Great story out this morning by Bloomberg reporter Thom Weidlich, detailing yet another devious and dirty scheme in the consumer credit industry.

The story outlines the misfortunes of a successful Park City, Utah restaurant called Cisero's that is best known for serving the movie stars and film glitterati attending the nearby Sundance film festival. The restaurant is engaged in a legal battle with its bank, but the larger struggle is between the restaurant and major credit cards like Visa and MasterCard.

It's a complex tale, but the gist of it is that the credit-card companies invoked arcane provisions of operating contracts with the merchant, and unilaterally "fined" the restaurant for enormous sums of money without proving any of the charges. Some of that money was actually debited from the merchants' account before they managed to close it.

When a restaurant opens for business, it signs service contracts with middleman firms that allow them to accept charges from Visa and MasterCards. These middleman firms process the charges on behalf of the issuing cards, and also debit the accounts of merchants for things like debit fees.

The problem is that when merchants like these restaurant owners in Utah sign their service contracts, they also have to agree to a series of draconian security rules, under which they are automatically liable to the card companies if the card companies suspect fraud or lax security procedures.

In the case of the Utah restaurant, Visa and Mastercard both claimed that the restaurant allowed charges from fraudulently used cards, and also violated security rules by keeping the data for too many customer accounts on their company computer.

New York/Washington - Federal regulators are considering trucking fresh water to households in a Pennsylvania town where residents say wells have been polluted by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas.

Only a month after declaring water in Dimock safe to drink, the Environmental Protection Agency is reconsidering action after residents supplied the EPA with hundreds of pages of data that link water pollution to fracking.

Two residents of Dimock, a town of some 1,400 in the northeast corner of Pennsylvania, told Reuters that the EPA said water would be delivered on Friday, but the agency indicated it was still considering the issue.

"No decision has been made by EPA to provide alternate sources of water," an EPA spokeswoman said in an email on Friday. She added that the agency was trying to understand the situation in Dimock where state regulators recently halted deliveries of fresh water.

If the EPA delivers water to the village, it would be the clearest sign yet regulators are concerned about the effect of drilling on drinking water there.

Back in 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States. Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations. These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites.

Sadly, most Americans don't even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest. Most Americans don't really seem to care about who owns the media. But they should. The truth is that each of us is deeply influenced by the messages that are constantly being pounded into our heads by the mainstream media. The average American watches 153 hours of television a month. In fact, most Americans begin to feel physically uncomfortable if they go too long without watching or listening to something. Sadly, most Americans have become absolutely addicted to news and entertainment and the ownership of all that news and entertainment that we crave is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands each year.

The six corporations that collectively control U.S. media today are Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal. Together, the "big six" absolutely dominate news and entertainment in the United States. But even those areas of the media that the "big six" do not completely control are becoming increasingly concentrated. For example, Clear Channel now owns over 1000 radio stations across the United States. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are increasingly dominating the Internet.

Residents' wells were found to be tainted by a natural gas drilling operation

Allentown, Pennsylvania - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency abruptly changed its mind Saturday about delivering fresh water to residents of a northeastern Pennsylvania village where residential wells were found to be tainted by a natural gas drilling operation.

Only 24 hours after promising them water, EPA officials informed residents of Dimock that a tanker truck wouldn't be coming after all. The about-face left residents furious, confused and let down - and, once again, scrambling for water for bathing, washing dishes and flushing toilets.

Agency officials would not explain why they reneged on their promise, or say whether water would be delivered at some point.

"We are actively filling information gaps and determining next steps in Dimock. We have made no decision at this time to provide water," EPA spokeswoman Betsaida Alcantara said in an email to The Associated Press.

It's not clear how many wells in the rural community of Dimock Township were affected by the drilling. The state has found that at least 18 residential water wells were polluted.

First, Congress considered the National Defense Authorization Act, sections of which gave the President the authority to use the military to arrest and indefinitely detain Americans without trial or charge. The language was revised because of strong condemnation from the American people. But now a new bill has emerged that poses yet another threat to the American citizenry.

Congress is considering HR 3166 and S. 1698 also known as the Enemy Expatriation Act, sponsored by Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Charles Dent (R-PA). This bill would give the US government the power to strip Americans of their citizenship without being convicted of being "hostile" against the United States. In other words, you can be stripped of your nationality for "engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States." Legally, the term "hostilities" means any conflict subject to the laws of war but considering the fact that the War on Terror is a little ambiguous and encompassing, any action could be labeled as supporting terrorism. Since the Occupy movement began, conservatives have been trying to paint the protesters as terrorists.

Egyptian protesters have condemned the United States' interference in their country's internal affairs, demanding the closure of US embassy in Cairo.

Chanting anti-US slogans, the demonstrators gathered outside the US embassy in the capital Cairo on Saturday to protest what they described as Washington's meddling in their country's internal affairs.

The demonstrators accused the US of meddling in Egypt's recent general elections and called for the expulsion of US ambassador to Cairo.

The protests came a week after Egyptian military forces raided offices of several NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) in Egypt, accusing them of receiving financial support from the US.

A former inmate at the US detention center of Guantanamo Bay has disclosed details of humiliation and torture he suffered during eight years in the prison.

Saber Lahmar explained that he was deprived of sleeping and food and there was constant noise from a motor outside his door.

"You couldn't walk, move, talk -- it was forbidden," said the 42-year-old Algerian, who successfully appealed for freedom in a civilian court in Washington in 2008.

The court found no evidence of Lahmar's alleged crimes or that he was a threat to the United States.

Lahmar, who arrived in the prison in January 2002, also said that he was subjected to electric shocks and there were drugs in his food, which stopped him sleeping.

The Royal Navy's most formidable warship is being sent to the Gulf for its first mission as tensions rise in the strategically vital region, it can be disclosed.

Iran has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, which served as the conduit for 17 millions barrels of oil every day last year.

Naval commanders believe the deployment of HMS Daring, a Type 45 destroyer, will send a significant message to the Iranians because of the firepower and world-beating technology carried by the warship.

Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, has publicly warned Iran that any blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would be "illegal and unsuccessful".

The Daily Telegraph understands that HMS Daring has been fitted with new technology that will give it the ability to shoot down any missile in Iran's armoury. The £1 billion destroyer, which will leave Portsmouth next Wednesday, also carries the world's most sophisticated naval radar, capable of tracking multiple incoming threats from missiles to fighter jets.

Daring, with its crew of 190, will transit through the Suez Canal and enter the Gulf later this month to replace the Type 23 frigate currently on station.

Unraveling the GOP candidate's baffling statements about Israel and the Palestinians

Following Rick Santorum's sudden and unanticipated rise to prominence during the Iowa caucuses, there has been a rush to review the earlier and more obscure phase of his presidential campaign to see what newsworthy tidbits might have been overlooked when the spotlights were all shining on Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

One of Santorum's gems in the rough was initially uncovered back in November by the ThinkProgress blogger Eli Clifton and Philip Weiss, and returned to this week by a blogger at The Jewish Week . Santorum said, among other things, "all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they're not Palestinians."

It was a reminder that two weeks before Newt Gingrich claimed that Palestinians are an invented people, Santorum had also denied their existence.

But whereas Gingrich's vilification of the Palestinians was merely a nasty example of crude cynicism, Santorum's seemed both more sincere and more intimately tied up with his ignorance not only of the question of Palestine but - more alarmingly perhaps - of American history as well.

Rick Perry endorsed deploying American forces to Iraq again in Saturday night's GOP debate, saying that the United States cannot afford to "allow the Iranians to come back into Iraq and take over that country."

The Texas governor accused President Barack Obama of cutting and running from the conflict in Iraq too early, in order to placate Democrats.

"This president wants to kowtow to his liberal, leftist base and move out those men and women," Perry said. "He could have renegotiated that time frame."

Perry's fellow Republicans declined to join him in calling for a return of U.S. troops to Iraqi soil.