An Islamist who believes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States were an American conspiracy is the front-runner in Egypt's presidential race, a new poll shows.

Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, formerly a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, led the field of 13 candidates with 32 percent of the vote in a survey released Monday by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

Mr. Abolfotoh expressed his views on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an interview last year with Egypt scholar Eric Trager.

Mr. Trager, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, quoted Mr. Abolfotoh as saying:

"It was too big an operation .... They [the United States] didn't bring this crime before the U.S. justice system until now. Why? Because it's part of a conspiracy."

Egyptians will vote Wednesday and Thursday in their first presidential election since the toppling of Hosni Mubarak last year. If none of the candidates wins a majority, the two top vote-getters will compete in a runoff next month.

People tend to associate the word psychopath with serial killers or other violent criminals. The word conjures up images of anti-social monsters who are unable to fit into everyday society. This makes sense since everything in our media teaches us that psychopaths are predatory murderers. Indeed, experts on psychopathy have estimated that up to 25% of prison populations include people who could be labeled as psychopaths. However, people with psychopathic personalities are not exclusively found among criminals. In reality, they are often described as "charming" and quite normal, even functioning in high profile professions. Recently, Sherree DeCovney made controversial headlines by making the assertion that as many as 1 in 10 financial services workers on Wall Street were psychopaths, which was probably an overestimation. But, DeCovney was on to something. There are many highly successful people who can also be observed to have psychopathic tendencies, and recently, evidence has been piling up that one of them is none other than presidential wanna-be Mitt Romney.

Tunis, Tunisia - Tunisia said Tuesday it will soon extradite Al-Baghdadi Al-Mahmoudi back to his homeland, after detaining the former Libyan prime minister for eight months.

Al-Mahmoudi was arrested in September for illegally crossing the frontier into Tunisia as he tried to flee to Algeria, where members of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's family had sought refuge.

Lawyers and human rights groups had opposed the extradition, saying Al-Mahmoudi might be harmed by Libya's new ruling authorities - representative of the rebels who overthrew Gadhafi last year.

"Tunisia will never be a refuge for those who represent a threat to Libya's security," said Tunisian Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali on Tuesday, following a visit by his Libyan counterpart, Abdurrahim el-Keib.

Mondher Bedhiafi, a spokesman for Tunisia's justice ministry, said the extradition would occur in the coming weeks, but only once necessary procedures were completed.

France's latest attempt to keep genetically modified (GM) crops from its fields has been rebuked by a scientific panel at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Yesterday, EFSA issued an opinion dismissing France's argument that a GM maize variety produced by Monsanto might be harmful to the environment or human health.

The opinion is the latest blow in a long-running battle over MON810, also known as YieldGard, whose cultivation has been banned in a handful of European countries despite its approval by the European Commission in 1998. The French government, faced with strong public opposition to GM crops, banned Mon810 in 2008 under a so-called "safeguard clause" that gives countries some leeway to duck European rules. EFSA rejected the measure later that year, and in 2011, France's Council of State also ruled that the prohibition was out of line.

In February, France again asked the European Commission for permission to ban MON810, armed with a new scientific dossier. In it, the French government argues, among other things, that Cry1Ab, a protein produced by MON810 to ward off maize stalk borers, could hurt non-target species such as bees and butterflies, and that it could linger in the soil. But in yesterday's report, EFSA's Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms said the file contains some of the same evidence France presented - and EFSA rejected - in 2008; in the remainder, the panel "could not identify any new science-based evidence indicating that maize MON 810 cultivation in the EU poses a significant and imminent risk to the human and animal health or the environment."

Given recent history, EFSA's decision is "not really a surprise," AFP quoted a spokesperson for European health Commissioner John Dalli as saying. The commission is considering its next move, but "technically, we could now demand that France lift its ban," the spokesperson said.

National Defense Authorization Act 2013: De Facto Declaration of War

Congressional hawks want war. Bipartisan support backs it. Moderates outnumber hotheads. At issue is for how long.

Saber rattling, fear mongering, and bogus accusations persisted for years. Now it's showing up in legislation. More on that below.

Possibly a false flag will ignite another Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States."

At high-anxiety times, options often dwindle to war. Knee-jerk congressional support authorizes it with no formal declaration. The Constitution's Article 1, Section 8 mandates it.

It hasn't been declared since December 8, 1941. Why bother when presidential diktats send Americans to war with no congressional opposition.

Threats don't exist so they're invented. False flag attacks masquerade as real ones. Body counts rise exponentially. Buildings and other facilities topple like tenpins.

When people realize they've been had, it's too late. They never learn. No matter how often they're fooled, they're easily deceived again. Once a damn fool, always one. Relying on scoundrel media for news and information makes it easy.

Television is worst of all. Print managed news also omits what people most need to know and distorts the rest.

The betrayals come in many forms. Here are a few of the more outrageous, and destructive, examples:

Evasion: Corporations suddenly stopped meeting their tax responsibilities

While corporate profits have doubled to $1.9 trillion in less than ten years, the corporate income tax rate, which for thirty years hovered around the 20-25% level, suddenly dropped to 10% after the recession. It has remained there for three years.

We are seeing a manifestation of the Shock Doctrine. Corporations are using the national emergency of the financial collapse to make a statement about taxes, and a traumatized nation is too preoccupied to do anything about it.

Since September 15, 2008 the United States economy has been like a ticking time bomb with the unregulated activities of the banks the fuse that is slowly burning. This fuse has affected the international banking system and while citizens of the United States are focused on an electoral contest, the issues of the future of the U.S banking system, the future of the dollar and the future of the Euro are bringing home the reality of the capitalist depression. Two weeks ago, Paul Krugman released a book entitled, End this Depression Now. This book sought to galvanize action by the US government to stimulate the economy based on the twentieth century Keynesian ideas of stimulating growth. Increasingly, it is becoming clearer that far more drastic political measures will be needed if the international financial system is to be protected from the gambling of the top bankers in the United States. Wealth creation and a new economic system are needed to meet the needs of human beings.

This reality was brought home last Thursday, May 10, when it was revealed the J. P Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States had been involved in the most risky type of speculative trading that was not supposed to be undertaken by a federally insured depository institution. The nature of the speculative trading is still covered up by the media but from what has been coming out there were bets placed by a derivative trader who was placing US$100billion bets that the US economy would recover. One report called the operation 'trades in the synthetic derivatives hedging business.'

If you've ever felt stupider after watching Congress bicker about some issue for a couple of hours, you're not wrong. The nation's lawmakers are, in fact, dumbing themselves down, according to a new report by the Sunlight Foundation.

An analysis weighing congressional speeches against the Flesch-Kincaid scale - best known as that numerical score that tells you how smart you are when you run the word count diagnostic in your word processing software - reveals that legislators speak at a 10.6 grade level.

That's down from 11.5 just seven years ago. In the span of less than a decade, Congress' rhetorical skills have receded nearly a full grade, the Sunlight Foundation discovered. The report readily admits the unreliability of the Flesch-Kincaid test, which grades language on complexity, not clarity. But it is still a decent metric for judging the quality of one's words.

That quality is declining on Capitol Hill, and it's a bipartisan effort. Democrats in the 112th Congress speak at a 10.8 grade level, with Republicans declaiming at a 10.5 mark. But the GOP could take some solace in the knowledge that a reading of Democratic scores showed that the further left a member of Congress is ideologically, the more his or her grade tends to decline.

NATO arrives everywhere violently. Chicago was no exception. During summit activities, city cops are enforcers. They specialize in serving wealth, power, and imperial interests.

Their guerrilla warfare history is notorious. They're reliable state terror partners.

Their tactics include no-holds barred surveillance, vigilantism, and brutality. They're infamous for physical confrontation, flagrant abuse, and criminal assaults.

From 2002 - 2004 alone, over 10,000 complaints were lodged. Many involve violence, brutality, even torture and murder. Only 18 disciplinary actions followed.

University of Chicago Law Professor Craig Futterman heads its Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project (PAP). It's one of America's leading civil rights initiatives.

It focuses on criminal justice issues. Its aim is improving police accountability and the nation's criminal justice system. It faces long odds as America grows more repressive. Police behavior during Chicago's NATO summit is Exhibit A. More on that below.

If you woke on a beautiful spring Sunday in May on a pond in Maine, what would you do? A canoe ride on water as smooth as glass, and breakfast on the deck, perhaps -- followed by disrupting international war criminal Tony Blair at Colby College graduation in Waterville!

Who knew our protest would lead news coverage of the ceremony? (Washington Post, WGME, Houston Chronicle, and Daily Mail, to name a few.)