The continued slide in median earning power, rather than public obfuscation or even lack of jobs, is America's real problem. It is the wood as distinct from the trees. It tends to loom larger when the television is off. Edward Luce - Financial Times

What we are witnessing in Europe - and what may loom for the United States - is the exhaustion of the modern social order. Since the early 1800s, industrial societies rested on a marriage of economic growth and political stability. Economic progress improved people's lives and anchored their loyalty to the state. Wars, depressions, revolutions and class conflicts interrupted the cycle. But over time, prosperity fostered stable democracies in the United States, Europe and parts of Asia. The present economic crisis might reverse this virtuous process. Slower economic expansion would feed political instability and vice versa. This would be a historic and ominous break from the past. Robert J. Samuelson - Washington Post

For almost two centuries, today's high-income countries enjoyed waves of innovation that made them both far more prosperous than before and far more powerful than everybody else. This was the world of the American dream and American exceptionalism. Now innovation is slow and economic catch-up fast. The elites of the high-income countries quite like this new world. The rest of their population like it vastly less. Get used to this. It will not change. Martin Wolf - Financial Times

Israeli forces and Palestinian militants exchanged fire on Monday in the most serious flare-up in months along the border with the Gaza Strip, officials said.

The latest exchange came after Israel targeted two men in an airstrike into southern Gaza on Sunday night, killing one and wounding the other. Israel said they were militant jihadists responsible for attacks.

Then, militants of the Islamic group Hamas that rules Gaza and a smaller hardline offshoot, Islamic Jihad, fired some 30 rockets toward Israel's southern border on Monday morning, causing some property damage but no casualties, said an Israeli military spokeswoman. She spoke on condition of anonymity, citing military rules.

Gaza's interior ministry said Israel's military launched around 20 tank shells and an airstrike, mostly toward targets around the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

Palestinian health official Ashraf al-Kidra said five people were injured after a strike near a mosque. Another mosque was targeted nearby and a factory was targeted in east of Gaza City, according to the interior ministry.

Sustainability pioneer Vandana Shiva speaks to Jo Confino about campaigning against seed slavery, corporations and patents

Vandana Shiva, one of the Guardian's Top 100 most inspiring women, is currently leading a campaign to create a global citizens' response on the issue of seed freedom.

In 1991, Shiva founded Navadanya, a movement which aims to protect nature and people's rights to knowledge, biodiversity, water and food. It does this by setting up community seed banks that generate livelihoods for local people and provide for basic needs.

Shiva, a scientist, philosopher, feminist, author, environmentalist and activist, explains why the two week campaign on seed freedom against major corporations, which culminates on World Food Day later this month, is so important and the consequences of failure.

Shiva calls for civil disobedience, quoting Gandhi who said that "as long as the superstition that unjust laws must be obeyed exists, so will slavery exist".

© Abedin Taherkenareh/EPAAn Iranian man counts his banknotes after Iran's currency, the rial, crashed to a record low

Yet again, the US and its allies spread mass human misery though a policy that is as morally indefensible as it is counter-productive

The Economist this week describes the intensifying suffering of 75 million Iranian citizens as a result of the sanctions regime being imposed on them by the US and its allies [my emphasis]:

"Six years ago, when America and Europe were putting in place the first raft of measures to press Iran to come clean over its nuclear ambitions, the talk was of "smart" sanctions. The West, it was stressed, had no quarrel with the Iranian people - only with a regime that seemed bent on getting a nuclear bomb, or at least the capacity for making one. Yet, as sanctions have become increasingly punitive in the face of Iran's intransigence, it is ordinary Iranians who are paying the price.

Turkish Yurt Newspaper said that the government of the Development and Justice Party has to take a neutral stance on the events in Syria instead of supporting the groups of the so-called the armed opposition.

"Turkey was inevitably affected by the events in Syria... so it was very necessary for it to adopt new polices and be aware that instigating others will bring nothing but more damages.. The Turkish government was wrong at seeing the whole region through a sectarian vision," Journalist Ali Sirmen wrote in an article published by the newspaper.

Last week, Stanford University and New York University released a major study about the use of drones in the ever-evolving but never-ending war on terror. Unfortunately, many commentators missed the report's key message: Drones are terrorizing an entire civilian population.

I was one of the researchers for the study, and spent weeks in Pakistan interviewing more than 60 people from North Waziristan. Many were survivors of strikes. Others had lost loved ones and family members. All of them live under the constant threat of annihilation.

What my colleagues and I learned from these unnamed and unknown victims of America's drone warfare gave the report its title: "Living Under Drones."

People in the United States imagine that drones fly to a target, launch their deadly missiles with surgical precision and return to a U.S. base hundreds or thousands of miles away. But drones are a constant presence in the skies above the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan, with as many as six hovering over villages at any one time. People hear them day and night. They are an inescapable presence, the looming specter of death from above.

And that presence is steadily destroying a community twice the size of Rhode Island. Parents are afraid to send their children to school. Women are afraid to meet in markets. Families are afraid to gather at funerals for people wrongly killed in earlier strikes. Drivers are afraid to deliver food from other parts of the country.

A video shows Israeli occupation forces in Jerusalem smashing the head of a Palestinian boy on the ground during a violent arrest, after Israeli troops stormed the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in eastern occupied Jerusalem this morning.

The brief clip shows a boy being dragged by black-clad occupation soldiers. As the boy screams "khalas" - "enough" or "stop" - the soldiers throw him to the ground. One soldier punches the boy in the side of the head, smashing his head into the stone floor.

The video was posted on the YouTube account of QNN, a Palestinian news group that operates on Facebook. QNN identified the child as Hasan al-Afifi of the Bab al-Hadid area of the Old City of Jerusalem. The videographer is identified as Amjad Arafa.

On Oct. 4th, the German state TV channel ZDF reported on the attack on Turkey several times.

In its "Mittagsmagazin" at 1300 hours it reports as follows:

02:06 - 02:32
German:

"Raketen- und Granatfeuer. Die Türkei übt Vergeltung für einen Angriff von syrischer Seite. Gestern Nachmittag hatten syrische Rebellen einen türkischen Ort in Grenznähe beschossen. Seit Wochen schon warnt Ankara davor, die Türkei zu provozieren. Inzwischen haben sich die syrischen Rebellen ganz offiziell zu der Provokation bekannt."

Translation: (emphasis added)

"Rocket and mortar fire. Turkey takes revenge after an attack from the Syrian side. Yesterday afternoon Syrian rebels fired on a Turkish village close to the border. For weeks Ankara had warned against provoking Turkey. Meanwhile Syrian rebels officially claimed responsibility for the provocation."

Even those pundits who seem to want to distance U.S. foreign policy from Tel Aviv's demands and begin treating Israel like any other country sometimes feel compelled to make excuses and apologies before getting down to the nitty-gritty. The self-lacerating prologues generally describe how much the writer really has a lot of Jewish friends and how he or she thinks Israelis are great people and that Israel is a wonderful country before launching into what is usually a fairly mild critique.

Well, I don't feel that way. I don't like Israel very much. Whether or not I have Jewish friends does not define how I see Israel and is irrelevant to the argument. And as for the Israelis, when I was a CIA officer overseas, I certainly encountered many of them. Some were fine people and some were not so fine, just like the general run of people everywhere else in the world. But even the existence of good upstanding Israelis doesn't alter the fact that the governments that they have elected are essentially part of a long-running criminal enterprise judging by the serial convictions of former presidents and prime ministers. Most recently, former President Moshe Katsav was convicted of rape, while almost every recent head of government, including the current one, has been investigated for corruption. Further, the Israeli government is a rogue regime by most international standards, engaging as it does in torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and continued occupation of territories seized by its military. Worse still, it has successfully manipulated my country, the United States, and has done terrible damage both to our political system and to the American people, a crime that I just cannot forgive, condone, or explain away.

Frequent and rising Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians almost always go unpunished.

Indeed, often, Israeli soldiers stand by and watch as Israeli settlers go on the rampage. The situation is so bad that a boy like Yousef Ikhlayl, 17, can be killed and there is no investigation or accountability.

So when an Israeli settler got sentenced to prison for torturing and abusing a Palestinian child, it was quite an event, as Haaretz reported:

Prominent rabbis, public officials and a Knesset member, on Saturday, held a send off for a criminal about to enter prison after being convicted of abusing a Palestinian youth.

The event was held in the West Bank Shilo settlement in honor of Zvi Struck, who was convicted of abusing a Palestinian youth in July 2007, together with another man whose identity remains unknown. The two beat the youth up, bound him, fired their guns close to him, undressed him and threw him naked at the roadside. Three months earlier the two men had beaten up the same youth and killed a day-old kid [newborn goat].

The Jerusalem District Court sentenced Struck to 18th months in prison, which the Supreme Court extended after an appeal to 30 months.