Two would-be customers at an Alpharetta, Georgia Apple Store walked out empty handed last week after the store refused to sell them Apple’s popular iPad and iPhone gadgets because the two customers were speaking Farsi.

According to a report by local TV station WSB-TV, Sahar Sabet and her uncle were speaking with one another in Farsi when a sales representative approached them and said that the store couldn’t sell them any products because Apple’s corporate policy prohibits the sale of any goods to Iran without authorization by the US government. Sabet was attempting to buy the iPad as a gift for her cousin who lives in Iran.

Sabet, who says she left the store in tears, is a US citizen. She called Apple’s customer relations number, where an employee apologized and advised her that she could buy the device online. But Sabet’s case is hardly a case of a misinformed salesperson: Apple stores have done this before.

Zack Jafarzadeh, another Iranian American currently living in Virginia, also spoke with WSB-TV about a similar instance at a different Apple store, where he wasn’t allowed to purchase an iPhone with a friend after a clerk overheard him speaking in Farsi.

Nor does Apple’s history of questionable sales policies extend just to Iranians. In 2010, New York’s then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo opened an investigation into several claims that New York City’s Apple Stores were discriminating against Asian customers. And in that same year, Apple raised eyebrows after they refused to accept cash as a form of payment for iPads. In all cases, the miscommunications seemed to originate not with overzealous sales representatives but with Apple’s own store policies.

NPR reached out to Apple for a comment, but Apple has thus far remained silent on the case in Georgia.

On June 8, the Iraqi-Kurdish journalist Mouloud Anfand, travelling in the city of Sulaimaniyah, went for a routine appointment and never showed back up. A day later, he phone colleagues and told them he was on personal business and would be back in a week. Now his colleagues and an international group of journalists’ advocates are taking his case public and suggesting Iran may have been involved in his disappearance.

Why Iran? Anfand, who is of Iranian origin but lives and works in Iraqi Kurdistan, has been a sore point between the Iranian government and Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). He edits the magazine Israel-Kurd, a project of the Israel-Kurd Institute which promotes better ties between the KRG and Israel, and encourages Kurdish Jews living in Israel to return to Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran reportedly asked KRG to shut the magazine down, but the Kurdish government refused.

On June 13, a woman speaking Farsi answered Anfand’s phone, according to his colleague at Israel-Kurd, Diyari Mohammed, raising suspicions that the Islamic Republic was involved.

The journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) put out a release today calling for an investigation:

We fear the worst and we urge the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government’s authorities to do everything possible to find Mouloud Anfand. And we therefore call for an immediate investigation into this journalist’s disappearance.

The RSF release added that Iran says that by keeping Israel-Kurd open, KRG is “facilitating the ‘activities of the Zionist enemy’s agents,’ the Israeli intelligence services.” (“Israel-Kurd” seems an unlikely name for a covert Israeli spy front.)

Murder, rape, assault and robbery in the U.S. imposed $42 billion — $137 per American — in direct costs in 2010. These costs, comprised of costs to police, courts and correctional institutions, out of pocket medical expenses borne by victims and lost earnings by victims and perpetrators, represent an opportunity to derive economic benefits by reducing violent crime.

The Center for American Progress’ new report, “The Economic Benefits of Reducing Violent Crime,” [PDF] examines the economic costs of violent crime and concludes that “successful efforts to reduce violent crime can generate significant savings for municipal budgets and large benefits for residents.”

The report’s authors acknowledge that much of the damage from violent crime comes in the form of intangible costs, including the pain and suffering from victims, however a study of U.S. cities found that reducing violent crime by 10 percent and 25 percent would provide considerable, tangible, economic benefits to those local economies.

The costs of violent crime were examined in eight cities — Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Seattle — and broken down into “direct” and “intangible” costs:

Estimated savings for municipal budgets from reducing violent crime by 25 percent ranged from $6 million per year in Seattle to $59 million per year in Chicago. But the major economic benefits derive from the impact of lower rates of violent crime on housing values. “On average, a reduction in a given year of one homicide in a zip code causes a 1.5 percent increase in housing values in that same zip code the following year,” write Robert J. Shapiro and Kevin A. Hassett in their report. They find:

The estimated increases in the value of the housing stock for the eight cities and their immediate metropolitan areas, following a 10 percent reduction in homicides, range from $600 million in Jacksonville and the surrounding area to $800 million in the Milwaukee area, to $3.2 billion in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs, and $4.4 billion in the Boston area.

While the report focuses on the economic benefits from reducing violent crime, the authors offer several examples of effective methods for reducing crime. Policing that focuses criminal justice and social service attention on a small number of chronically offending gang members produced a 43 percent decline in gun violence and a 66 percent reduction in gang-related homicides in one study. And a 1997 meta-analysis by the Department of Justice identified that family therapy; parent training efforts and vocational training have proven effective in reducing crime rates.

By Sarah Margon

I am not a Twitterati. I’ve been on Twitter for just over a year, and I currently have a mere 570 followers. I don’t really know the rules and usually what I do know I don’t fully understand. I don’t keep my Twitter feed up all day (gasp!) and admittedly there are days that go by when I don’t even think about it.

So I’m definitely not Twitterati material. And that’s just fine.

But what is not fine was to see Foreign Policy’s 2012 Twitterrati list — what the magazine deems the best 100 global Tweeters — include only 15 females. Asking around to a few other female Tweeps, I learned that this isn’t new. Vanessa Parra (@parrav, 1,888 followers) told me it has happened before. So I checked other lists. Parra was right; the 2011 list included only ten women.

The paucity of women on these lists made me wonder what actually goes into selecting the annual Twitteratti. What are the criteria? How do you get noticed by the invisible list makers? Who are the invisible list makers?

A preliminary glance at this year’s group indicates that in order to be part of the list you need to have (generally) at least a thousand followers. Some Twitteratti have 3,000 followers, others have 16,000. If numbers are the main requirement, future lists might consider including Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy), a public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues, who has over 100,000 followers; Heather Hurlburt (@natsecheather), Executive Director of the National Security Network, who has just under 1,000; Katharine Houreld (@khoureld), who covers Afghanistan and Pakistan for Reuters with 1,500 followers; or Semhar Araia (@Semhar), with 4,000 followers, is a hard-charging Horn of Africa expert and the founding director of DAWN.

It is worth noting that the Twitteratti list was also remarkably, although not exclusively, U.S. focused. What about including Valerie Amos (@ValerieAmos, +6,000 followers), U.N. Under-Secretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator; or Ambassador Rao, (@NMenonRao, +36,000 followers); Foreign Secretary, India, 2009-2011. Indian Ambassador to the United States of America. They’d certainly bring up the numbers and deepen the foreign aspect of the policy.

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After a pair of USA Today journalists started investigating wasteful spending in the Pentagon’s propaganda operations, one of the contractors singled out by the investigation struck back. Camille Chidiac, who owns nearly half of Leonie Industries, eventually admitted to setting up fake websites and online accounts to call the reputations of the USA Today journalists into question.

Chidiac’s actions earned a spot on the list of people who are not allowed to earn federal contractor dollars on May 30. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), who already took up defending the journalists and callied for an investigation.

Johnson, USA Today reports, sent a letter to the Pentagon renewing his calls for a full investigation into the matter and for Leonie Industries — not just minority owner Chidiac — to be barred from receiving contracts. The letter said:

[The contractor's actions] suggest a pattern of malice, dishonesty, and incompetence that renders Leonie Industries unsuitable for continued service as a federal contractor. The intimidation of journalists, in particular, is unacceptable. The notion that taxpayers’ dollars would go to such a company is abhorrent.

The original USA Today feature investigative story that sparked Chidiac’s online retaliation laid out the level of money involved in the contracts — and exactly how unfit Leonie is to receive federal tax dollars. Chidiac and her brother and business partner Rema Dupont had more than $4 million dollars in liens for failing to pay their taxes. Their company nonetheless received gargantuan contracts:

Leonie Industries has Army contracts that could surpass $130 million; the Army has already paid them more than $90 million.

Those deals were to plant information in news items in Afghanistan and throw events that reflected well on the U.S. and the military with the aim of “bending the will of civilians and combatants to U.S. aims.”

Glenn Hubbard, one of Mitt Romney’s economic advisers, earlier this month penned an op-ed that appeared in a German newspaper attacking the Obama administration’s approach to the European economic crisis. The piece also criticized President Obama by name, saying that Romney “understands” the situation better.

The Obama campaign fired back, accusing Hubbard and the Romney campaign of “attempt[ing] to undermine America’s foreign policy abroad.” And last night during a press conference at the G20 meetings in Los Cabos, Mexico, the president piled on:

OBAMA: First of all, with respect to Romney’s advisers, I suggest you go talk to Mr. Romney about his advisers. I would point out that we have one president at a time and one administration at a time. And I think traditionally, the notion has been that America’s political differences end at the water’s edge. I’d also suggest that he may not have been familiar with what our suggestions to the Germans have been. I think sometimes back home there is a desire to superimpose whatever ideological arguments are taking place back home on a very complicated situation in Europe.

Politico has the video clip:

Adding to Obama’s criticism of the substance of Hubbard’s critique, ThinkProgress’s Pat Garofalo noted that he “is advocating for a doubling down on austerity that has simply made Europe’s economic situation worse.”

A new trove of previously classified CIA documents were publicly released for the first time yesterday, shedding new light on the run-up to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The documents, which were obtained by the National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act, point to missed opportunities by intelligence agencies to apprehend or eliminate Osama bin Laden and better prepare security agencies for attacks involving hijacked civilian aircraft.

One memo, dated December 1998, details “planning by Usama [sic] bin Laden to hijack U.S airplane,” and notes that two individuals thought to be part of Al-Qaeda successfully evaded security checks at an undisclosed New York airport during a trial run. Another, dated March 2004, acknowledges that early Predator drone missions over Afghanistan in the fall of 2000 twice observed an individual “most likely to be Bin Laden” but the UAV was not equipped to act on the information.

Much of the new information reveals CIA counterterrorism units that were severely underfunded at the turn of the century and rendered incapable of aggressively pursuing bin Laden and his network of terrorists. “Due to budgetary constraints….CTC/UBL [Counterterrorism Center/Osama bin Laden Unit] will move from offensive to defensive posture,” reads one memo. It is dated April 5, 2000, just 17 months prior to the attacks.

The release of these documents undermines previous administrations’ insistences that they were fully committed to the capture or elimination of bin Laden and devoted adequate resources to achieve that end. And it also calls into question the Bush administration’s claim that they entered office with no readily available intelligence on how best to prepare for possible terrorist attacks. “Nobody organized this country or the international community to fight the terrorist threat that was upon us until 9/11,” said then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2006 during an interview with The New York Post.

In all, more than 100 internal memos and reports were released yesterday. The National Security Archive sought the release of these documents after they were referenced in footnotes from the 9/11 Commission’s official report, and though they applaud the CIA’s decision to release these documents, the group also notes that hundreds more remain unavailable for public consumption:

Although the collection is part of a laudable effort by the CIA to provide documents on events related to September 11, many of these materials are heavily redacted, and still only represent one-quarter of the CIA materials cited in the 9/11 Commission Report. Hundreds of cited reports and cables remain classified, including all interrogation materials such as the 47 reports from CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from March 24, 2003 – June 15, 2004, which are referenced in detail in the 9/11 Report.

ThinkProgress has compiled a timeline on the hunt for bin Laden.