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Last week, behind-the-curtains activity by President Barack Obama garnered national attention when it was leaked that he had relayed a message to New York Governor David Paterson, requesting that Paterson quit seeking re-election. While this presidential vote of no confidence may seem particularly harsh, especially given that Paterson is a fellow Democrat and one of just two black governors nationwide, the ensuing reaction in the media has been seriously overblown...
...Germany's electoral system is a combination of proportional representation and simple plurality voting. This means that half the Bundestag members are elected through direct voting in 299 districts and half are awarded seats according to their party's share of the overall vote. Oftentimes, one party wins more seats in the direct vote than it earns from its share of the overall vote; when that happens, the party is allowed to keep its extra seats, which are called überhangmandate, or overhanging mandates, and the number of seats in parliament changes...
...community burst to the surface last week when the top U.N. official, Norwegian Kai Eide, ordered his American deputy Peter Galbraith home. According to Western diplomats, Galbraith wanted a probe into all fraud allegations while Eide urges an easing of the definition of fraud to avert a second-round vote...
...struggle over the poll also highlights the country's age-old ethnic divide. In the August poll, Abdullah won a clear majority of the Tajik vote in the north; Karzai the Pashtun vote in the south. Abdullah's ties to the late warrior-poet, Ahmed Shah Masood, killed by al-Qaeda a few days before 9/11, help Abdullah's support in the north because Tajiks revere Masood as an exemplary leader who single-handedly held off the Soviets and the Taliban. On the other hand, Abdullah's Masood connection is a turnoff to many Pashtun tribesmen, who viewed Masood...
...refreshing shock on both sides of the Florida Straits to see the hallowed Revolution Plaza packed not for a 10-hour Fidel speech but for something as joyously secular as a pop concert. As Granma itself noted afterward, there was "no political manipulation of cultural expression ... just a vote for human understanding." And while that's to the Castros' credit, the truth is that the long-term effects of that sort of nondogmatic fiesta don't always favor systems like Cuba's. Says Daniel Erikson, a senior associate at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington and author of The Cuba...