Attorney General Eric Holder faced a grilling today during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing.

Rep. Darrell Issa was the main questioner, asking Holder if his Justice Department knew of the tactics used in the flawed gunrunning operation known as Fast and Furious.

NPR's Carrie Johnson reports Republicans also accused Holder of not coming clean and not complying with subpoenas. She sent this report to our Newscast unit about the four-hour long hearing:

NPR's Deborah Amos has been covering the uprising in Syria since it began more than a year ago. Like other foreign reporters, she has had to cover much of the conflict from afar because the Syrian government has only rarely granted visas. She has just returned to Syria for the first time since last fall and sent this dispatch:

Federal election law has required the public disclosure of campaign donors for nearly 40 years.

But this year, outside groups are playing a powerful role in the presidential election. And some of them disclose nothing about their donors. That's despite what the Supreme Court said in its controversial Citizens United ruling two years ago.

Each school year, more than 700,000 California students — predominantly black and Latino — are suspended or expelled.

Robert, a talkative sixth-grader in the city of Richmond, has been suspended three times from his elementary school in the West Contra Costa Unified School District. If he gets suspended one more time, he says, he might get expelled. [NPR has withheld his last name because he is a minor.]

The United States named its 19th poet laureate today: Natasha Trethewey, a professor of English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. She is the nation's first poet laureate to hail from the South since the initial laureate — Robert Penn Warren — was named by the Library of Congress in 1986.

Since Republicans took back the U.S. House in the 2010 elections, abortion has been a fairly constant theme. The House took eight separate abortion-related votes in 2011 — the most in a decade, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Sweet Heart Sweet Light, the new album by the English space-rock band Spiritualized, was recorded while frontman Jason Pierce was undergoing chemotherapy for liver disease. Pierce set out to craft the record as a clear-cut pop record in between hospital stays, and though he says he isn't convinced he succeeded, most of the album is composed of could-be Top 10 radio hits from the early '70s.

The National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center issued an El Niño watch, today.

That means there is a 50 percent chance that El Niño — warmer than normal temperatures in the Pacific Ocean near the equator — will develop by next winter. As The Baltimore Sun reports, if this happens it will be the first time El Niño rears its head since 2009.

Last.fm and eHarmony became the latest websites to suffer security breaches that put the passwords of some of their users at risk.

In a statement on its website, Last.fm, which tracks and recommends music, said it was investigating the leaked passwords and asked all its users to "change their passwords immediately."

The dating site EHarmony said it had reset the passwords of those members whose passwords had been compromised.