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Unless Deutsche Telekom AG is prepared to abandon another attempt to exit the U.S. market, it has to sweeten the terms of its $33 billion deal to combine T- Mobile USA with MetroPCS Communications. To win support from MetroPCS shareholders in an April 12 vote, New Street Research LLP says Deutsche Telekom may have to cut the debt component by $6 billion, while Nomura Holdings Inc. says MetroPCS owners want a bigger equity stake. While Deutsche Telekom could choose to walk away, that would represent another failed attempt to exit the business, following a 2011 agreement to sell T-Mobile to AT&T that regulators blocked.

Aereo might call a Wall Street analyst as a witness in its case versus leading broadcasters.

Entities linked with the major networks have charged that the service could deprive them of carriage or retransmission consent fees, but Barclays’ Anthony DiClemente disputes that. DiClemente isn’t making the case to defend Aereo, but simply to suggest to investors that the service doesn’t pose much of a threat to the value of major media companies. They tend to “bundle” broadcast stations' in package deals with cable assets and aren’t likely to allow a cable operator to get one without paying for the other. “Distributors could have a hard time disaggregating the two to save” on retransmission payments, the analyst says.

The New America Foundation’s Board of Directors announced the appointment of Anne-Marie Slaughter as the Foundation’s next president, effective Sept. 1.

Dr. Slaughter, a Princeton professor, former Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and the former Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, will succeed Steve Coll, who stepped down on March 31 after five years leading the nonpartisan public policy think tank. Dr. Slaughter, a current New America board member, will work out of both New America's Washington, DC and New York offices. Dr. Slaughter served as the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department from 2009-2011. She was the first woman to hold that position. She is currently the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she also served as Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs prior to her government service. With her new role at New America, she will transition to emeritus status at Princeton. Dr. Slaughter is one of the nation’s leading thinkers about the challenges and opportunities presented by 21st century globalization.

Harlequin Romance has prevailed in a class action suit brought by three authors who accuse the book publisher of depriving writers who published books between 1990 and 2004 of their fair share of e-book revenue.

A New York federal judge threw out the authors claim that Harlequin had used a corporate sleight-of-hand to pay them 3-4% of e-book royalties instead of the 50% they believed they were due. The case, which turned on technical questions of law, is an example of the collisions that can arise as a result of book contracts signed in an age that pre-dated the current boom in e-books. In a four-page decision, the New York court declined to consider the authors’ arguments that “third party publishers” were alter-egos for Harlequin. Instead, the court relied on a narrow interpretation of contract law to dismiss the claim. The decision is very brief and contains an unusual footnote stating that the judge’s clerk, a second-year law student, had largely researched and drafted the opinion (clerks often help with such tasks but judges rarely acknowledge this).