News from around the web: 2009-09-06

While Orange and T-Mobile compete with O2 to sell the iPhone in Britain, a report by Denmark’s Strand Consult reveals how it makes a loss for providers and struggles against other phones

The 61-year-old former boss of the software company AutoDesk, who also receives a salary of $1m and is eligible for an annual bonus worth up to $4m, was granted options on 5m shares of Yahoo stock when she took the top job at the beginning of the year.

Scrapping “wasteful” government projects should knock a few trillion from total borrowings this year.

Pretty impressive

Here’s another take on things at odds with the Monetarists and the Keynesians. Definitely more Austrian. Notice the emphasis on debt structure – read malinvestment – from a lack of regulation and loose monetary policy. Worthy of debate for sure.

whenever Wolfowitz says "Look!" what he’s really signaling is: I don’t want to talk about this Iraq stuff any more, so why do you keep coming back to it? The reason for coming back, of course, is that Wolfowitz does and always will occupy a unique role in the intellectual history of the decision.

Good program for G1 USB tethering

Becker takes a crack at Allan Meltzer’s arguments – which I don’t buy – about the ineffectiveness of stimulus. Call this the Attack of the Monetarists. "At the ripe age of 78, Nobel economist Gary Becker finds himself the pin-up hero for libertarians around the world convinced that massive government response to the Great Contraction of 2008-2009 is not only unnecessary but almost certainly a threat to economic freedom as well."

Clinton White House veterans — John D. Podesta, A former senior adviser, Steve Ricchetti, a Congressional lobbyist; and Chris Jennings, a health policy aide – homed in on their ultimate lesson of the failure 15 years ago, that there is a political cost to doing nothing.

Britain was within hours of a banking shutdown last autumn as the government battled to piece together a rescue plan for the stricken Halifax and Royal Bank of Scotland, it has emerged.

When President Obama visited the Cleveland Clinic in July, he lauded its innovative approach to low-cost, high-quality health care: "They’ve set up a system where patient care is the No. 1 concern, not bureaucracy," he said. "Those are changes that I think the American people want to see." That’s exactly right, Mr. President. But you’re running out of time.

President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.

That it is not a top-tier college by most measures, however, makes Lafayette an excellent test case as it and other private colleges cross the $50,000 annual cost threshold in shaky economic times.

The U.S. central bank must resist popular pressure to keep interest rates too low as the economy recovers, according to a top Federal Reserve official.

Yesterday — in a very significant decision (.pdf) written by Bush-43-appointed federal judge Milan Smith and joined by a Reagan-appointed judge — the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed a lawsuit to proceed that was brought against John Ashcroft for the illegal and unconstitutional detention of American Muslims. The suit was brought by Abdullah al-Kidd, an American citizen of African-American descent who converted to Islam. Al-Kidd was arrested, detained under abusive conditions, and then had his movements and freedoms severely restricted for sixteen months despite no evidence that he had done anything wrong.

"Maine Senator Olympia Snowe’s idea of creating a public option as only a fallback if private insurance companies fail to produce genuine competition seems to be gaining currency at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue at the moment. Today’s Washington Post has new details on how a "trigger" would work"

Judith, this one’s for you. "You could say that it’s not a “real” library any more. Or you could say that the smell, look and feel of real books cannot be replaced by e-readers. But the administrators of Cushing Academy, a prep school near Boston, have done exactly that."

Distraction of the day: Video: Huge sinkhole under Florida home

When I saw the title of this video, I immediately thought of all the underwater mortgages in Florida.  But, this is a REAL sinkhole – not exactly a good thing for the sellers of this house.