Harold Maass of The Week The Best of Today's Business

NEWS AT A GLANCE

RadioShack CEO quits

RadioShack's chief executive, David Edmondson, resigned yesterday after admitting that he inflated his academic credentials on his resume. Edmondson had claimed he received two degrees from a small Baptist college, but a Fort Worth Star-Telegram investigation found that the institution had no record of the degrees. Last week, RadioShack announced its quarterly earnings were down 62 percent and it was closing hundreds of stores. "It's not as if he's led a turnaround of this company," said Fulcrum Global Partners analyst Stacey Widlitz. (AP in Yahoo! Finance)

Supply fears return

Oil prices jumped yesterday after renewed violence shut down close to a fifth of Nigeria's oil production. Militants demanding local control over the Niger Delta's oil wealth kidnapped nine foreign workers and torched pipelines. The attacks fueled fears of a supply crisis fed by production problems in Iraq, nuclear tensions in Iran, and a war of words between Washington and Hugo Chavez, the combative leftist president of Venezuela. "It's a long list," said Frederic Lasserre of Societe Generale in Paris. (The New York Times, free registration required)

Linking CEO pay to performance

Corporate boards are increasingly attaching performance targets to stock options in CEO pay packages to address complaints of excessive executive compensation. In 2003, 17 of 100 major U.S. corporations linked performance to the equity they granted to top executives; now, 30 do. CEOs, said a board member at NCR Corp., "should win only when shareholders win." (The Wall Street Journal, paid registration required)

Chinese newspapers attack Google

A Beijing newspaper has accused Google of launching its controversial search engine in China without the proper license. Google says the paperwork is in order; China's Ministry of Information is investigating. Google has faced criticism in the U.S. for tailoring search results to meet Beijing's censorship rules, but in China the company is being blasted by a nationalist business paper for warning users about the censorship. The Chinese Business Times said this made Google like an "uninvited guest" who tells his dinner host "the dishes don't suit his taste, but he's willing to eat them as a show of respect to his host." (Reuters.com)

BEST COLUMNS OF THE DAY

The value of experience

There's one thing many mutual funds that beat the market have in common, says Chet Currier in Bloomberg.com. Experience. A new Standard & Poor's study found that the funds with the best performance typically have managers who have been around longer than most of their peers. If you're determined to find a fund with above-average returns, "experience might give you an edge you could get no other way."

Emerging markets to the rescue

Consumers "from Beijing to Bucharest" are the cavalry that could save the world economy, says Frederick Kempe in The Wall Street Journal (paid registration required). People in emerging markets are buying "like never before" as their economies boom, and they could keep global consumption growing even as Americans cut back. But both the U.S. and Europe are threatening to slap tariffs on China over what they say are unfair trade practices. If an "untimely trade war" erupts, American companies could find it harder to reach some of tomorrow's biggest customers.

GOOD DAY FOR: Web surfing, as 87 percent of employees visit Internet sites that have nothing to do with their jobs while they are at work, according to a survey by Vault.com. (USA Today)

BAD DAY FOR: Web surfing, as three quarters of companies monitor their employees' activity online, and a quarter have fired people for misusing the Internet on the job, according to the American Management Association. (USA Today)

NOTED: Health care for smokers costs companies about 25 percent more than care for non-smokers. A growing number of companies -- including PepsiCo and the Gannett newspaper chain -- have begun charging smokers an extra $20 to $50 per month for health insurance. (Los Angeles Times)