David Feith:

Ahmed Altaie and Bowe Bergdahl—one born 1965 in Baghdad, the other two decades later in Hailey, Idaho—wouldn’t seem to have much in common. But this weekend, as Americans take to beaches and barbeques to celebrate our independence, Messrs. Altaie and Bergdahl share a unique, practically unknown bond: They are the only two U.S. soldiers currently held captive as prisoners of war.

Over the past decade, the U.S. has deployed more than two million troops abroad, with hundreds of thousands in war zones at any one time. Yet in a sign of how much warfare has changed since the time of Thucydides, Grant or even Westmoreland, prisoners of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have been few in number and low in profile. Today there is one in each theater, an unusual symmetry that seems to magnify the solitude and difficulty of their plights.

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has been a captive of the Taliban for two years, since June 30, 2009. He was a 23-year-old private at the time, about a half-year into his first deployment. The circumstances of his capture remain murky, but one way or another he fell into enemy hands in rural Paktika province, a mountainous region along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

Frank Rich:

“SOMETHING ROTTEN: Obama’s failure to right the wrongs of the crash has haunted his presidency, and could undo it”: “What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. … Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. … For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, … the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.”

Insider dealing continues, unabated.

Leander Kahney:

As my colleague Mike Elgan points out, the iPhone has changed the world in profound ways.

Now an ex-colleague, Brian Chen of Wired.com, has just published one of the first books to take an in-depth look at how, exactly, the smartphone world is shaping up.

Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future — and Locked Us In is an excellent overview of how the iPhone is changing the computing landscape.

I follow Apple closely, yet I was surprised at how much I learned about the world of mobile from Chen’s well-reported book (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb).

Dylan Lowball McCain:

Players who use computers to cheat are a growing concern in the chess world. Now the developer of Rybka, the winner of the last four World Computer Chess Championships, has been accused of plagiarizing code to create the program.

Rybka has been stripped of its titles, and the developer, Vasik Rajlich, has been barred from entering programs in competitions.

The ruling on Rybka and Mr. Rajlich was made Tuesday by the International Computer Gaming Association, the group that organizes the championships. It concluded that Mr. Rajlich, who has American and Czech citizenship and lives in Poland, had used source code from programs called Crafty and Fruit.

“We are convinced that the evidence against Vasik Rajlich is both overwhelming in its volume and beyond reasonable question in its nature,” the association’s executive committee said in a statement.

Favid Streitfeld:

As millions of Americans struggle in foreclosure with little hope of relief, big banks are going to borrowers who are not even in default and cutting their debt or easing the mortgage terms, sometimes with no questions asked.

Two of the nation’s biggest lenders, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, are quietly modifying loans for tens of thousands of borrowers who have not asked for help but whom the banks deem to be at special risk.

Rula Giosmas is one of the beneficiaries. Last year she received a letter from Chase saying it was cutting in half the amount she owed on her condominium.

Ms. Giosmas, who lives in Miami, was not in default on her $300,000 loan. She did not understand why she would receive this gift — although she wasted no time in taking it.

Lawrence Lindsey:

Washington is struggling to make a deal that will couple an increase in the debt ceiling with a long-term reduction in spending. There is no reason for the players to make their task seem even more Herculean than it already is. But we should be prepared for upward revisions in official deficit projections in the years ahead—even if a deal is struck. There are at least three major reasons for concern.

First, a normalization of interest rates would upend any budgetary deal if and when one should occur. At present, the average cost of Treasury borrowing is 2.5%. The average over the last two decades was 5.7%. Should we ramp up to the higher number, annual interest expenses would be roughly $420 billion higher in 2014 and $700 billion higher in 2020.

The 10-year rise in interest expense would be $4.9 trillion higher under “normalized” rates than under the current cost of borrowing. Compare that to the $2 trillion estimate of what the current talks about long-term deficit reduction may produce, and it becomes obvious that the gains from the current deficit-reduction efforts could be wiped out by normalization in the bond market.