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and, now, the state-run petroleum business.
• Even with that track record, the hardest work lies ahead.
• Mexico has reams of progressive laws on the books, virtually all of which have been thwarted by corruption and inefficiency involving officials at every level. Many police officers work for drug traffickers. Federal regulators turn a blind eye to blatantly monopolistic practices among the nation's largest companies. As a result, Mexicans have been left deeply skeptical about the potential for change.
• The second year of Pena Nieto's six-year term will show whether the 47-year-old president and his rejuvenated Institutional Revolutionary Party have the ability to protect his reforms from the swarms of special-interest exemptions typically inserted into Mexican legislation by members of Congress allied with special interests. Then the president and his team must prove they can impose their will on federal, state and municipal officials, from education bureaucrats to local courts, charged with enacting his laws on the ground.
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• BANGKOK (AP) -- A year ago, Ng Shui-Meng watched a closed-circuit police video in disbelief as it revealed the moment her husband, the most prominent civil rights advocate in Laos, disappeared.
• It shows Sombath Somphone being stopped by traffic police on his way home around 6 p.m. on Dec. 15, 2012. A man in a black windbreaker emerges from the police post and drives his car away. Two other men then escort the 61-year-old activist into a pickup truck.
• His wife, who obtained the video a day after his disappearance, still doesn't know what happened next.
• The apparent abduction has sent a chilling message to the country's already fragile civil society, and exposed Laos as one of Asia's most repressive societies rather than the languid land of smiles of backpacker blogs and tourism boosters.
• Laos' media are under total state control, security watchdogs operate down to the grassroots and foreign human-rights organizations are banned. The communist government responds to even the small and peaceful public protests which periodically surface with swift suppression and arrests.
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