Apple’s iPhone, the New International Currency

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Photo Credit: Andrew Burton/Getty ImagesI’ve been paying my bills with iPhones. Not with apps or on bank sites—I’ve been using the Apple (AAPL) hardware as currency.

It started by accident in December, during a business trip to New York. I live in Rome, where domestic work comes cheap and technology is expensive. An unlocked, gold, 32-gigabyte iPhone 5s that costs about $815 with tax in the U.S. goes for €839 (about $1,130) in Italy, roughly a month’s wages for workers who do laundry, pick up kids from school, or provide care for the elderly. When one worker heard I was visiting the States, she asked me to pick her up an iPhone in lieu of the equivalent cash for work she’d done. Lining up inside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, I was surrounded by shoppers speaking languages from around the world. The salesman looked stunned when I said I wanted an unlocked iPhone. Just one?

A new shipment of unlocked 5s phones had just come in, he said, adding that the gold model I asked for was the most popular in Europe and the easiest to resell. To my right, a man with a credit card from a Saudi bank was trying to buy his third and fourth phones of the day. “Make it two,” I said. There was one more step: The salesman grabbed a landline from behind the counter to connect me with my bank’s antifraud department. Purchases from this store, he said, are red flags.

Do the math, and that’s no surprise. Exiting the store with my plastic Apple shopping bag secured by a rope drawstring, I no longer thought of the phones inside as appliances. They were more like gold bars.

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O’Reilly Destroys Geraldo For Calling Obama “Majesty”

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Photo Credit: futureatlas.comGeraldo Rivera is nothing more than a typical liberal media hack desperately committed to keeping Obama safe from any tough questions about his record, and he showed it again with his most recent appearance on The O’Reilly Factor.

Geraldo voiced his pleasure with Bill O’Reilly’s recent interview with the president that aired on Super Bowl Sunday because of the tone O’Reilly took in grilling Obama on his scandals.

He thought that O’Reilly didn’t respect Obama enough as president, going so far to say that O’Reilly’s referring to Obama as a “community organizer,” along with his tough questioning, stripped Obama of his “majesty.” Amazing.

TheBlaze reports:

During a tense exchange on Friday’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Geraldo Rivera accused Bill O’Reilly of stripping President Barack Obama of his “majesty” during his highly-watched Super Bowl interview.

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Allen West: Obama Asylum Plan is ‘Threat to National Security’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesFormer Florida Congressman Allen West is joining the chorus of those slamming President Barack Obama’s move to ease the rules for asylum seekers and refugees who gave “limited” material support to terrorists or terrorist groups.

“When you understand the situation with national security, this is not the type of decision you should be making. And think about this: We’re not even a year away from the Boston Marathon bombing, where you have the Tsarnaev brothers, and they were going back into Chechnya, and they were meeting with these individuals, and now we’re going to relax the standards,” West said in an exclusive interview with John Bachman on “America’s Forum” on Newsmax TV.

“But this is the wrong path to take because this is a threat to the sovereignty, this is a threat to our national security, and no one wants to think that we’re allowing more terrorists to come into our country right now,” he cautioned.

West, a former soldier and defense contractor, took office in January 2011 as the first black Republican congressman from Florida since 1876, when Josiah T. Walls left office near the end of Reconstruction. West served on the Armed Services and Small Business Committees.

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US Government Reportedly Ordering Drone Strikes Based on Cell Phone Location

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Photo Credit: Fox News The U.S. government reportedly is ordering some drone strikes based on the location of terror suspects’ cell phones — without necessarily confirming the location of the suspects themselves — raising concerns about missiles hitting unintended targets.

The details were included in a report published Monday by journalist Glenn Greenwald’s newest venture, The Intercept. Though it previously has been reported that National Security Agency data-tracking is used in locating and targeting terror suspects, the Intercept article raised new questions about the accuracy of that data.

The report, citing an unnamed former drone operator and other sources, said the NSA uses a “complex analysis of electronic surveillance” to pinpoint drone strike targets. However, the report said, the CIA and U.S. military don’t always confirm who the target is with informants on the ground. This raises the concern that the flagged phone could be in the hands of someone else — a friend, a family member, someone who’s holding the wrong phone at the wrong time — when the missile is fired.

“It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone,” the former drone operator was quoted as saying. “We’re not going after people — we’re going after their phones.”

The Intercept report also detailed how some Taliban leaders have caught onto the NSA’s methods, and have tried to evade tracking by purchasing multiple SIM cards and mixing them up.

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Wrong-Way Car Crashes in Florida and California Kill 11

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/San Gabriel Valley Tribune,Watchara PhomicindaEleven people died early Sunday in two highway collisions, one in Florida and one in California, caused by drivers going the wrong way, authorities said.

Five people died in the Florida collision and six were killed in California.

A Ford Expedition SUV traveling south on northbound Interstate 275 in Tampa, Florida, collided head-on with a Hyundai Sonata just after 2 a.m., killing the SUV driver and all four people in the other car, according to a Florida Highway Patrol news release.

The SUV became engulfed in flames, the patrol report said. The other vehicle was also damaged by fire. The driver and all three passengers in the car were members of the Sigma Beta Rho fraternity at the University of South Florida in Tampa, the patrol said.

The identity of SUV driver has not been confirmed due to extensive damage to the vehicle, the patrol said. It is unclear if alcohol was involved in the crash, the patrol said.

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Police: Iowa State Representative’s Sisters Found Dead in Apparent Homicide

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Photo Credit: AP/PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTETwo sisters of an Iowa state representative have been found dead of apparent gunshot wounds in the Pittsburgh home they shared in what police are investigating as a double homicide.

The bodies of 44-year-old Susan Wolfe and 38-year-old Sarah Wolfe were found Friday afternoon in their basement after they didn’t show up for work, authorities said. Police found Sarah Wolfe’s car around 1:15 a.m. Saturday parked nearly a mile away.

Pittsburgh police Lt. Daniel Herrmann said they don’t have a motive for the killings, and there were no signs of forced entry. The two sisters died of single gunshot wounds to the head, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

The Allegheny County medical examiner said Sunday that the two women sustained “other injuries,” but didn’t elaborate. He also wouldn’t answer whether the women were sexually assaulted, the Post-Gazette reported.

Sarah Wolfe was a psychiatrist for Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, and Susan Wolfe was a teacher’s aide at Hillel Academy in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood.

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Zogby Report Card: Only 29% Say Obama Has Nation Headed in Right Direction

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner Pollster John Zogby reports in our weekly White House report card that President Obama’s numbers are mixed, both in approval rating and right-direction, wrong-direction.

“I am a numbers guy and the numbers are mixed. Troubling for Obama is that so few Americans feel the U.S. is headed in the right direction (29 percent average) and that the stock market is falling. This could be the inevitable correction and the obvious impact of the Fed’s tapering.

“He is also still upside down in public opinion toward Obamacare, though the gap between supporters and opponents is not really widening.

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Disabled US Veteran Denied Entry to Starbucks Over Service Dog

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Photo Credit: Fox News A disabled U.S. Army veteran says he was told he could not enter a Texas Starbucks because of his service dog.

Yancy Baer traveled to Houston from San Antonio on behalf of the national organization Canine Companions for Independence, which helped pair Baer with service dog Verbena after Baer’s left leg was amputated from the knee down due to bone cancer, KHOU reported.

The cancer was discovered after a non-combat injury Baer suffered while serving in Iraq in 2009.

Baer got Verbena about 14 weeks ago, and traveled to San Antonio to share his story on behalf of the nonprofit Canine Companions.

He tried to go into a Starbucks on Memorial Drive when he was stopped by a store employee.

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Michelle Malkin Girds for 2014 GOP Civil War

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Photo Credit: APMichelle Malkin doesn’t run away from fights, she runs toward them. And she’s running faster than ever headlong into the 2014 Republican primary battles on behalf of upstart conservative candidates who are mounting insurgent challenges to the GOP old guard.

Twitter is Malkin’s weapon of choice. Battles with her almost always devolve into wars, and those who follow the conservative social media scene know she has a proven formula online: Taunting quips from foes bring out the full force of her Twitter arsenal, with snappy replies, catchy hashtags and the mobilization of a legion of energized followers.

Malkin, 43, says she’s using her influence — and her confrontational approach — on behalf of candidates she deems worthy of it in this year’s midterm.

“I see the practically unlimited power that social media has to help push the issues and causes and people I care about,” Malkin told POLITICO in a recent interview. “I know what I’m good at.”

She’s focusing on backing politicians challenging establishment Republicans — for instance, she’s thrown her support behind Katrina Pierson, who is campaigning to unseat longtime incumbent Rep. Pete Sessions in Texas.

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70 Million Americans Taking Mind-Altering Drugs

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Photo Credit: WNDThe heroin-overdose death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has caused the media to focus, however fleetingly, on America’s drug problem.

News accounts of the Oscar-winner’s tragic demise typically reference the startling increase in heroin-related deaths in the last four to five years. The problem, reporters explain, is the vast number of Americans addicted to prescription pain meds like OxyContin, many of whom discover heroin to be both cheaper and easier to obtain than the prescription opioid drugs to which they initially became addicted.

That’s accurate as far as it goes. But by following the trail further, we arrive at a place far more shocking and consequential. We discover that not only has the traditional distinction between illegal “street drugs” and legal “therapeutic prescription drugs” become so blurred as to be almost nonexistent, but between America’s twin drug epidemics – one illegal, the other legal – well over 70 million Americans are using mind-altering drugs. And that number doesn’t include abusers of alcohol, which adds an additional 60 million Americans. So we’re really talking about 130 million strung-out Americans. How is this possible?

Of course, most of the drug news we’ve heard lately has been about pot. It started with medical marijuana, with state after state successfully defying the federal ban. Then on Jan. 1, flat-out legalization took center stage, when Colorado and Washington opened their doors to exhilarated pot-smokers, while numerous other states – from Alaska, Oregon and California in the west to Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., in the east – announced plans to push for legalization in the coming months.

As a result, stock prices for cannabis companies soared (“The demand for marijuana is insatiable,” says one entrepreneur, “you have a feeding frenzy for the birth of a new industry”), the New York City-based publication “High Times” announced a new private-equity fund to “raise $100 million over the next two years to invest in cannabis-related businesses,” and ad agencies geared up to support “an industry estimated to already be generating revenues in the billions of dollars.”

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