Poor Mojo's Newswire

The basic model would consist of a tiny GPS transceiver placed in a capsule and inserted under a person's skin, so that authorities could track him easily.

Model B would have an extra function — a dose of cyanide to remotely kill the wearer without muss or fuss if authorities deemed he'd become a public threat.

The inventor said the chip could be used to track terrorists, criminals, fugitives, illegal immigrants, political dissidents, domestic servants and foreigners overstaying their visas.

A two-year-old court decision allowing manufacturers to set the minimum prices that retailers can charge for their products is driving up prices U.S. buyers pay for a range of products and hurting Internet sellers, three witnesses told a U.S. Senate subcommittee Tuesday. Congress should pass a law effectively overturning a 2007 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court saying that so-called vertical price-fixing isn't necessarily a violation of U.S. antitrust law, representatives of eBay, Burlington Coat Factory and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said. That Supreme Court decision, in Leegin Creative Leather Products v. PSKS, hurts small and medium-size Internet sellers trying to compete with established retailers, said Tod Cohen, eBay's vice president and deputy general counsel for government relations. The court's decision went against 96 years of antitrust law, he said.

On May 18, 1927, disgruntled school board member Andrew Kehoe bombed the Bath, Michigan school, killing 38 children and six adults. There is a new book out on the disaster, entitled Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing, from the University of Michigan Press, written by Arnie Bernstein. The press kindly sent me a copy. Bernstein has a historian's eye for small and significant period details of fascinating interest to anyone who thinks about what the 1920s were like in Michigan, which makes it easy to pick up anywhere and read some small detail that gives you a sense for the times.

“America’s war on terror has indeed tested our resolve. We’ve pushed the limits of our own principles. … Is there any line we still will not cross?” Apparently there is one. Last week, Lieutenant Daniel Choi, a West Point graduate and Arabic linguist, was discharged from the National Guard following his open declaration on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show that he is gay. “Ahhhh, that’s the line,” Stewart remarked. “The one line America will not cross is the Chorus Line.” “Dan Choi is one of 54 Arabic translators dismissed due to their sexual preference,” Stewart went on. “So it was okay to waterboard a guy over eighty times — but God forbid the guy who could understand what that prick was saying has a boyfriend.”

In announcing the return of the military commission system devised by former president George W. Bush, Obama also proposed reforms that he said would restore them “as a legitimate forum for prosecution, while bringing them in line with the rule of law.” But human rights organizations almost in unison called it a bad idea, insisting that even with changes the special military tribunals would provide substandard justice and meet with delays and legal challenges. “The military commissions system is flawed beyond repair,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “By resurrecting this failed Bush administration idea, President Obama is backtracking dangerously on his reform agenda.” The American Civil Liberties Union called it “a striking blow to due process and the rule of law.”