By Sophie Knight and Sinead Carew TOKYO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Japan's SoftBank Corp cleared a major hurdle in its attempt to buy U.S. wireless provider Sprint Nextel Corp, as rival bidder Dish Network Corp declined to make a new offer after SoftBank sweetened its own bid last week. SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son is now a step closer to sealing the largest overseas acquisition by a Japanese company in history, after winning support from a key shareholder by raising SoftBank's offer to $21.6 billion from $20.1 billion last week. ...

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Acer Inc, the world's No.4 PC vendor, said on Wednesday that it expects notebook and tablet PC shipment to be flat in the second quarter from the first quarter, versus an prediction of 0-5 percent growth made in April. Acer Chairman J.T. Wang made the comment to reporters at the firm's annual shareholder meeting. ...

By Leila Abboud PARIS (Reuters) - Telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent plans to focus on networking products and high-speed broadband and will slim down with a billion euros in cost cuts by 2015 in a bid to reverse years of losses. The plan unveiled on Wednesday by Michel Combes, the company's new chief executive, will also include more than a billion euros of unspecified asset sales and 2 billion euros in debt re-financing by 2015, followed by a further 2 billion in debt reduction that could include issuing new shares. ...

(Reuters) - Britain's Vodafone Group Plc has raised its preliminary offer to buy Germany's largest cable operator, Kabel Deutschland Holding AG, a day after U.S. media group Liberty Global Plc made a rival bid, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the bid. Bloomberg reported that Vodafone told Kabel Deutschland this week that it would be willing to pay 85 euros a share compared with its initial offer of 80 euros to 82 euros for the German company. Vodafone is said to be studying Kabel Duetschland's books before making an official offer, Bloomberg said. ...

By Noel Randewich SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said he will license graphics technology to other companies, a new model for the chipmaker that could lead to new business with Apple, Samsung and other mobile device makers. Huang told the Reuters Global Technology Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday that licensing graphics cores and visual patents would help Nvidia take greater advantage of the booming market for smartphones and tablets and tap markets it could not reach through selling its own chips. ...

By Mari Saito TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp's top investor Daniel Loeb will miss its shareholder meeting on Thursday and those attending will not be considering his proposal to partially spin off the lucrative entertainment business, sources familiar with the matter said. But his suggestion, which strikes at the heart of whether Sony remains both a consumer electronics maker and a provider of music, movies and TV programs, will be the elephant in the room at the annual gathering - and for months to come. ...

TOKYO (AP) — On the Internet, no one can save you from yourself. That is a lesson many Japanese politicians have learned recently in painful, awkward and at times costly fashion.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Michael Hastings, the war correspondent whose unflinching reporting from Afghanistan led to the resignation of a top U.S. army general, has died in a car accident in Los Angeles, according to his employer and family.

(Reuters) - Rhode Island remains on track to make a $2.5 million interest payment next year on bonds that were used to finance the facilities of 38 Studios, a now-bankrupt videogame company founded by former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling. The state's House Finance Committee approved a budget late Tuesday night that included making an interest payment next May on $75 million of taxable bonds that the state sold in 2010 to make a loan to the company and lure it to Rhode Island. The company's loan payments were originally supposed to secure the bonds. ...

Welcome to the NASA Grand Challenge, where everyone from government agencies to citizen scientists will compete to figure out the best way to detect and study earth-threatening asteroids. This is a real thing that is happening, and it's all complimentary to the agency's initiative to lasso an asteroid for further study. 

By Sruthi Ramakrishnan (Reuters) - Adobe Systems Inc, known for its Photoshop and Acrobat software, reported a higher-than-expected adjusted second-quarter profit and said demand rose for Creative Cloud, the subscription-based version of its flagship software package. The company said it expects the number of paid subscribers for Creative Cloud in the current quarter to top the 221,000 subscribers who signed up in the second quarter, increasing the total to 700,000. The company added 153,000 subscribers in the first quarter. ...

(Reuters) - Eastman Kodak Co on Tuesday said it will seek court approval for a $406 million rights offering that could give creditors a big equity stake in the company after it emerges from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Kodak said creditors agreed to backstop an offering that would let the Rochester, New York-based company issue 34 million common shares at $11.94 each, equal to about 85 percent of the equity of a reorganized company. ...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dish Network Corp said it would not make a new offer to buy No. 3 U.S. wireless provider Sprint Nextel in time for a Tuesday deadline and will instead focus on its tender offer for Clearwire Corp. The decision may be good news for Japan's SoftBank Corp, which is also trying to buy Sprint. Satellite TV provider Dish said in a statement that it was not practical for it to submit a revised offer by the June 18 deadline imposed by Sprint even though it "continues to see strategic value in a merger with Sprint. ...

By Jim Finkle BOSTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said that an assault it led earlier this month on one of the world's biggest cyber crime rings has freed at least 2 million PCs infected with a virus believed to have been used to steal more than $500 million from bank accounts worldwide. "We definitely have liberated at least 2 million PCs globally. That is a conservative estimate," Richard Domingues Boscovich, assistant general counsel with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, said in an interview on Tuesday. ...

(Reuters) - Billionaire investor Carl Icahn promised Dell Inc shareholders that the company would buy back up to $16 billion of stock if they join his campaign to stop the computer maker from going private. Time is running out for Icahn. Next month, the company's shareholders will vote on whether to accept a $24.4 billion bid from the company's founder, Michael Dell, and private equity firm Silver Lake, and so far shareholders' reaction to two of Icahn's proposals has been mixed. Icahn has said repeatedly that Michael Dell's bid undervalues the company. ...

Google has filed a motion to end the gag order on the secret FISA court requests that it gets from the government as a part of the National Security Agencies surveillance, which could work considering how recent efforts to reveal the secrets of the secret court have gone. Just the other day, right after we all learned about PRISM, the court granted the Electronic Frontier Foundation a legal victory in its battle to uncover some of the secret courts secrets. Of course, that was just one tiny step in the path toward more transparency. ...

By Diane Bartz WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mississippi's attorney general said on Tuesday he would subpoena documents from Google Inc as part of a probe into allegations the Web search company facilitated the sale of drugs without a prescription and other illegal products. Google responded in a blog post that it had been vigorous in working to limit drug advertisements to legitimate companies that comply with the law and to combat what it called "rogue online pharmacies. ...

Obama's speech today comes 50 years after JFK's landmark address.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Afghan president on Wednesday suspended talks with the United States on a new security deal to protest the way his government was being left out of initial peace negotiations with the Taliban meant to find a way to end the nearly 12-year war.

A new film claims the official government report on the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 is an elaborate fabrication, but the most shocking part of the story is that charges are being leveled by some of the very investigators who put the report together. Six experts who appear in the film were members of the National Transportation Safety Board investigation team that concluded the crash was an accident, but they now claim they were silenced by their superiors. The movies, "TWA Flight 800" will debut on EPIX TV next month, on the 17-year anniversary of the crash.

BERLIN (AP) — Trying to tamp down concerns about government over-reach, President Barack Obama on Wednesday defended U.S. Internet and phone surveillance programs as narrowly targeted efforts that have saved lives and thwarted at least 50 terror threats.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan's president says he will not pursue peace talks with the Taliban unless the United States steps out of the negotiations and the militant group stops its violent attacks on the ground.

Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about today:

MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — Al-Qaida-linked militants detonated multiple bomb blasts and breached the main U.N. compound in Mogadishu on Wednesday, sparking gun battles with security forces that killed at least 12 people. U.N. personnel who reached the compound's secure bunker all survived, though officials hinted not all reached that bunker.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses despite an Obama administration directive to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts enacted this year, according to a GOP senator.

SAO PAULO (AP) — Tens of thousands of Brazilians again flooded the streets of the country's biggest city to raise a collective cry against a longstanding lament — people are weighed down by high taxes and high prices but get low-quality public services and a system of government infected with corruption.

ASHLAND, Ohio (AP) — A woman told authorities she was held captive for more than a year by three people who forced her to do housework, raided her bank account and menaced her with snakes and pit bulls.

The image was stark: a silent, solitary figure standing in passive defiance to the Turkish prime minister's demand for protesters to clear Taksim Square in central Istanbul.

The zoo in Novosibirsk, Russia's third-largest city, is home to a unique animal — the liliger. That's a big cat breed where the father is a lion and the mother is a lion-tiger hybrid, called a liger.

MIAMI (AP) — When LeBron James' greatness almost wasn't good enough, officials began preparing for a San Antonio celebration.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican lawmakers have a message for those who want the party to soften its emphasis on social conservatism in hopes of reaching a wider national audience: Not so fast.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supporters of a far-reaching immigration bill in the Senate see fresh momentum from a report by the Congressional Budget Office that says the measure would boost the economy and reduce federal deficits by billions of dollars.

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. (AP) — Cher is no stranger to tabloid fodder.