Talk of psychopaths usually conjures up images of the Norman Bates character in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho.

It is less likely to create an image of a smarmy salesman trying to sell you a timeshare or dodgy investment scheme.

But many of these scoundrels operating in Spain display the character traits associated with psychopaths.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) recently sent an email to 77,000 people, many in Spain, warning them that they appeared on a so-called 'suckers list' used by boiler room bosses to target unsuspecting investors.

The people who use the list were described by the FSA as 'ruthless, calculating and will stop at nothing to steal your money'.

This description bears remarkable similarities to the features of a psychopath.

The USS Somerset - the last of three Navy ships named for 9/11 attack sites - was christened Saturday in honor of the passengers and crew of the plane that crashed before terrorists could reach their intended target.

Passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 stormed the cockpit and thwarted an attack on Washington, but the plane crashed in Somerset County, Pa., killing all 40 passengers and crew members.

"The men and women of Flight 93 ... thought they were going to San Francisco to work, to play, to learn; to live their lives in peace while others guarded them," said Navy Rear Adm. David Lewis. "Instead they found themselves in a war, on the front lines, in the opening battle. It was a new kind of war, one with new rules, maybe no rules at all. They had no preparation, no training, no guidance.

"And they performed superbly."

News reports from the main strongholds of the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq [MEK] Organization in Iraq revealed that a large number of MKO members have been infected with different incurable diseases, and that death toll has increased among members due to heavy psychological pressures and mental distress.

According to a report by the Persian-language Neday-e Haqiqat (the Voice of Truth) website, Maryam Sanjabi, a former ringleader of the MKO, said, "The reason for the high number of cancer and stroke patients among the 3,000-strong population of the MKO is the psychological and mental pressures imposed on them by the MKO ringleaders during the previous years."

She said that over 50 people in Ashraf and Liberty Camps in Iraq have died of cancer, stroke or other incurable diseases during the last 2 years, adding that the MKO leaders do not allow patients to leave the camps to receive treatment in Iraq's hospitals.

The MKO, whose main stronghold is in Iraq, is blacklisted by much of the international community, including the United States.

President Obama and Mitt Romney are both jostling to upstage each other prior to Romney's trip to Israel. Obama is set to authorize an additional $70 million in military assistance to Israel today. Haaretz reports that "U.S. Jewish leaders and a long list of Democratic and Republican congress members and senators have been invited to the signing ceremony of the act, which will take place in the White House."

But the Romney campaign knows how to squash that news.

I'm no stranger to Israel and Palestine, still what shocks me about coming here is how blatant the system of unfairness is. Why is this not utterly familiar to me? I wonder. Why don't Americans see this every day in the news? What kind of fairyland image are we getting of this place, and why? Or as the Canadian Christian pilgrim said to me last night leaving Qalandiya checkpoint, "What endless humiliation. And why is it such an open secret back home?" So everything here brings me back to the American denial, our blindered media, and to American Jewish identity and the lies that American Jews have told one another for generations.

A few impressions of the blatancy. I flew into Ben Guiron from Newark and my flight was mostly Jewish. There were no Palestinians or Arabs on the flight, as far as I could see. The sense was reinforced at Ben-Gurion. I saw no women wearing hijab, the customary form of dress in this part of the world. The shuttle I rode into Jerusalem had ten passengers, mostly American Jews, two binational Israeli American girls, a Christian tourist and an international aid type. This last passenger was dropped at Qalandiya checkpoint to go on to Ramallah. "Is this a hospital?" the orthodox girl in the front row asked. A reminder that the Palestinian reality is sealed off from Israelis, and also that Qalandiya is a vast bureaucratic complex in benign disguise, a border crossing that keeps the subject population Over There. "A lot of the Arabs throw rocks, that is why they put this up," an older Jew who fought in the 48 war explained to his wife as we passed along the wall.

Ian Blunt and Beth Lawrence outline some key events in the history of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and explain how it operates as a global brand and generates and uses its funds.

Bread and Circuses

Bread and circuses were mainstays of the domestic politics of ancient Rome: keep down the price of food and put on a good show and the masses would be happy and the emperor would have a decent chance of not being overthrown or assassinated.

The biggest of the modern global circuses do not function in exactly the same way as their Roman forebears. A deal to host a 'mega-event' like the Olympics or the football World Cup can bring a certain political kudos to the government concerned, but they are more concerned with profiting from, rather than placating, the masses.

There can be negative side-effects of course: a public and international spotlight on domestic social inequality, lack of democracy and so on. Commenting on the most recent World Cup, Patrick Bond, director of South Africa's Centre for Civil Society, which ran a World Cup Watch project, said: "The elite have pulled off bread and circuses for the masses. We live in one of the most unequal societies in the world, and we've just seen an amplification of that inequality. The costs will become increasingly clear." There has already been no shortage of criticism of the social and economic effects of the London Olympics, but the hope for the organisers is that the blaze of publicity once the event starts will offset such negative criticisms. Sports reporters are, after all, paid to focus on sporting records rather than human rights.

The US Air Force's massive 30,000lb bunker-buster bomb critical for striking heavily fortified Iranian nuclear facilities is "ready to go"

Michael Donley, the US Air Force Secretary, said that the bomb "if it need to go today", would be available.

"We continue to do testing on the bomb to refine its capabilities, and that is ongoing," he said "We also have the capability to go with existing configuration today."

The endorsement of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) - the world's largest conventional bomb - comes after concerns were raised that the weapon still needed refining if was to be effective against Iran's deepest installations.

Last February Congress agreed to an "urgent" Pentagon request to divert $81.6m (£52m) into improvements for the 14-ton MOP.

Saudi security forces opened fire on demonstrators as a large number of people staged a rally in the oil-rich Eastern region of Qatif to call for the freedom of political inmates held in the country's jails.

Thousands of demonstrators on Friday also demanded that the Al Saud regime set free prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Nemr al-Nemr.

Sheikh Nemr was attacked, injured and arrested by Saudi security forces while driving from a farm to his house in Qatif on July 8.

Chanting slogans in support of social justice in the province, protestors asked the regime to stop killing civilians by the Saudi-backed forces in neighboring Bahrain, press tv reported.

Some of the demonstrators were also detained and some others were injured as a result of violent crackdown by the security forces, activists said.

Earlier in the week, similar demonstrations were held against the regime in the town of Awamiyah and the city of Buraydah.

Similar demonstrations have also been held in Riyadh and the holy city of Medina over the past few weeks.

The investigation into the alleged poisoning of the late Palestinian leader leaves many questions unanswered.

Bradford, United Kingdom - I was 23 years old when I first met Yasser Arafat and I was at the Percy military hospital when he died. I had been with him in the ruins of his various headquarters in Beirut, Tunis and Ramallah. I loved him as if he were my father, and have remained his loyal supporter all my life.

So the news, broken by Al Jazeera, that he may have been murdered using Polonium-210 - the weapon of choice used to kill Alexander Litvinenko after tea in a central London hotel with, we were told, a former colleague of his from the KGB, is of personal as well as political importance to me.

In the case of Litvinenko, we were assured by all news media that only a state actor with access to nuclear weapons could possibly have the means of carrying out this crime. The same media outlets are currently ignoring the inconvenient truth that one such state actor with both a long track record of murdering its opponents and access to the requisite nuclear material is Israel, which, shortly before the death of Arafat - from the mouths of both Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert - told the world that their earlier undertakings to the United States not to harm Arafat were null and void, with Shaton saying that the Palestinian leader had "no insurance policy" against Israeli action.

As the Global Financial Crisis rumbles along in its fifth year, we read the latest revelations of bankster fraud, the LIBOR scandal. This follows the muni bond fixing scam detailed a couple of weeks ago, as well as the J.P. Morgan trading fiasco and the Corzine-MF Global collapse and any number of other scandals in recent months. In every case it was traders run amuck, fixing "markets" to make an easy buck at someone's expense. In times like these, I always recall Robert Sherrill's 1990 statement about the S&L crisis that "thievery is what unregulated capitalism is all about."

After 1990 we removed what was left of financial regulations following the flurry of deregulation of the early 1980s that had freed the thrifts so that they could self-destruct. And we are shocked, SHOCKED!, that thieves took over the financial system.

Nay, they took over the whole economy and the political system lock, stock, and barrel. They didn't just blow up finance, they oversaw the swiftest transfer of wealth to the very top the world has ever seen. They screwed workers out of their jobs, they screwed homeowners out of their houses, they screwed retirees out of their pensions, and they screwed municipalities out of their revenues and assets.

Financiers are forcing schools, parks, pools, fire departments, senior citizen centers, and libraries to shut down. They are forcing national governments to auction off their cultural heritage to the highest bidder. Everything must go in firesales at prices rigged by twenty-something traders at the biggest and most corrupt institutions the world has ever known.

And since they've bought the politicians, the policy-makers, and the courts, no one will stop it. Few will even discuss it, since most university administrations have similarly been bought off - in many cases, the universities are even headed by corporate "leaders" - and their professors are on Wall Street's payrolls.

We're screwed.