In the shade of the trees where they have been picking olives all morning, in this wadi, south-east of Nablus, a Palestinian farmer, Jamal Otman Koarik, and two of his daughters share a lunch of home-baked bread, zatar, oil, courgettes and salad with three visitors. It's a bucolic scene that could have happened any time in the past century. But what makes it notable in 2008 is that the guests who have been helping Mr Koarik pick the olives are Israeli Jews: a rabbi, an anthropologist and a youth worker, Hellela Siew.

Born in Tel Aviv, Ms Siew served in the army, took a university degree, then a teacher's diploma. Thirty-six years ago, she took the tough decision to emigrate to London, telling her parents: "I won't come back until there's peace." Ms Siew, who is now 64, remains an Israeli citizen but now lives with her British husband in Hebden Bridge. She has kept to her word, except that each autumn she comes back to stay in her hometown with her relatives and spends each day of the two-month harvest season picking olives on Palestinian farmland in the West Bank.

And Ms Siew does that for a purpose. Up on the ridge above us, you can see the red roofs of Itamar, a notably hard-line Jewish settlement, and she is here to help protect the Palestinian farmers from the threat of settler violence which has so often scarred the olive harvests.

NATO defense ministers reached a deal over controversial plans to launch direct attacks on the thriving drugs trade in Afghanistan, which the US says helps fund the Taliban insurgency raging in the country.

Ministers overcame resistance to the plans from several NATO states -- notably Germany, Italy and Spain -- by accepting that any attacks against opium laboratories would be coordinated with the Afghan authorities.

"There is a formal agreement between the NATO nations to fight drug trafficking," a diplomat confirmed as defense ministers met in the Hungarian capital Budapest for a two-day meeting to discuss issues ranging from the war in Afghanistan to Georgia's NATO membership bid and piracy off the Somali coast.

NATO spokesman James Appathurai said the alliance's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would "act in concert with the Afghans, against facilities and facilitators supporting the insurgency."

The linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky has long been a critic of American consumerism and imperialism. SPIEGEL spoke to him about the current crisis of capitalism, Barack Obama's rhetoric and the compliance of the intellectual class.

SPIEGEL: Professor Chomsky, cathedrals of capitalism have collapsed, the conservative government is spending its final weeks in office with nationalization plans. How does that make you feel?

 A happy purchaser of a new iPhone. "Consumption distracts people. You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption." Chomsky: The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable, its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

SPIEGEL: What exactly did you anticipate?

Chomsky: In the financial industry, as in other industries, there are risks that are left out of the calculation. If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion. Those are the external costs of our transaction. In the case of financial institutions, they are huge.

A deadly outbreak of cholera in Iraq is being blamed on a scandal involving corrupt officials who failed to sterilise the local drinking water because they were bribed to buy chlorine from Iran that was long past its expiration date.

The centre of the epidemic is in Babil province, south of Baghdad, in the marshy lands east of the Euphrates river, not far from the ruins of ancient Babylon. In Baghdad, where half the six million population has no access to clean drinking water, people are now drinking only bottled or boiled water.

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has appointed a commission of inquiry to find out why ineffective chlorine was being used. He is also refusing to release three officials under arrest despite demands from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) to which they are linked. In the town of al-Madhatiya, in southern Babil, a councillor involved in buying the chlorine was reportedly released after militiamen connected to ISCI intimidated police into freeing him.

The scandal over the contract is becoming a test case of the Maliki government's willingness to tackle the pervasive corruption in Iraq where officials see their jobs primarily as a way of enriching themselves through bribes. It is also a test of his ability to exercise central control over ISCI and parties which have been hitherto dominant outside Baghdad.

On Sunday, en route to Astana, Kazakhstan, after a "very nice trip to India", US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters accompanying her, "I just wish I could have stayed longer in India". New Delhi must be one of a handful of capitals where officials from the George W Bush administration receive an expectant welcome, and the doomsday warnings emitted from New York and Washington do not seem to matter.

But there was another reason for Rice's trepidation as her jet descended to Astana - US influence and prestige in Central Asia and the Caspian region has again plummeted. Rice realizes there is hardly any time left to retrieve lost ground, and the Bill Clinton administration's legacy in the Caspian and Central Asia has largely dissipated. Central to this has been the failure of the Bush

administration to handle relations with Russia. The stocktaking has already begun.

Writing in The Washington Post on Wednesday, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz rebuked the Bush administration for its "drift towards confrontation with Russia" and pointed out that "isolating Russia is not a sustainable long-range policy". They said much of Europe is "uneasy". Their target was Rice, a self-styled "Sovietologist", and her inexcusably vitriolic attack on the Kremlin in a speech at the Marshall Fund of Germany in Washington on September 18.

Find out which US states are suffering the most in the current economic and financial crisis.

(move the mouse over the indicators on the left)

"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

Venezuela's government has shut all branches of restaurant chain McDonald's for 48 hours, citing tax irregularities, officials have said.

The head of the country's tax agency, Jose David Cabello, said the chain had inconsistencies in its accounts.

The 115 branches in Venezuela were closed from Thursday to Saturday.

Peace efforts in Pakistan received a major blow yesterday when a gathering of the country's nascent anti-Taliban tribal movement was bombed, killing up to 50 and injuring 100.

The suicide attack occurred in the tribal belt running along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, in the strategically important Orakzai area, which is used as a crossing point by Taliban and al-Qaida militants.

Some 600 tribal members had come together for a traditional gathering, known as a jirga, when the bomber struck.

The meeting was finalising the establishment of a militia, according to officials, and plans had been made to demolish a local Taliban headquarters immediately afterwards. A cleric from Orakzai, Maulana Jamil Hasan, said: "If peace committees are not safe, then who in this country can feel secure?" [They were going to demolish their opponents' headquarters? How peaceful is that? -ed.]

Tribesmen in Pakistan's wild north-west have been forming militias, known as lashkars, to fight extremists as Pakistan's security forces struggle. But the polarisation of tribesmen between pro-Taliban and anti-Taliban elements has led to predictions of civil war in the area.

Gov. Sarah Palin abused the powers of her office by pressuring subordinates to try to get her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired, an investigation by the Alaska Legislature has concluded. The inquiry found, however, that she was within her right to dismiss her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, who was the trooper's boss.

A 263-page report released Friday by lawmakers in Alaska found that Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, had herself exerted pressure to get Trooper Michael Wooten dismissed, as well as allowed her husband and subordinates to press for his firing, largely as a result of his temperament and past disciplinary problems.

"Such impermissible and repeated contacts," the report states, "create conflicts of interests for subordinate employees who must choose to either please a superior or run the risk of facing that superior's displeasure and the possible consequences of that displeasure." The report concludes that the action was a violation of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.

What now lies ahead is not fully known at this point. Ms. Palin could be censured by the Legislature, but that is unlikely.

Ms. Palin, who had been elected governor in 2006, was tapped as Senator John McCain's running mate in late August, about a month after an inquiry was opened into her firing of Mr. Monegan. Her political ascendancy took what was essentially a state personnel matter and elevated it into a national issue, one that has been simmering in the background of an increasingly heated presidential race.

TEHRAN -- Merchants in traditional bazaars in several large cities closed their shops this week to protest a decision by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to enforce the nation's first ever sales tax.

The protests, the largest since Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005, began Saturday in the central city of Isfahan when jewelers closed their shops, newspapers reported Wednesday. The strike spread, and by Tuesday bazaars in the cities of Shiraz, Tabriz, Qazvin and Mashhad had followed suit. The police clashed Wednesday with a group of shopkeepers who gathered outside the bazaar in Isfahan, the daily newspaper Sarmayeh reported.

In Tehran, only the gold merchants joined the strike.

Bazaars are the backbone of the country's traditional economy. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, merchants allied with the clergy, and their strikes helped overthrow the government.

They still wield significant power, and this is the first time since the revolution that they have protested on such a large scale. The news media refrained from reporting the protests until Wednesday because of the delicacy of the issue.

[...]

"These protests are not the result of the tax law," said Saeed Leylaz, a political analyst and an economist in Tehran. He added, "These shopkeepers are the middle class who are fed up with the pressures and are now showing their frustration in a civil protest."

LAKEVILLE, Minn. -- After a week of trying to portray Senator Barack Obama as a friend of terrorists who would drive the country into bankruptcy, Senator John McCain abruptly changed his tone on Friday and told voters at a town-hall-style meeting that Mr. Obama was "a decent person" and a "family man" and suggested that he would be an acceptable president should he win the White House.

But moments later, Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, renewed his attacks on Mr. Obama for his association with the 1960s radical William Ayers and told the crowd, "Mr. Obama's political career was launched in Mr. Ayers' living room."

The dizzying statements came on a confused day when Mr. McCain's campaign pounded Mr. Obama as a "liar" in an incendiary television commercial about Mr. Ayers and as Mr. McCain abruptly announced another economic policy proposal, this time a plan to suspend mandatory withdrawals from 401(k) retirement accounts.

The events reflected Mr. McCain's frequently lurching campaign. For the past several weeks, as the polls have shown Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, gaining increasing ground, Mr. McCain's traveling road show has veered from message to message and from pumping up hostile crowds to trying to calm them down. Each news cycle seem to bring another tactic as the campaign appears to be trying anything and everything to see what might work.

I know, this is lacking in intrinsic information value. But this is an example of a "McCain=confused" frame emerging in the MSM.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman