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Attorney General Eric Holder recused himself from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decision to secretly seize two months of phone records of Associated Press journalists.

AG Holder said he recused himself early on in the DOJ's investigation of what he described as some of the most serious leaks from government officials that jeopardized national security. Deputy Attorney General James Cole signed off on the subpoena authorizing the seizure of the AP's phone records last year. Because he recused himself, AG Holder said he does not have all of the facts surrounding the probe, which is coming under intense scrutiny. "I don't know all that went into the formulation of the subpoena," AG Holder said. He did say that the leak that sparked the subpoena was "a very serious leak." "This was a very serious leak. A very, very serious leak," AG Holder said. "It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole. It put the American people at risk."

The Federal Communications Commission and its Canadian counterpart, Industry Canada, have agreed, through a process known as an exchange of letters, on ten interim spectrum sharing arrangements covering operations in their common border area. These arrangements will aid in the deployment and use of mobile broadband and improve public safety communications along the U.S.-Canada border by facilitating the efficient sharing of spectrum and avoiding potential interference.

Among the technical sharing arrangements is an arrangement reached on the 3650-3700 MHz band, which allows wireless broadband and high-speed Internet services to coexist along the U.S.-Canada border. In this band, the United States and Canada agreed upon a spectrum sharing arrangement which includes, among other things, the use of “contention-based protocols” to avoid harmful interference while sharing the spectrum more efficiently. Contention-based protocols allow multiple users to share the same spectrum by defining the events that must occur when two or more devices attempt to simultaneously access the same channel and establishing rules by which each device is provided a reasonable opportunity to operate. The technical sharing arrangement reached on the 700 MHz band will allow public safety licensees on both sides of the border to fully implement their 700 MHz narrowband systems. The arrangement reflects the harmonization of the U.S. and Canadian public safety 700 MHz narrowband channel plans, thus providing more efficient, interference-free public safety operations in the border area.

In the four months since the Newtown, Connecticut shootings, the tone of the conversation about gun control on Twitter has shifted sharply several times in apparent response to ongoing events, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of nearly 21 million tweets from December 18 through April 21.

In that period, the Twitter sentiment overall was almost balanced between those supporting stronger gun control measures (42% of the conversation) and those opposed (38%), according to the report. That is in contrast to the first three days after the December 14 attack when an earlier Pew Research report found that pro-gun control voices dominated their opponents 64% to 21%. But what stands out even more is the fluid nature of the debate on Twitter. In 10 of the 18 weeks studied, assertions favoring tougher regulations outnumbered those opposing; in seven of those weeks, the sentiment against a new law was more prominent. In one of those weeks, the mix was exactly even. The findings also suggest that while pro-gun control forces dominated in the emotional and painful hours immediately following the attack, over time the conversation shifted to reflect the nation's more divided view of gun control that has become evident in recent years. At the same time, one of the biggest shifts in Twitter opinion occurred the week of the April 17 Senate vote, when sentiment favoring tougher gun laws outstripped expressions of opposition by 3-1.

The Kochs brothers, after years of working through the media with relentless lobbying and messaging, are exploring the idea of skipping the middleman and becoming media themselves, with the acquisition of one of the biggest media groups in the country.

The Tribune papers encompass eight major publications across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Allentown Daily Call, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Baltimore Sun, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Hartford Courant, the Daily Press of Hampton Roads, Virginia, and Hoy, America's second-largest Spanish-language paper. It should go without saying that the sale of this still-potent media empire to the cash-addled Koch brothers duo – lifetime denizens of a sub-moronic rightist echo chamber where everything from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment benefits to the EPA are urgent threats to national security, and even child labor laws are evidence of an overly intrusive government – would be a disaster of epic proportions. One could argue that it would be on par with the Citizens United decision in its potential for causing popular opinion to be perverted and bent by concentrated financial interests.