Arab Spring protests so far have toppled governments in Tunisia and Egypt, led to a government-toppling civil war in Libya, and what looks to become a protracted civil war in Syria where the dictatorial regime remains, by most accounts, firmly entrenched, for now at least.

Now the Arab Spring protests, more than a year and a half after their inception, are hitting another North African country: Sudan. Student demonstrations against Omar Al-Bashir’s government have been bubbling up over the past couple weeks. Activists called for protests on Friday, which so far appear to have drawn hundreds to various towns across the country, according to a map of reported demonstrations posted by The Atlantic.

The protests — referred to in Sudan as “elbow licking,” after a colloquial phrase for doing the impossible adopted by the government — were set off by student objections to austerity measures imposed by the government. As the protests have grown over two weeks, reliable details have been more difficult to come by because of a government crackdown against journalists and bloggers.

Authorities ignored U.N. warnings against “heavy-handed suppression” and used tear gas to break up demonstrations near the capitol Khartoum and in eastern Sudan. The protesters chanted, “freedom, peace, justice and revolution is the choice of the people,” according to the BBC.

The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marked a defining moment in the decades long battle to bring affordable healthcare to the U.S. But while healthcare continues to be a divisive issue domestically, the U.S. has funded and advocated for some of the best universal health systems around the world.

The U.S. is ranked 37th in the World Health Organization’s rankings of health systems. But the impact of U.S. health policy extends beyond U.S. borders. Laurie Garrett, a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that the U.S. is now in line domestically with policies it has been promoting internationally:

Dating back to the Marshall Plan in post-WWII Europe, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s 1945-49 occupation of Japan, and then the Korean War, it has been a matter of U.S. foreign policy to invest in the creation of universal health systems. More recently, the Marshall Plan was cited by AFRICOM in support of a Department of Defense engagement in health systems construction across Africa. This year (FY2012), South Africa was the number one recipient of health aid from the United States, totaling nearly $470 million, much of which is supporting the country’s fourteen-year program to build universal health coverage.

Indeed, Japan and Marshall Plan countries in Europe make up the majority, thirteen out of twenty, of the top national health systems in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2000 report [PDF]. Those countries are highlighted in the following chart:

And a 2010 Commonwealth Fund comparison of population health [PDF] in seven countries — Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK — found the U.S. underperforming “relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance.” Half of those countries outperforming the U.S. — Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK — were recipients of Marshall Plan assistance.

The ACA will provide access to health insurance for 30 million uninsured Americans and prevent insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. “[P]erhaps it will now be possible for an HIV-infected individual in Mississippi or Alabama to have access, at taxpayers’ expense, to the same level of care as the U.S. government supports for comparable individuals in Johannesburg,” writes Garrett.

Yesterday, new U.S. sanctions kicked-in barring global financial institutions from doing oil business through Iran’s central bank. On Sunday, a total European Union embargo on Iranian oil comes into effect. The world has, more or less, lined up behind these measures.

Now, economists are saying that these latest rounds of international sanctions could gut Iran’s oil-revenue-based economy. Jamie Webster, a senior manager of the Markets and Country Strategies Group at PFC Energy, told RFE/RL’s Golnaz Esfandiari:

A lot of these countries have already started to back out and essentially completed the backing out of that crude. So that’s around 600,000 barrels a day. Previously, before all of this latest rash of sanctions, Iran was exporting around 2.2 million barrels a day, so that is affecting them…

Another energy economist, Robin Mills, told Esfandiari that European firms’ refusal to insure Iranian oil tankers will also hurt Iranian oil sales to Eastern countries such as Japan and China, perhaps costing Iran another 400,000 barrels a day of exports. With prices of crude oil falling, that could mean Iran’s oil revenues fall by half, Mills said:

[O]il prices, which were very high in March, have fallen back quite significantly, so that’s a kind of a double impact.

So it could be that Iran’s oil revenues which were perhaps something like $100 billion to $110 billion during the last Iranian year, in this year they could be down to $45 billion to $50 billion, so the oil revenues could be cut in half overall with the combination of lower exports and lower prices.

Iran hawks in the U.S. calling for confrontation won’t even acknowledge that exports are down. Forget that the U.N.’s energy agency says Iran’s exports are down 40 percent, the stance that sanctions have no teeth willfully ignores even pronouncements by an Iranian official that exports are down between 20 and 30 percent. (The Iranians rarely acknowledge any economic pain at all, let alone from sanctions.)

The dual-track of pressure and diplomacy pursued by the Obama administration is based on the notion that a potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. U.S., U.N. and Israeli intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue an approach other than war. Questions about the efficacy and potential consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis.

United Technologies settled a lawsuit with the U.S. government yesterday, acknowledging making false statements about its illegal export to China of U.S. software. That technology was used in China’s advanced military attack helicopter, the Z-10. “We accept responsibility for these past violations and we deeply regret they occurred,” United Technologies CEO Louis Chenevert said in a statement.

While United Technologies may be committed to avoiding such violations in the future, the FBI says foreign efforts to illegally acquire embargoed U.S. technology isn’t new but is quickly becoming one of the biggest national security problems facing the U.S. C. Frank Figliuzzi, head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, testified before the intelligence subcommittee of the House homeland security committee on Thursday:

What we’re seeing is that foreign nations and their intelligence services are understanding more than ever before that it’s cheaper to steal our technology than to use their budget resources in this time of economic crisis to develop it themselves.

“The theft of U.S. proprietary technology, including controlled dual-use technology and military-grade equipment, from unwitting U.S. companies is one of the most dangerous threats to national security,” said John P. Woods, assistant director of national security investigations at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Responding to the United Technologies settlement, Andrew Shapiro, assistant secretary of state for political affairs, commented, “[the settlement] sends a clear message: willful violators U.S. arms exports control laws will be pursued and punished.”

The Z-10 is now in production and in use by the People’s Liberation Army of China.