NEW YORK/BOSTON (Reuters) - Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management Inc have mounted an aggressive challenge to Michael Dell's controversial $24.4 billion offer to take Dell Inc private, offering $21 billion in cash to shareholders while vying to wrest control of the company from its co-founder.

Michael Dell, major shareholders such as Southeastern and billionaire activist investor Icahn are waging a battle over the future of the world's third largest personal computer maker, once a tech-industry high flyer, but now struggling to evolve as people embrace smartphones and tablet computers.

Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake want to take the company private for $13.65 per share, making it the largest buyout since the 2008 financial crisis. But many shareholders, including Southeastern and T. Rowe Price, complain that offer severely undervalues the company.

Instead, Icahn and Southeastern, two of Dell's biggest shareholders, proposed a deal that gives shareholders $12 of cash for every share they own, as well as allow them to keep their stock. Given that they retain their stake in the company and that the rival offer is for $13.65 a share, every stock owned takes on a value of $1.65, Icahn and Southeastern argue. (http://r.reuters.com/tug97t)

At $12 apiece, the cash portion of Icahn's and Southeastern' s offer will come to $21 billion.

Should Dell's board rebuff them and put the go-private offer to a shareholder vote, the pair will nominate a slate of 12 directors to challenge the current board. In an interview with CNBC on Friday, the activist investor said Michael Dell will no longer run the company should his slate of candidates be elected.

The initial reaction from shareholders was favorable, though some investors hoped the latest offer would prompt Michael Dell to offer a counter. David Moon, Chairman of Moon Capital Management in Knoxville, Tennessee, said his firm sold its Dell shares weeks ago and warned that failure to secure any sort of deal might send Dell's shares back to $10 a share, before Michael Dell's takeover offer.

Mario Gabelli, chief executive of Gamco Investors Inc, said via e-mail he would vote in favor of the latest proposal. On Twitter, he wrote it was a "good alternative" to a leveraged buy-out. Gabelli investment funds own about 5.2 million Dell shares, latest filings show.

"It's improvement. It gives people a choice. The other (proposal) comes across like a ramrod," said Donald Yacktman, founder and CEO of Yacktman Asset Management which holds 14.8 million shares, according to Thomson Reuters data. "Whichever way things evolve, what this is doing is forcing better capital allocation than we have seen in the last five years."

On Friday, Icahn again suggested Michael Dell would be the biggest beneficiary of his own proposed buyout, which would exclude current shareholders from participating in the fruits of his restructuring effort.

Icahn's offer "gives us the opportunity to continue our participation in Dell's operating business and thus we believe it to be superior," said Tim Piechowski, associate portfolio manager, Alpine Capital Research, St Louis, Missouri, which owned 2.5 million shares as of May 10.

Dell shares were up 0.7 percent at $13.42 in late trade.

VISION

Icahn argued in a letter sent to Dell's board and made public in a filing on Friday that Dell operates a large enterprise-focused computing business in addition to its ailing PC division, with strong ties Microsoft Corp and Intel Corp. Without specifying details, he also said cost savings could be had from merging assembly plants across the world, while there remained opportunities to spin off non-core businesses.

That echoed Michael Dell's own strategic vision for a company he hopes to transform from a purveyor of low-margin PCs into a global provider of high-margin services for enterprises.

As for Southeastern, past filings show the fund management firm run by Mason Hawkins bought into Dell's shares at about $16.88, meaning a huge loss were they to accept a buyout.

Icahn told Reuters on Friday he will personally contribute a couple of billion dollars to finance a $5.2 billion bridge loan needed to effect his deal. He added that he had already reached out to several investment bankers. Later, he told CNBC in a TV interview that one of those investment banks included Jefferies, which would contribute $1.6 billion to the loan.

Jefferies & Co declined to comment.

The Icahn and Southeastern challenge comes after Blackstone LP ended its pursuit of Dell in April, and pulled out a month after it teamed up with Icahn to challenge the take-private attempt.

It was "insulting to shareholders' intelligence for the board to tell them that this board only has the best interests of shareholders at heart," Icahn and Southeastern said in the letter. "We are often cynical about corporate boards, but this Board has brought that cynicism to new heights."

Dell said in a statement on Friday that its special committee is reviewing the Southeastern Asset materials and will provide comment in "due course." A representative for Silver Lake declined to comment.

"I don't think Icahn and Southeastern have enough sway over the shareholders," Raymond James analyst Brian Alexander said. "As Dell has a lot of cash, (the latest deal) is basically like a leveraged private equity deal, without the company going private."

Both Icahn and Southeastern said they would take shares rather than cash. They would finance the proposal from existing cash and about $5.2 billion in new debt.

Icahn and Southeastern together hold about 13 percent of Dell stock. The billionaire investor previously proposed paying $15 per share for 58 percent of Dell.

"As a shareholder, what I'm most pleased about is that the pot continues to be stirred," said Robert Willis, president and CEO of Willis Investment Counsel in Gainesville, Georgia, which owns about 350,000 shares of Dell. "I like the fact that those who oppose this aren't going to lie down."

(Additional reporting by Jennifer Saba in New York, Aaron Pressman in Boston, and Sakthi Prasad and Supantha Mukherjee in Bangalore; writing by Edwin Chan, editing by Edwina Gibbs, Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Jeffrey Benkoe and Andre Grenon)

Though it focuses on the human element, MyMoneyCircles is anythingbut soft and fuzzy. The website refers to its approach as a "boot camp"for personal finance. But what exactly does a personal finance boot campentail?

The boot camp method at MyMoneyCircles involves pushing participantsto get their personal finances in the best shape possible. And the bootcamp analogy is apt, because it highlights the simple fact that , and building robustis often an act of sacrifice.

MyMoneyCircles will conduct a series of boot camps to address a variety of financial goals, including:

The personalized support system at MyMoneyCircles is designed to helpusers make the changes necessary to meet these goals. By engagingparticipants throughout the process, and providing advice tailored totheir needs, the site aims to lead them each step of the way toward .

Here are some of the methods MyMoneyCircles will use to engage,encourage, and energize those who want to improve their personalfinances:

Central to the program is the expertise of Lynnette Khalfani-Cox.Khalfani-Cox, also known as "The Money ," is a best-selling authorand frequently-quoted expert in the national media. Khalfani-Cox's inputdrives both the design and content of MyMoneyCircles, and she willanswer individual participant questions too. A variety of financialspecialists--full disclosure, this author will be one of them--will alsobe available to provide advice.

Access to this expertise will begin in early January, but those interested can sign up for the first boot camp now at .

The original article can be found at : ""

A parliamentary statement signed Tuesday by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acknowledged the government had a set of documents produced by a postwar international military tribunal containing testimony by Japanese soldiers about abducting Chinese women as military sex slaves. That evidence apparently was not included in Japan's only investigation of the issue, in 1991-1993.

Tuesday's parliamentary statement also said documents showing forcible sex slavery may still exist. The statement did not say whether the government plans to consider the documents as evidence showing that troops had coerced women into sexual slavery.

Over the past two days, top officials of Abe's conservative government have appeared to soften their stance on Japan's past apologies to neighboring countries for wartime atrocities committed by the Imperial Army, saying Japan does not plan to revise them.

The backtracking appears intended to allay criticisms of Abe's earlier vows to revise the apologies, including an acknowledgment of sexual slavery during the war, and calm tensions with neighbors South Korea and China. The U.S. government also has raised concerns about Abe's nationalist agenda.

Abe has acknowledged so-called "comfort women" existed but denied they were coerced into prostitution, citing a lack of official evidence. He also has repeatedly vowed to reassess apologies by past Japanese administrations.

The parliamentary statement, released Tuesday and seen by the Associated Press on Wednesday, was in response to an official inquiry last month to the upper house of Parliament by opposition lawmaker Tomoko Kami, who said the government's investigation into sex slavery was "insufficient" and documents it claimed to have collected were incomplete.

Kami, of the Japan Communist Party, also asked whether the government had ever updated its archives to reflect more recent findings than the earlier investigation. The answer was no.

The statement acknowledged documents produced by the 1946-1948 International Military Tribunal for the Far East, held in Tokyo, but said they were not in the Cabinet Secretariat's archives. It did not say when the documents were found or whether they are reflected in any official statements about sexual slavery.

Abe also has criticized the tribunal's decisions as "condemnation by the allied victors' judgment," but has said he's in no position to object to the rulings Japan had already accepted.

The parliamentary statement described the 1993 findings as "the result of an all-out and sincere investigation" that brought "closure." But it said the government is open to updates if new findings are valid.

"Due to the nature of the issue, there is a possibility that previously unavailable documents may be discovered. In such a case, we are asking related ministries and offices to report to the Cabinet," it said.

The documents quote testimony from Japanese soldiers saying they recruited women by posting advertisements for factory workers and "threatened them and used them as prostitutes for the bestial lust of the troops."

One army lieutenant testified that he helped set up a brothel for soldiers including himself, forcing five women in the city of Guilin in southern China to work as prostitutes for eight months.

Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Wednesday that Japan recognizes the harm it caused during its invasion and occupation of much of Asia, and that it has repeatedly and clearly stated that position.

"The Abe government has expressed sincere condolences to all victims of the war, in and out of the country, and there is no change in that," Suga said in response to a question about a comment by South Korean President Park Geun-hye, published in The Washington Post this week, asserting that Japan should correct its view of its wartime history.

Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida echoed Suga's remarks.

"The Japanese government has accepted the facts of history in a spirit of humility, expressed once again our feelings of deep remorse and our heartfelt apology, and expressed our feelings of profound mourning for all victims, both at home and abroad," he told reporters. "And Prime Minister Abe shares the same view."

China and South Korea have reacted harshly to recent nationalistic events and remarks, including visits by several Japanese government ministers and nearly 170 lawmakers to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which memorializes 2.3 million war dead, including 14 wartime leaders convicted of war crimes. Rancor over territorial disputes has further strained relations between Japan and its neighbors.

Only in the past two decades has Japan acknowledged some of its past brutalities, including medical atrocities and use of poison gas, as well as sexual slavery a legacy that still haunts Tokyo's relations with its neighbors.

Before he took office in December, Abe had advocated revising a 1993 statement by then-Prime Minister Yohei Kono expressing remorse for the suffering caused to the sexual slaves of Japanese troops.

___

Associated Press writer Elaine Kurtenbach contributed to this report.

Battaglin beat fellow Italians Fabio Felline and Giovanni Visconti for his first stage victory in one of cycling's main tours.

Overall favorite Bradley Wiggins lost 17 seconds after he was caught behind a crash near the finish on the slippery road. He dropped to sixth in the general standings, 34 seconds behind Paolini. Main rival Vincenzo Nibali moved up to fourth, 31 seconds off the pace.

Battaglin, who rides for Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox, completed the hilly 153-mile route from Policastro Bussentino to Serra San Brunowon in 6 hours, 14 minutes, 19 seconds.

The Italian stayed in the main pack throughout the race while a number of other riders tried unsuccessful breakaways.

The first featured seven riders who built a lead of nearly eight minutes after 34 miles. But the pack, led by Paolini's Katusha team, gradually reeled them in.

Several other riders tried to attack but were unsuccessful, with Sylvain Georges having the best attempt as he stormed up the final climb to Croce Ferrata. But Danilo Di Luca chased him down with less than six miles to go, bringing Robinson Chalapud with him.

Georges ran out of steam and dropped back to the main pack while Di Luca and Chalapud stayed 10 seconds in front heading over the summit. They were caught with less than a half mile remaining to set up the mass sprint to the line.

Wednesday's fifth stage is a mainly flat, 124-mile leg from Cosenza to Matera.

of mozambique * Says net interest income grew 7,3% to R5 121m (Q1 2012: R4 774m) * Says elevated consumer indebtedness and unsecured lending continued into

2013, leading to higher retail impairments * Says credit loss ratio increased to 1,22% (Q1 2012: 1,08%) * Says cautious in outlook for the year but remains on track to achieve medium to long term earnings growth target

NEW YORK (AP) -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said she wants to be called just "Sonia from the Bronx."

And on Sunday, the first Hispanic justice on the nation's highest court explained why, saying "you can't come from the world I grew up in, the South Bronx, without feeling the frenzy of exile, constantly."

She spoke at Cooper Union, a private college in Manhattan's East Village where Abraham Lincoln once gave a speech against slavery.

The justice said she wasn't "doing press" on an evening in her hometown that ended with hugs from some members of the audience who asked her to sign their copies of her memoir, "My Beloved World."The best-selling book was published earlier this year with what she called Sunday "some baring of my own heart."

She spoke on the closing night of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York City, which included her conversation with scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

It was hardly a private event.

With a wry smile, Sotomayor said she recognized that "it seems pointless today to exclude the press from any event, when any member of the audience can tweet quotations."

This year's festival has focused on looking at the idea of bravery in art and politics.

The judge's speech came as she and fellow Supreme Court justices are considering three issues dividing the nation: affirmative action, voting rights and gay marriage.

Sotomayor was careful not to reveal her personal opinions, though she conceded that "it is impossible for a homosexual couple today not to be affected by the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases in some way," adding to laughter, "just so you're all clear, I'm not predicting anything."

The federal Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, defines marriage as the union between one man and one woman now being considered by the Supreme Court. The court must also rule on California's Proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage.

The justice told the New York audience on Sunday that 2013 is likely to be "a turning point for those whose lives will be changed, for better or for worse, by those rulings."

Born in New York to Puerto Rican parents, Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court in 2009 by President Barack Obama and sworn in later that year.

She said she needs to keep returning to the Bronx, "to the essence of my world, with love, to take strength from."

Sotomayor said that while the streets of her childhood South Bronx were portrayed as "ugly, dirty, crime- and drug-ridden" in movies, she wrote about "the hopes and struggles of the people," about "a beloved world for someone like me."

Yet in Bier's "Love Is All You Need," it turns out that love really is all you need. And like any old rom-com, it's the just-add-water, instant mush variety of love that springs up between the unlikeliest of partners because, hey, you're in the theater to see a love story.

This is several steps above the usual Hollywood romance, with nice low-key passion between Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm as prospective in-laws who connect during chaotic preparations for their children's wedding. Bier and regular screenwriting partner Anders Thomas Jensen dress things up with gorgeous postcard images of Sorrento, Italy, lovely music, elegant production design and deeper complications and entanglements than we typically see in a screen fling.

It's still standard stuff, though: mostly predictable, mostly gooey, and mostly unlike anything resembling our own clunky tales of amour. The film is gentle and good-hearted, but despite a few solemn themes of illness and infidelity, it never rises above slight and diverting.

Split between dialogue in English and Danish with subtitles, "Love Is All You Need" presents a quick, formulaic introduction to the characters and their issues. Philip (Brosnan) is a British produce importer in Copenhagen who has buried himself in work since his wife's death years earlier, choosing to live in lonely anger that distances him from adoring co-workers and his son Patrick (Sebastian Jessen).

Ida (Dyrholm) is a hairdresser finishing chemo for breast cancer who discovers her husband Leif (Kim Bodnia) is cheating on her with a young bombshell (Christiane Schaumburg-Muller).

They're all off to Italy, where Ida and Leif's daughter, Astrid (Molly Blixt Egelind) is preparing to wed Patrick at a villa Philip owns but has neglected since he lost his wife.

Philip and Ida begin at odds, though it's clear from the start that Bier and Jensen aim to bring this odd pair together. Cut in the Mr. Darcy, misanthrope-with-a-heart-of-gold mold, Brosnan shows off a quiet charm and weary melancholy while maintaining some of the panache of his James Bond days. Dyrholm, who starred in Bier's 2010 foreign-language Academy Award winner "In a Better World," balances a wide-eyed mix of bitterness, befuddlement and bemusement over the hurts life suddenly throws at Ida, an open heart whose obstacles steel her to wring more out of whatever time she has left.

These two have no business hitting it off, let alone drifting into love over a long, comedy-of-errors weekend. It's never really believable, but when it comes to screen romance, what is?

The easy affinity Brosnan and Dyrholm manage between Philip and Ida carries the story along well enough, and the glowing travelogue presented in cinematographer Morten Soborg's scenery is an ideal backdrop for fairy-tale romance to bloom in middle-age.

The secondary relationships are fairly standard boorish awkwardness as Leif shows up with his mistress, weepy reservations as Astrid and Patrick have second thoughts about marrying.

Paprika Steen stands out as Philip's self-absorbed, amorous sister-in-law, somehow imbuing a really horrible woman with traces of pathos when she gets the brutal chastisement she so clearly deserves.

It's refreshing to see Bier lighten up after a string of grave melodramas that include "Brothers," ''After the Wedding" and "Things We Lost in the Fire." She handles her love story with the same style and class, though it's disappointing she doesn't find a way to go deeper than the conventional pleasantries she explores here.

Yet if love is all you need, you could do worse than spending time with the pretty people and pictures of "Love Is All You Need."

"Love Is All You Need," a Sony Pictures Classics release, is rated R for brief sexuality, nudity and some language. Running time: 116 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

___

Motion Picture Association of America rating definition for R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

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Specifically all devices running the BlackBerry 10 Enterprise System and Android Knox now meet the DoD's Security Technology Implementation Guide. And iOS 6 should get the okay in coming weeks. As of right now that includes a small roster of phones: The two new BlackBerry's—the Z and Q10s—and the Samsung Galaxy S IV. BlackBerry has maintained a high enough level of security to appease the likes of the Pentagon for some time. But, what makes Knox and iOS 6 good enough now?

RELATED:

Borrowing a feature from BlackBerry, Samsung now lets IT admins to keep work and personal information separate using what it calls "partitions." Workers no longer have to lug around two gadgets. Security Enhanced (SE) Android, as its called, creates a container that separates out business from personal use. When you turn on the phone, Knox will launch with certain apps such as email, contact, calendar, and file sharing. Each of those programs are isolated and encrypted at all times, which means it meets the high security standards for sending internal emails. 

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Administrators can't access any programs not in that bin, but have complete control over those ones in Knox. That also means when someone leaves the company they can remote wipe just the corporate secrets part. 

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With all the hacking going on all over the place, Secure Boot prevents any non-verified apps from running on the device. Which is especially important on Android phones, which aren't known for their security. This will prevent any malicious programs from compromising a business's security.

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If a device is lost or stolen, the software not only track it, but it can recover all the lost information. Even if a thief resets the device, using the security system , the administrator can pull a new copy of the lost information out of firmware. .

If and when the Pentagon approves Apple phones, it would block access to the App store, iMessage and Safari because they post a security risk, .  Employees will instead get a special Pentagon approved browser that will be routed through their servers. 

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The first-ever drug designed to treat social impairments associated with autism failed to show a benefit in a midstage trial, representing a blow to families and to privately held drugmaker Seaside Therapeutics.

Results of the study, presented on Wednesday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Spain, showed the drug known as STX209 failed to improve symptoms of social withdrawal in a 12-month study of 150 individuals aged 5 to 21, most with classic autistic disorder.

The drug is the first of a handful of treatments in development that are expressly designed to correct the genetically induced signaling problems in the brain that result in autism.

Seaside's drug STX209, or arbaclofen, works to control an overabundance of signaling or "noise" at brain synapses by reducing the amount of the neurotransmitter glutamate that is available in the brain.

Other companies pursuing drugs for autism include Swiss drugmakers Novartis AG and Roche Holding AG , which last year licensed patents from Seaside for the use of drugs known as mGluR5 antagonists that attack the signaling problem in a different way.

Based on the results, however, Roche has decided to pass on its option to develop arbaclofen, said Dr. Randall Carpenter, president and chief executive officer of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company. Roche did not return calls seeking comment.

Carpenter said Seaside will seek new partners and has already met with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to devise a new study based on the current trial's findings that he believes may yet lead to the drug's approval.

"We believe our drug works at a molecular level that corrects signaling pathway abnormalities, circuit abnormalities and even anatomical abnormalities," Carpenter said.

"So the real question for us is, if you have a disease-modifying therapeutic, how would you demonstrate that in a short-term clinical trial?" Carpenter said.

In general, individuals with autism struggle with difficulties in communication, behavior and social interaction. U.S. government researchers said in March that as many as one in 50 American school-age children have a diagnosis of autism, which can range from highly functioning individuals to those with severe speech and intellectual disabilities.

While intensive behavioral therapy has been shown to help, there are no approved drugs that can reverse or improve core symptoms of autism.

In the Seaside trial, the primary goal of improvements in social withdrawal was assessed based on parent observations, and that may have contributed to high response rates among those who got a placebo, likely reflecting parents' eagerness to see an improvement.

Dr. Bryan King, director of the Seattle Children's Autism Center at the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital, said the issue of a strong placebo effect has been a problem in prior trials. "It's not uncommon at all to see a 25 to 30 percent placebo response rate in these studies," he said.

But researchers saw other signs that the Seaside drug was having an effect. On a secondary measure of severity, which is scored by clinicians, there was a significant difference between those in the study on the drug and those who were on a placebo.

"This is a clinically relevant level of change," Dr. Jeremy Veenstra-Vanderweele Of Vanderbilt University, one of the study's key investigators, said in a webcast from the meeting.

Veenstra-Vanderweele said an analysis of the results showed improvements in day-to-day social function, as measured on a scale known as the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale.

"This is a scale that a lot of us as investigators didn't think could move over this period of time. So this is a potentially very exciting, novel outcome," he said.

He said the next step is to test to see if this same finding can be observed in a larger clinical trial that specifically targets changes in this behavior.

Carpenter said the company has collected genetic samples from more than 400 subjects and plans to study the specific genetic differences to get a better idea of which patients will likely respond to the drug.

(This version of the story corrects the name of behavior scale in paragraph 16.)

(Editing by Doina Chiacu)