1. CORRECTED - UPDATE 5-BlackBerry maker sheds 5 pct after apps offer


    * Shares of RIM drop 5 pct in morning Nasdaq tradeTORONTO, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Shares of Research In Motion dropped more than 5 percent on Monday after it sought to appease disgruntled BlackBerry customers by offering free apps and technical support to make up for last week’s global smartphone outage.Tens of millions of BlackBerry users were left without mobile email and other messaging for up to four days last week after a failure at a RIM data center in England triggered a service disruption across five continents.RIM will offer premium apps worth more than $100 to customers and a month of technical support for businesses free of charge, hoping to stem fresh defections from the BlackBerry, whose market share was already shrinking before the incident.Analysts have said RIM needs to quickly repair the damage to its image caused by the outage and stem the loss of corporate customers who are now questioning the reliability of the BlackBerry.”RIM has responded swiftly but this won’t undo the damage done to its reputation,” analyst Geoff Blaber at CCS Insight told Reuters earlier on Monday. “This may go some way to appeasing customers but what’s critical is that the problem does not repeat itself.”The stock was trading 5.1 percent lower at $22.75 on the Nasdaq by 11:30 a.m. It has shed more than 60 percent of its value since the start of the year.The BlackBerry has in recent years lost market share to Apple Inc’s iPhone and devices powered by Google’s Android system. At the same time it has sought to make deeper inroads beyond its core corporate base, with a special focus on younger consumers and in emerging markets.Highlighting the challenges, Apple said it sold 4 million of its new iPhone 4S in the first three days after launch last week.”DEEPLY GRATEFUL”RIM co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie told Reuters on Monday the company wanted to make amends with customers.”This is our way of expressing appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions and a tangible way of telling them how deeply grateful we are for their continued business,” he said in a phone interview.Balsillie declined to estimate how much the offer would cost RIM and said he was unable to say whether RIM might have to revise its earnings forecast for the current quarter, which ends in late November.The financial impact could prove sizable if a large enough portion of RIM’s more than 70 million subscribers take up the offers.Balsillie said RIM was not running any tests on its network at the time of the failure and was still investigating the precise cause of the breakdown, the company’s worst ever.The free apps on offer include games such as Bejeweled, and premium versions of a translation service and the music discovery tool Shazam.Richard Levick, who runs a U.S. consultancy that specializes in crisis management, praised the move but said the company should have made the announcement last week.”I think it’s a good start, but they are always late,” he said. “They are always behind the curve.”Francisco Jeronimo, an analysts at IDC, had a different perspective on the offer. He said the decision was a clever move by RIM because it would help customers to discover the app service.He said the company was likely to have struck a deal with app developers to keep the cost down.”For RIM, this is an interesting way to attract users to the App World and incentivise them to search and download apps,” he said.”More important than the offer itself, is that RIM is showing goodwill and being humble. They recognized the problem, apologized and now they are compensating their users.”

  2. No final decision yet on Bahrain arms sale - U.S.


    WASHINGTON Oct 14 (Reuters) - The United States held out the possibility on Friday it may not sell $53 million in arms to Bahrain, saying it had not made a final decision to transfer the materiel and human rights would weigh in its assessment.The Pentagon on Sept. 14 notified Congress of its intent to sell more than 44 armored Humvees and 300 TOW missiles to Bahrain, whose crackdown on a popular uprising this year has prompted some U.S. lawmakers to oppose the sale.”This is a notification about future intent,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters. “We will continue to take human rights into consideration as we make future decisions about this.”Senator Ron Wyden and Representative James McGovern, both Democrats, have introduced resolutions in Congress to prevent the sale “until meaningful steps are taken to improve human rights” there.As the so-called “Arab spring” swept authoritarian governments from power in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, Bahrain’s Shi’ite majority turned up the political heat in the island country.The Sunni ruling family in the Gulf Arab state has put down the pro-democracy uprising with the help of neighboring Saudi Arabia and of the United Arab Emirates.Many Shi’ite areas are witnessing almost nightly clashes with police. Opposition groups say heavy-handed police tactics are worsening tension on the street.About 30 people, mainly Shi’ites, died when the protest movement erupted in February, but ongoing clashes and deaths in police custody have taken the total past 40, according to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.”Proceeding with the announced arms sale to Bahrain without modification under the current circumstances weakens U.S. credibility at a critical time of political transition in the Middle East,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio wrote Secretary off State Hillary Clinton in a letter on Thursday.It is relatively rare for U.S. lawmakers to oppose such arms sales because they are typically vetted with Congress before they become public.Prime contractors for the arms sale would be AM GeneralRaytheon Co , according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the part of the Pentagon that oversees foreign arms sales.

  3. Lehman Europe creditors in line for 2012 payout


    PwC, appointed administrator to Lehman Brothers’ European division when the bank collapsed in September 2008, said it had raised some 1.8 billion pounds ($2.8 billion) in cash from the unit’s assets in the last six months, bringing the total so far to 12.6 billion pounds.