Today's news bullets:

- Icahn's efforts to unseat Yahoo's board has picked up new backers, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens bought 10 millions shares. In addition, Third Point LLC, the activist hedge-fund firm run by Daniel Loeb has bought four million shares in Yahoo since March.

"One person close to Yahoo said some at the company believe Mr. Icahn doesn't have a reasonable chance of unseating its directors under the current circumstances because of shareholder support for the company. That support includes a 10% combined stake held by cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo and a roughly 10% stake held by the Capital World Investors division of Capital Research & Management Co., this person said. It's unclear whether Capital World Investors has expressed such support to Yahoo in any definitive way."

- Microsoft, the World’s Worst Poker Player... Heidi Moore explains, "Yahoo, for its own part, may be inviting the wolf at the door to dinner — and not realizing that it is the main dish — by expecting help from Google. Yahoo’s Panama was originally designed to take market share from Google, but failed. Analysts believe that an ad pact with Google may benefit Yahoo for a year or maybe two. Then Google could use its greater power, market share and innovation to crush Yahoo. Great competitive strategy.

If Microsoft wants to distract Yahoo management from signing a pact with Google, maybe this new “deal” could help in the most obvious manner by giving Yahoo executives and board members more paper to sift through. But Microsoft got nowhere on its own in these negotiations in four months. If Carl Icahn and other shareholders have jumped in to do the dirty work and already put their weight behind a $33 a share bid, Microsoft should stand back and let them. Why confuse the issue?"

- Microsoft-Yahoo, Upgrading to a New Version? "Under the newer version, Microsoft would acquire just the parts of Yahoo it wants -- the search-advertising business and Yahoo's Asian assets -while also taking a minority stake in Yahoo.

The news that Yahoo has even talked to Microsoft about such a proposal has Tim Sweeney over at Seeking Alpha writing: "So you won't sell the whole company to Microsoft for $33 a shar

e, but you will sell your two biggest engines for growth and let a competitor take a minority interest in Yahoo. Can't wait to see how much the shareholders can anticipate getting from this deal."

- Yahoo Is Haunted by the Ghost of AOL Past, If Yahoo has any worry about doing a deal with Microsoft, it should look at the fate of AOL. "The change in value over the past 30 months alone is a stunning reversal." Dennis explains, "AOL's value should be growing -- not shrinking -- as more people buy shoes, plan travel or trade sewing patterns online. Meanwhile, the promise of AOL's third-party ad services shows that this value is being leeched away by more-focused interlopers.

Yahoo has long argued that it wouldn't be caught in the same currents. By clearing out its bureaucracy it could uncover a new source of earnings. It may well ask Google to handle some of the search-advertising work, a partnership that could supposedly create $1 billion in fresh cash flow.

But the question for Yahoo's board shouldn't be whether it can increase its cash flow. It is whether it can improve its stock price, over a reasonable period of time, greater than a Microsoft offer. A growing chorus of shareholders think it can't.

So, the basics: AOL can't succeed at being Yahoo; Yahoo can't succeed at being Google; Microsoft can't succeed at being any of them. Nonetheless, Microsoft has the fantasy it wants to be Google. How could Yahoo's board do anything but take a decent offer and bank it?"

- Eight former AOL executives were charged with fraud for inflating Internet advertising revenues by more than $1bn as a result of the merger with Time Warner.

- Google Query Growth Solid, Yahoo Crappy according to Comscore. "Google gained share: 61.6% of US queries, up from 59.8% in March

Yahoo dropped almost another full point, to 20.4%. Query volume shrank for the third consecutive month, down -1.5%. Slowly but surely, Yahoo's query share is heading toward zero. Microsoft, meanwhile, also lost share, but at least its queries grew year over year--up 9.4%. Ask? Don't ask. Down to 4.3%. AOL dropped, too, to 4.6%."

- Russia's Yandex plans up to $2 billion in New York IPO, Reuters reported. "Russian biggest internet firm Yandex plans to raise between $1.5 billion and $2.0 billion in a New-York initial public offering in autumn this year."

According to Reuters, Yandex had appointed Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Renaissance Capital to organise an IPO on Nasdaq.