions imposed on Iran by the international community and the possibility of military conflict all help the regime justify its increasing authoritarianism:

http://www.economist.com/node/17900396

Nasrin Sotoudeh, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer, has been found guilty of "activities against national security" and "propaganda against the regime" and sentenced to 11 years in prison. According to her husband, the charges against Sotoudeh were based on interviews she gave to foreign media. Sotoudeh may have run afoul of Iranian authorities for other reasons: in the past, she has represented dissident journalists and political organizers, as well as protesters arrested at the demonstrations that followed the 2009 Iranian presidential election. Sotoudeh was a founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Center; the former head of the Center, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, has lived in exile in Britain since 2009:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/11/MNBV1H6UJL.DTL

In January 2010, Google announced that it had been subjected to “a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China.” Among other things, the email accounts of Chinese dissidents were hacked. While Google did not directly accuse the Chinese government of hacking, the company announced that it would no longer comply with Chinese government censorship guidelines. When the Chinese government advised that Google that it could not operate in China unless it agreed to continue to censor the search engine accessed by Google users in China, Google moved its Chinese language operations to Hong Kong, where it is not subject to Chinese government censorship.

A US State Department cable recently released by Wikileaks concludes that Google was hacked at the behest of senior Chinese officials, including at least one member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau (Politburo) of the Chinese Communist Party:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11920616

An amnesty agreement negotiated by the Nigerian government with the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in 2009 reduced the number of kidnappings and the level of oil "bunkering" in the Delta for most of 2010. But the level of violence and theft in the Delta is once again increasing. While thousands of militants have put down their weapons, other young men -- motivated perhaps more by the desire for personal profit than by political ideals -- have formed or joined armed Delta groups. Moreover, the militants who have taken advantage of the Nigerian government's amnesty program face unemployment once they are rehabilitated; this eventually could lead them back to militant groups, or to positions as hired thugs for local politicians. The possibility that militant groups might once again dramatically inhibit Delta oil production threatens President Goodluck Jonathan's reelection bid:

http://www.economist.com/node/17800311

Nigeria faces another serious security threat: Boko Haram, an Islamist group opposed to what it considers the immoral westernization of Nigeria. In July 2009, five days of fighting in northern Nigeria between security forces and Boko Haram members left hundreds dead and thousands displaced. On Christmas Eve 2010, Boko Haram apparently detonated several bombs in the central Nigerian city of Jos (for the past decade, the site of violence between Muslim Hausa-Fulani herders and Christian Berom farmers), killing dozens and triggering a new wave of communal violence. Boko Haram is also blamed for deadly Christmas Eve attacks on churches in northern Nigeria, and for the recent bombing of an army barracks in Abuja:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/03/AR2011010300809.html

On Friday, Iran's Chief Prosecutor stated that the criminal prosecution of Iran's opposition leaders is inevitable. The Chief Prosecutor was believed to be referring to former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and to Mehdi Karoubi, the reform candidates defeated in Iran's controversial 2009 presidential election, as well as to former President Mohammad Khatami, who joined Mousavi and Karoubi in denouncing the official results of that race as fraudulent. To date, the Iranian regime has hesitated to charge men who were once such prominent regime insiders with criminal activity, despite demands that they be prosecuted from hardliners (particularly hardliners within the Revolutionary Guard):

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/01/MN931H2JJI.DTL