The nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) are back this Tuesday in Vienna. The stakes couldn't be higher. It will be a long and winding road. Hidden agendas on both sides badly want the talks to fail - and will spare no effort towards that goal.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei could be interpreted as a stony realist, when he said that the talks will go nowhere. It's as if the Supreme Leader had read Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, a crucial book by Martha Gellhorn Prize winner Gareth Porter which is being launched today in New York. In the book, Porter thoroughly debunks the whole narrative of the Iran nuclear dossier as sold to the world by the George W Bush administration, assorted neo-cons and the Israeli Likud.

Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever.

Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It's 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire's biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy - a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we've seen in more than a century.

But the crazy thing is, nobody at the time quite knew it. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 - also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act - was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.

Wall Street had spent much of that era arguing that America's banks needed to become bigger and badder, in order to compete globally with the German and Japanese-style financial giants, which were supposedly about to swallow up all the world's banking business. So through legislative lackeys like red-faced Republican deregulatory enthusiast Phil Gramm, bank lobbyists were pushing a new law designed to wipe out 60-plus years of bedrock financial regulation. The key was repealing - or "modifying," as bill proponents put it - the famed Glass-Steagall Act separating bankers and brokers, which had been passed in 1933 to prevent conflicts of interest within the finance sector that had led to the Great Depression. Now, commercial banks would be allowed to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, creating financial megafirms potentially far more powerful than had ever existed in America.

Can Utah shut down the new NSA data center by turning off the water?

A bill proposed by state Rep. Marc Roberts seeks to do just that.

Based on model legislation drafted by a transpartisan coalition organized by the Tenth Amendment Center (TAC) and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) called the OffNow Coalition, the Fourth Amendment Protection Act would prohibit state material support, participation, or assistance to any federal agency that collects electronic data or metadata without a search warrant "that particularly describes the person, place and thing to be searched or seized."

This puts contracts that provide the 1.7 million gallons of water a day necessary to cool the NSA computers at its Bluffdale facility in the crosshairs.

The Sochi Winter Olympic Games open amid a flurry of superlatives. They are the most expensive Games to date - at a cost of $50 billion; they are the first ever Winter Olympics to be hosted by Russia; and the official torch relay to start to event is the longest in history, covering over 40,000 miles and involving the participation of some 14,000 torch bearers.

Another superlative is that no other sporting event has attracted so much lurid and negative media coverage, emanating largely from the Western corporate news outlets...

Over the past weeks, Western media have sought to highlight all manner of alleged problems awaiting the Sochi Games, ranging from the grimly serious to the sublimely ridiculous. This week, ahead of the Games' official opening, under the auspices of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Western media carried reports that the US government was warning airlines heading to the Black Sea resort on the risk of explosives being secreted by terrorists in toothpaste tubes.

Venezuela gave three U.S. diplomats 48 hours to leave the country on Monday, accusing them of conspiring against the government to incite protests that were the OPEC nation's most serious violence since President Nicolas Maduro's April election.

Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said the three consular staff used visa visits to universities as cover for promoting student-lead protests.

The demonstrations, which have energized the opposition but show few signs they can oust Maduro, continued on Monday with rowdy protests around Caracas and various provincial cities. On Wednesday, the protests turned deadly and three people were fatally shot.

"They have been visiting universities with the pretext of granting visas," said Jaua, who often faced off against police during his own days as a student demonstrator.

"But that is a cover for making contacts with (student) leaders to offer them training and financing to create youth groups that generate violence," he told reporters.

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee lambasted the nation's top intelligence chiefs on Wednesday, complaining of lies about gathering the phone records of Americans and failing to cooperate with Congress in an investigation of the CIA's controversial interrogation programs.

Committee members grilled Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan at the first intelligence committee hearing since President Barack Obama proposed reforms to the spy program.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told them an ongoing "culture of misinformation" has undermined the public's trust in America's intelligence leadership.

"That trust has been seriously undermined by senior officials' reckless reliance on secret interpretations of the law and battered by years of misleading and deceptive statements senior officials made to the American people," Wyden said.

He said the deception didn't help the fight against terror, but instead hid bad policy choices and violations of civil liberties. Wyden singled out Clapper's testimony to Congress last March that the National Security Agency does not collect data on millions of Americans, an assertion proved false by leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Clapper has since apologized, suggesting he misspoke. But five members of Congress, led by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., called this week for the White House to fire Clapper for misleading Congress.

Mining giant Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) is losing about R100-million a day because of a strike by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), which entered its fourth week on Monday.

"The company is losing 4 000oz, amounting to R100-million in revenue daily," said Amplats spokesperson Mpumi Sithole.

Amplats on Saturday said it was suing Amcu for damages and losses suffered over their work stoppage.

Amplats was seeking R591-million but this could rise if damages continued, said Sithole.

"The provisional quantum of the damages claim is about R591-million, although as Amcu's wrongful conduct is continuing, the damages will continue to accrue," she said.

Despite efforts by the Obama administration to ease shortages of critical drugs, shortfalls have persisted, forcing doctors to resort to rationing in some cases or to scramble for alternatives, a government watchdog agency said on Monday. The number of annual drug shortages - both new and continuing ones - nearly tripled from 2007 to 2012.

In recent years, drug shortages have become an all but permanent part of the American medical landscape. The most common ones are for generic versions of sterile injectable drugs, partly because factories that make them are aging and prone to quality problems, causing temporary closings of production lines or even entire factories.

The analysis by the United States Government Accountability Office, released Monday, was required by a 2012 law that gave the Food and Drug Administration more power to manage shortages. The watchdog agency was designated to evaluate whether the F.D.A. had improved its response to the problem, among other things.

The accountability office concluded that the F.D.A. was preventing many more shortages now than in the past - 154 potential shortages in 2012 compared with just 35 in 2010 - but that the total number of shortages has continued to grow. In 2012, the number of drugs in short supply, both new and long-term, was 456, the report said, up from 154 in 2007. Such drugs now include the heart medicine nitroglycerin, and cisatracurium, which is used to paralyze muscles during surgery and for patients on ventilators.

The online mega-retailer has a little-known $600-million contract with the CIA.

President Obama is now considering whether to order the Central Intelligence Agency to kill a U.S. citizen in Pakistan. That's big news this week. But hidden in plain sight is the fact that Amazon would be an accessory to the assassination.

Amazon has a $600 million contract with the CIA to provide the agency with "cloud" computing services. After final confirmation of the deal several months ago, Amazon declared: "We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA."

The relationship means that Amazon -- logoed with a smiley-face arrow from A to Z, selling products to millions of people every week -- is responsible for keeping the CIA's secrets and aggregating data to help the agency do its work. Including drone strikes.

Drone attacks in Pakistan are "an entirely CIA operation," New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti said Tuesday night in an interview on the PBS NewsHour. He added that "the Pakistani government will not allow the [U.S.] military to take over the mission because they want to still have the sort of veneer of secrecy that the CIA provides."

The sinister implications of Amazon's new CIA role have received scant public attention so far.

Twenty-two gold miners who came out of an abandoned Gold One mine shaft in Benoni on Gauteng's East Rand have been arrested.

Police say the gold miners who had temporarily blocked a shaft over the last two years will be charged with illegal mining. They say the miners were examined by paramedics before being taken away to the nearby police station.

Some of the illegal miners came to the surface earlier on Monday. Others were rescued on Sunday and have already been charged.

At least 200 illegal miners are believed to be trapped underground. Many of them are believed to be illegal migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho.

Emergency workers battled for most of the day trying to persuade illegal miners to vacate an abandoned mine shaft in Benoni. The miners want an assurance from police that they will not be arrested.