Check out this very interesting analysis on American federalist system. I will just quote a little of it so you can make an idea on what’s about:

In the 2000 presidential election, the candidate who won by more than 540,000 votes lost. George Bush became America′s new ″popularly elected″ president, despite not having the plurality of the votes.

In the Senate, Michael Enzi and Thomas Craig have the same voting power as Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. Enzi and Craig represent 501,242 people from the state of Wyoming, while Boxer and Feinstein represent 35,484,453 people from the state of California. That means that one person from Wyoming has the voting representation of 71 Californians.

In Massachusetts, you can get married to whomever you chose. In the rest of the country, your choice in Massachusetts can be ignored.

The 13 smallest states, consisting of 4.46% of the population, could outvote the rest of the country when ratifying an amendment.

You can download the whole PDF analysis clicking the link here: A Critical Evaluation of America′s Federalist System

The EU is set to draw up national action plans, in a fresh bid to reach its goal of becoming the most competitive economy in the World by 2010.

The recommendations for national action plans will come in a report, which will be presented to EU leaders next month, drawn up by former Dutch premier Wim Kok.

The report is widely expected to conclude that the EU remains a long way off its target.

The Financial Times reports that the national action plans will focus on creating growth and jobs.

A Wall Street Journal reporter in Baghdad seems to have been sent in a “long planned” vacation, until after the November 2nd Elections. That seems to happen after a private email criticizing the Iraq’s situation ended up on a high profile weblog.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology will make the materials for nearly all its courses freely available on the Internet over the next ten years. MIT raised $11 million to fund the initiative to put the entire curriculum online (almost 2000 courses). Items include course outlines, lecture notes, reading lists, lab assignments and quizzes. Instructors around the world are free to adapt any of the information for their own use, including translating any or all of the content into other languages. They already have about 500 courses online already at MIT OpenCourseWare

An impressive analysis on how Europe and europeans are seeing the US at the moment.

There were 90 minutes of hard debate last night, out of which if they edited out all of the repetition, it could have been a 30-minute show, with room for a few commercials. Bush focused on tearing down Kerry’s character. Kerry’s focused on policy details.

There were 24 questions 17 on Iraq, 4 on homeland security, 2 on general judgments, 1 on character.

There is also the huuuuge agreement (7MB pdf) negociated and agreed before, concerning all the details of the debate. Still there are some other things they don’t want you to know about the debate.

After all, it seems that Kerry was the one to benefit out of it. Maybe that’s why Bush looked so funny close to the end of the talks.