The Week: A Roundup of This Week’s Science News

“Science,” a colleague once said at a meeting, “is a mighty enterprise, which is really rather quite topical.” He was so right: as we continue to enhance our coverage of the scientific world, we always aim to keep the latest news front and center.

His observation seemed like a nice way to introduce this column, which will highlight the week’s developments in health and science news and glance at what’s ahead. This past week, for instance, the mighty enterprise of science addressed itself to such newsy topics as the flu (there’s still time to get vaccinated!), and mental illness and gun control.

In addition to the big-headline stories that invite wisdom from scientists, each week there is a drumbeat of purely scientific and medical news that emerges from academic journals, fieldwork and elsewhere. These developments, from the quirky to the abstruse, often make their way into the daily news cycle, depending on the strength of the research behind them. (Well, that’s how we judge them, anyway.)

Many discoveries are hard to unravel. “In a way, science is antithetical to everything that has to do with a newspaper,” the same colleague observed. “You couldn’t imagine anything less consumer-friendly.”

Let’s aim to fix that. Below, a selection of the week’s stories.

DEVELOPMENTS

Health

Strange, but Effective

People with a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile — which kills 14,000 Americans a year — have a startling cure: a transplant of someone else’s feces into their digestive system, which introduces good bacteria that the gut needs to fight off the bad. For some people, antibiotics don’t fix this problem, but an infusion of diluted stool from a healthy person seems to do the trick.

Genetics

Dig We Must

Hillery Metz and Hopi Hoekstra/Harvard University

Evolutionary biologists at Harvard took a tiny species of deer mice, known for building elaborate burrows with long tunnels, and bred it with another species of deer mice, which builds short-tunneled burrows. Comparing the DNA of the original mice with their offspring, the biologists pinpointed four regions of genetic code that help tell the mice what kind of burrow to construct.

Aerospace

Launch, Then Inflate

Uncredited/Bigelow Aerospace, via Associated Press

NASA signed a contract for an inflatable space habitat — roughly pineapple-shaped, with walls of floppy cloth — that will ideally be appended to the International Space Station in 2015. NASA aims to use the pod to test inflatable technology in space, but the company that builds these things, Bigelow Aerospace, has bigger ambitions: think of a 12-person apartment and laboratory in the sky, with two months’ rent at north of $26 million.

Biology

What’s Green and Flies?

Jodi Rowley/Australian Museum

National Geographic reported on an Australian researcher working in Vietnam who discovered a great-looking new species of flying frog. Described as having flappy forearms (the better for gliding), the three-and-a-half-inch-long frog likes to “parachute” from tree to tree, Jodi Rowley, an amphibian biologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, told the magazine. She named it Helen’s Flying Frog, for her mother.

Privacy

That’s Joe’s DNA!

People who volunteer their genetic information for the betterment of science — and are assured anonymity — may find that their privacy is not a slam dunk. A researcher who set out to crack the identities of a few men whose genomes appeared in a public database was able to do so using genealogical Web sites (where people upload parts of their genomes to try to find relatives) as well as some simple search tools. He was trying to test the database’s security, but even he did not expect it to be so easy.

Genetics

An On/Off Switch for Disease

Geneticists have long puzzled over what it is that activates a disease in one person but not in another — even in identical twins. Now researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who studied people with rheumatoid arthritis have identified a pattern of chemical tags that tell genes whether to turn on or not. In rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system attacks the body, and it is thought the tags enable the attack.

Planetary Science

That Red Planet

Everybody loves Mars, and we’re all secretly hoping that NASA’s plucky little rover finds evidence of life there. Meanwhile, a separate NASA craft — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been looping the planet since 2006 — took some pictures of a huge crater that looks as if it once held a lake fed by groundwater. It is too soon to say if the lake held living things, but NASA’s news release did include the happy phrase “clues to subsurface habitability.”

COMING UP

Animal Testing

Retiring Chimps

Emily Wabitsch/European Pressphoto Agency

A lot of people have strong feelings about the use of chimpanzees in biomedical and behavioral experiments, and the National Institutes of Health has been listening. On Tuesday, the agency is to release its recommendations for curtailing chimp research in a big way. This will be but a single step in a long process and it will apply only to the chimps the agency owns, but it may well stir big reactions from many constituencies.

Read More..

The Week: A Roundup of This Week’s Science News

“Science,” a colleague once said at a meeting, “is a mighty enterprise, which is really rather quite topical.” He was so right: as we continue to enhance our coverage of the scientific world, we always aim to keep the latest news front and center.

His observation seemed like a nice way to introduce this column, which will highlight the week’s developments in health and science news and glance at what’s ahead. This past week, for instance, the mighty enterprise of science addressed itself to such newsy topics as the flu (there’s still time to get vaccinated!), and mental illness and gun control.

In addition to the big-headline stories that invite wisdom from scientists, each week there is a drumbeat of purely scientific and medical news that emerges from academic journals, fieldwork and elsewhere. These developments, from the quirky to the abstruse, often make their way into the daily news cycle, depending on the strength of the research behind them. (Well, that’s how we judge them, anyway.)

Many discoveries are hard to unravel. “In a way, science is antithetical to everything that has to do with a newspaper,” the same colleague observed. “You couldn’t imagine anything less consumer-friendly.”

Let’s aim to fix that. Below, a selection of the week’s stories.

DEVELOPMENTS

Health

Strange, but Effective

People with a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile — which kills 14,000 Americans a year — have a startling cure: a transplant of someone else’s feces into their digestive system, which introduces good bacteria that the gut needs to fight off the bad. For some people, antibiotics don’t fix this problem, but an infusion of diluted stool from a healthy person seems to do the trick.

Genetics

Dig We Must

Hillery Metz and Hopi Hoekstra/Harvard University

Evolutionary biologists at Harvard took a tiny species of deer mice, known for building elaborate burrows with long tunnels, and bred it with another species of deer mice, which builds short-tunneled burrows. Comparing the DNA of the original mice with their offspring, the biologists pinpointed four regions of genetic code that help tell the mice what kind of burrow to construct.

Aerospace

Launch, Then Inflate

Uncredited/Bigelow Aerospace, via Associated Press

NASA signed a contract for an inflatable space habitat — roughly pineapple-shaped, with walls of floppy cloth — that will ideally be appended to the International Space Station in 2015. NASA aims to use the pod to test inflatable technology in space, but the company that builds these things, Bigelow Aerospace, has bigger ambitions: think of a 12-person apartment and laboratory in the sky, with two months’ rent at north of $26 million.

Biology

What’s Green and Flies?

Jodi Rowley/Australian Museum

National Geographic reported on an Australian researcher working in Vietnam who discovered a great-looking new species of flying frog. Described as having flappy forearms (the better for gliding), the three-and-a-half-inch-long frog likes to “parachute” from tree to tree, Jodi Rowley, an amphibian biologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, told the magazine. She named it Helen’s Flying Frog, for her mother.

Privacy

That’s Joe’s DNA!

People who volunteer their genetic information for the betterment of science — and are assured anonymity — may find that their privacy is not a slam dunk. A researcher who set out to crack the identities of a few men whose genomes appeared in a public database was able to do so using genealogical Web sites (where people upload parts of their genomes to try to find relatives) as well as some simple search tools. He was trying to test the database’s security, but even he did not expect it to be so easy.

Genetics

An On/Off Switch for Disease

Geneticists have long puzzled over what it is that activates a disease in one person but not in another — even in identical twins. Now researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who studied people with rheumatoid arthritis have identified a pattern of chemical tags that tell genes whether to turn on or not. In rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system attacks the body, and it is thought the tags enable the attack.

Planetary Science

That Red Planet

Everybody loves Mars, and we’re all secretly hoping that NASA’s plucky little rover finds evidence of life there. Meanwhile, a separate NASA craft — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been looping the planet since 2006 — took some pictures of a huge crater that looks as if it once held a lake fed by groundwater. It is too soon to say if the lake held living things, but NASA’s news release did include the happy phrase “clues to subsurface habitability.”

COMING UP

Animal Testing

Retiring Chimps

Emily Wabitsch/European Pressphoto Agency

A lot of people have strong feelings about the use of chimpanzees in biomedical and behavioral experiments, and the National Institutes of Health has been listening. On Tuesday, the agency is to release its recommendations for curtailing chimp research in a big way. This will be but a single step in a long process and it will apply only to the chimps the agency owns, but it may well stir big reactions from many constituencies.

Read More..

DealBook: Michael Dell’s Empire in a Buyout Spotlight

The computer empire of Michael S. Dell spreads across a campus of low-slung buildings in Round Rock, Tex.

But his financial empire — estimated at $16 billion — occupies the 21st floor of a dark glass skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

It is there that MSD Capital, started by Mr. Dell 15 years ago to manage his fortune, has quietly built a reputation as one of the smartest investors on Wall Street. By amassing a prodigious portfolio of stocks, companies, real estate and timberland, Mr. Dell has reduced his exposure to the volatile technology sector and branched out into businesses as diverse as dentistry and landscaping.

Now, Mr. Dell is on the verge of making one of the biggest investments of his life. The 47-year-old billionaire and his private equity backers are locked in talks to acquire Dell, the company he started with $1,000 as a teenager three decades ago, in a leveraged buyout worth more than $20 billion. MSD could play a role in the Dell takeover, according to people briefed on the deal.

The private equity firm Silver Lake has been in negotiations to join with Mr. Dell on a transaction, along with other potential partners like wealthy Asian investors or foreign funds. Mr. Dell would be expected to roll his nearly 16 percent ownership of the company into the buyout, a stake valued at about $3.5 billion. He could also contribute additional personal money as part of the buyout.

That money is managed by MSD, among the more prominent so-called family offices that are set up to handle the personal investments of the wealthy. Others with large family offices include Bill Gates, whose Microsoft wealth financed the firm Cascade Investment, and New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who set up his firm, Willett Advisors, in 2010 to manage his personal and philanthropic assets.

“Some of these family offices are among the world’s most sophisticated investors and have the capital and talent to compete with the largest private equity firms and hedge funds,” said John P. Rompon, managing partner of McNally Capital, which helps structure private equity deals for family offices.

A spokesman for MSD declined to comment for this article. The buyout talks could still fall apart.

In 1998, Mr. Dell, then just 33 years old — and his company’s stock worth three times what it is today — decided to diversify his wealth and set up MSD. He staked the firm with $400 million of his own money, effectively starting his own personal money-management business.

To head the operation, Mr. Dell hired Glenn R. Fuhrman, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and John C. Phelan, a principal at ESL Investments, the hedge fund run by Edward S. Lampert. He knew both men from his previous dealings with Wall Street. Mr. Fuhrman led a group at Goldman that marketed specialized investments like private equity and real estate to wealthy families like the Dells. And Mr. Dell was an early investor in Mr. Lampert’s fund.

Mr. Fuhrman and Mr. Phelan still run MSD and preside over a staff of more than 100 overseeing Mr. Dell’s billions and the assets in his family foundation. MSD investments include a stock portfolio, with positions in the apparel company PVH, owner of the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, and DineEquity, the parent of IHOP and Applebee’s.

Among its real estate holdings are the Four Seasons Resort Maui in Hawaii and a stake in the New York-based developer Related Companies.

MSD also has investments in several private businesses, including ValleyCrest, which bills itself as the country’s largest landscape design company, and DentalOne Partners, a collection of dental practices.

Perhaps MSD’s most prominent deal came in 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis, when it joined a consortium that acquired the assets of the collapsed mortgage lender IndyMac Bank from the federal government for about $13.9 billion and renamed it OneWest Bank.

The OneWest purchase has been wildly successful. Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman executive who led the OneWest deal, has said that the bank is expected to consider an initial public offering this year. An I.P.O. would generate big profits for Mr. Dell and his co-investors, according to people briefed on the deal.

Another arm of MSD makes select investments in outside hedge funds. Mr. Dell invested in the first fund raised by Silver Lake, the technology-focused private equity firm that might now become his partner in taking Dell private.
MSD’s principals have already made tidy fortunes. In 2009, Mr. Fuhrman, 47, paid $26 million for the Park Avenue apartment of the former Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard S. Fuld. Mr. Phelan, 48, and his wife, Amy, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, also live in a Park Avenue co-op and built a home in Aspen, Colo.

Both are influential players on the contemporary art scene, with ARTNews magazine last year naming each of them among the world’s top 200 collectors. MSD, too, has dabbled in the visual arts. In 2010, MSD bought an archive of vintage photos from Magnum, including portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mahatma Gandhi, and has put the collection on display at the University of Texas, Mr. Dell’s alma mater.

Just as the investment firms Rockefeller & Company (the Rockefellers, diversifying their oil fortune) and Bessemer Trust (the Phippses, using the name of the steelmaking process that formed the basis of their wealth) started out as investment vehicles for a single family, MSD has recently shown signs of morphing into a traditional money management business with clients beside Mr. Dell.

Last year, for the fourth time, an MSD affiliate raised money from outside investors when it collected about $1 billion for a stock-focused hedge fund, MSD Torchlight Partners. A 2010 fund investing in distressed European assets also manages about $1 billion. The Dell family is the anchor investor in each of the funds, according to people briefed on the investments.

MSD has largely remained below the radar, though its name emerged a decade ago in the criminal trial of the technology banker Frank Quattrone on obstruction of justice charges. Prosecutors introduced an e-mail that Mr. Fuhrman sent to Mr. Quattrone during the peak of the dot-com boom in which he pleaded for a large allotment of a popular Internet initial public offering.

“We know this is a tough one, but we wanted to ask for a little help with our Corvis allocation,” Mr. Fuhrman wrote. “We are looking forward to making you our ‘go to’ banker.”

The e-mail, which was not illegal, was meant to show the quid pro quo deals that were believed to have been struck between Mr. Quattrone and corporate chieftains like Mr. Dell — the bankers would give executives hot I.P.O.’s and the executives, in exchange, would hold out the possibility of giving business to the bankers. (Mr. Quattrone’s conviction was reversed on appeal.)

The MSD team has also shown itself to be loyal to its patron in other ways.

On the MSD Web site, in the frequently asked questions section, the firm asks and answers queries like “how many employees do you have” and “what kind of investments do you make.”

In the last question on the list, MSD asks itself, “Do you use Dell computer equipment?” The answer: “Exclusively!”

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 19, 2013

An article on Friday about MSD Capital, an investment firm started by Michael S. Dell to manage his fortune, misstated, in some editions, the year its energy hedge fund raised $1 billion from outside investors. It was in 2011, not earlier this year. (Another of the firm's hedge funds, the MSD Torchlight Partners fund, raised $1 billion in 2012).

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/18/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Michael Dell’s Empire In a Buyout Spotlight.

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DealBook: China’s Focus on Aerospace Raises Security Questions

TIANJIN, China — When Airbus executives arrived here seven years ago scouting for a location to assemble passenger jets, the broad, flat expanse next to Tianjin Binhai International Airport was a grassy field.

Now, Airbus, the European aerospace giant, has 20 large buildings and is churning out four A320 jetliners a month for mostly Chinese state-controlled carriers. The company also has two new neighbors — a sprawling rocket factory and a helicopter manufacturing complex — both producing for the Chinese military.

The rapid expansion of civilian and military aerospace manufacturing in Tianjin reflects China’s broader ambitions.

As Beijing’s leaders try to find new ways to invest $3 trillion of foreign reserves, the country has been aggressively expanding in industries with strong economic potential. The Chinese government and state-owned companies have already made a major push into financial services and natural resources, acquiring stakes in Morgan Stanley and Blackstone and buying oil and gas fields around the world.

Aerospace represents the latest frontier for China, which is eyeing parts manufacturers, materials producers, leasing businesses, cargo airlines and airport operators. The country now rivals the United States as a market for civilian airliners, which China hopes to start supplying from domestic production. And the new leadership named at the Party Congress in November has publicly emphasized long-range missiles and other aerospace programs in its push for military modernization.

If Boeing’s difficulties with its recently grounded aircraft, the Dreamliner, weigh on the industry, it could create opportunity. Chinese companies, which have plenty of capital, have been welcomed by some American companies as a way to create jobs. Wall Street has been eager, too, at a time when other merger activity has been weak.

Washington is trying to figure out what to do about China’s deal-making broadly. “Many of these transactions raise important security issues for our country,” said Michael R. Wessel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was created by Congress to monitor the bilateral relationship. “China’s interest in promoting these investments isn’t necessarily consistent with our own interests, and it’s appropriate to thoroughly examine the transactions.”

In aerospace, the Chinese deal-makers have deep ties to the military, raising additional issues for American regulators. The main contractor for the country’s air force, the state-owned China Aviation Industry Corporation, known as Avic, has set up a private equity fund to purchase companies with so-called dual-use technology that has civilian and military applications, with the goal of investing as much as $3 billion. In 2010, Avic acquired the overseas licensing rights for small aircraft made by Epic Aircraft of Bend, Ore., using lightweight yet strong carbon-fiber composites — the same material used for high-performance fighter jets.

Provincial and local government agencies in Shaanxi province, a hub of Chinese military aircraft testing and production, have set up another, similar-sized fund for acquisitions. Last month, a consortium of Chinese investors, including the Shaanxi fund, struck a $4.23 billion deal with the American International Group to buy 80 percent of the International Lease Finance Corporation, which owns the world’s second-largest passenger jet fleet.

“There has always been an obvious cross-fertilization of ideas, expertise and money between the civilian and military,” said Martin Craigs, a longtime aerospace executive in Asia who is now the chairman of the Aerospace Forum Asia, a nonprofit group in Hong Kong. He added that Chinese companies had been actively hiring senior American and European aerospace engineers, so national security concerns could be quelled some by hiring the right people.

The push into aerospace coincides with growing worries in the West and across Asia about China’s increasingly assertive territorial claims, including the dispatch of Chinese warships to waters long patrolled by Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Coincidentally, hours after the A.I.G. deal was announced, two Chinese navy destroyers and two frigates showed up in disputed waters patrolled by Japan. China and Japan have stepped up public criticisms of each other since. And the Obama administration has begun a strategic “pivot,” shifting military forces from the Mideast back to the western Pacific, a move that Chinese officials have criticized as an attempt to contain their country.

Such confrontations in the region are drawing attention to China’s deal-making ambitions.

In October, a $1.79 billion bid by a business linked to Beijing’s municipal government to acquire the corporate jet and propeller plane operations of bankrupt Hawker Beechcraft in Wichita, Kan., fell apart over national security concerns in Washington. Executives found it hard to disentangle the civilian operations from the company’s military contracting business.

But many aerospace experts predict that Chinese investors and companies will find ways to appease American regulators. “There will be concerns undoubtedly and generally quite valid, but the commercial imperatives are such that people will find a way around them,” said Peter Harbison, the chairman of CAPA-Center for Aviation, a global aerospace consulting firm.

The sale of A.I.G.’s leasing business is expected to face scrutiny by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the government panel that reviews the national security implications of deals involving foreign buyers.

The group’s customers include many of the largest carriers in the United States, and the federal government has long counted on being able to use civilian passenger jets to transport troops overseas during a national emergency. When Saddam Hussein sent the Iraqi army into Kuwait in 1990, the Defense Department relied on the emergency mobilization of civilian jetliners to ferry 60 percent of the soldiers sent to and from the Mideast during the first Persian Gulf war and a quarter of the cargo, according to a RAND study.

Henri Courpron, the chief executive of A.I.G.’s International Lease Finance Corporation, said that he did not believe the United States should be concerned that the acquisition would prevent civilian aircraft from being available in a future crisis. Only 8 percent of the company’s aircraft are currently leased to American air carriers, and most of these are narrow-body aircraft that lack the range to ferry troops across oceans.

“It’s really a nonissue — we have 900-plus aircraft in our fleet, and there are only 11 wide bodies” currently being leased to American carriers, he said in a telephone interview. He added that the carriers have control over the aircraft during the leases. Executives from the consortium buying the stake in the leasing company declined repeated requests for interviews.

Chinese suitors in the aerospace industry understand the concerns. In part, they watched the experience in the natural resources industry. The China National Offshore Oil Corporation failed in its 2005 bid to acquire Unocal after intense political opposition. After that, Chinese energy giants have been more cautious, pursuing minority stakes in the United States and limiting their outright acquisitions.

Chinese companies are taking a similar tack in aerospace, pursuing joint ventures and technical cooperation agreements alongside acquisitions. For example, Avic is working with General Electric and other American aerospace companies on the production of a civilian jetliner, the C919. Beijing envisions the narrow-body C919 as the next step toward building a domestic aerospace business that can compete with Boeing and Airbus.

Western companies and their advisers say that they are acutely aware that technology transfers could help China strengthen its military and develop more competitive civil airplanes, and are taking precautions to protect trade secrets and national security. “You transfer the part that is most easily reverse engineered, or easily dissected,” said a lawyer with detailed knowledge of these transactions.

But many in the aerospace sector are more skeptical that the West can avoid losing control of technology. “The mentality is, they’re going to find a way to get there anyway, and we may as well get there with them,” Mr. Harbison of the CAPA-Center for Aviation said.

Airbus executives say that they are being prudent. They add that there are few trade secrets about the A320 manufactured here, an aircraft that was designed in 1986. “The A320 is well known all over the world,” said Jean-Luc Charles, the general manager of Airbus’s operations here.

A tour of the main assembly area, a hangar with gray steel walls and large red cranes overhead, suggests that it may be possible to protect the technology. The seats are installed here and the aircraft painted, but the factory is largely assembling planes from kits imported from Europe. Entire fuselages, with green protective coatings, are brought by ship from Hamburg, Germany. Even the stepladders and freight elevators give weight limits in German, and the tool boxes are labeled in English, not Chinese.

Mr. Charles said that 95 percent of the parts are still imported, and that it would take many years for that amount to shrink. “One by one, we start to give them the parts,” he said. “But each subassembly is a complex project — it takes five years.”

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DealBook: Thai Magnate's $11.2 Billion Bid Poised to Win Fraser & Neave

HONG KONG — After four months of fierce bidding between two Asian tycoons, a multibillion-dollar battle for control of Fraser & Neave appears to have reached its end.

A bidding deadline on Monday evening set by Singapore’s takeover regulator came and went, meaning the victor will probably be TCC Assets, which is controlled by Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi of Thailand. TCC Assets raised its offer on Friday to 9.55 Singapore dollars a share, valuing Fraser & Neave at 13.76 billion Singapore dollars ($11.19 billion).

That was apparently enough to chase away a counteroffer by Overseas Union Enterprise, which is part of the Indonesian billionaire Mochtar Riady’s Lippo Group and is led by Mr. Riady’s son Stephen.

Overseas Union had entered the contest for Fraser & Neave in November, when it bid 9.08 dollars a share.

Under the terms of the auction process — set last week by the takeover regulator, the Securities Industry Council, and intended to remove uncertainty for shareholders — Overseas Union had until 6 p.m. on Monday in Singapore to submit an increased offer.

Had it done so, TCC Assets would have had 24 hours to counter, and the auction would have continued until one of the parties failed to submit a counteroffer.

In a statement after the deadline passed, Overseas Union confirmed it had not made a new bid, saying that in order to succeed it “would need to significantly increase the offer price to a level which is no longer as attractive to Overseas Union, in particular, given the potential impact of the recent measures taken by the Singapore government in relation to the property market.”

Fraser & Neave, established in 1883 to sell carbonated drinks in Southeast Asia, owns businesses that include beverages, shopping centers and full-service apartments. In September, the company agreed to sell its controlling stake in Asia Pacific Breweries, the maker of Tiger Beer, to Heineken in a deal worth $4.6 billion.

TCC Assets already owned a 30 percent stake in Fraser & Neave, and in September made an initial takeover bid for the company at 8.88 dollars a share. Since then, TCC Assets has increased its stake to 40 percent. The Thai company’s revised bid on Friday represented a 5.2 percent premium to the offer submitted by Overseas Union in November.

The passing of Monday’s deadline without a new bid from Overseas Union means shareholders are likely to favor the higher offer from TCC Assets when they vote on the deal. A vote has yet to be scheduled.

Investors in Fraser & Neave have been bullish for months. On Monday, an hour before the deadline, the stock closed at a record high of 9.74 dollars. That was up 1.7 percent from the closing price on Friday and above any of the takeover bids that had been announced.

Overseas Union is being advised by Credit Suisse, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and C.I.M.B. of Malaysia. TCC Asset’s advisers are the United Overseas Bank, DBS of Singapore and Morgan Stanley.

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Well: Holly the Cat's Incredible Journey

Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor housecat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown.

Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach.

“Are you sure it’s the same cat?” wondered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, “the cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.”

But Holly not only had distinctive black-and-brown harlequin patterns on her fur, but also an implanted microchip to identify her.

“I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”

There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.

Scientists say it is more common, although still rare, to hear of dogs returning home, perhaps suggesting, Dr. Bradshaw said, that they have inherited wolves’ ability to navigate using magnetic clues. But it’s also possible that dogs get taken on more family trips, and that lost dogs are more easily noticed or helped by people along the way.

Cats navigate well around familiar landscapes, memorizing locations by sight and smell, and easily figuring out shortcuts, Dr. Bradshaw said.

Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,” Dr. Bateson said.

Peter Borchelt, a New York animal behaviorist, wondered if Holly followed the Florida coast by sight or sound, tracking Interstate 95 and deciding to “keep that to the right and keep the ocean to the left.”

But, he said, “nobody’s going to do an experiment and take a bunch of cats in different directions and see which ones get home.”

The closest, said Roger Tabor, a British cat biologist, may have been a 1954 study in Germany which cats placed in a covered circular maze with exits every 15 degrees most often exited in the direction of their homes, but more reliably if their homes were less than five kilometers away.

New research by the National Geographic and University of Georgia’s Kitty Cams Project, using video footage from 55 pet cats wearing video cameras on their collars, suggests cat behavior is exceedingly complex.

For example, the Kitty Cams study found that four of the cats were two-timing their owners, visiting other homes for food and affection. Not every cat, it seems, shares Holly’s loyalty.

KittyCams also showed most of the cats engaging in risky behavior, including crossing roads and “eating and drinking substances away from home,” risks Holly undoubtedly experienced and seems lucky to have survived.

But there have been other cats who made unexpected comebacks.

“It’s actually happened to me,” said Jackson Galaxy, a cat behaviorist who hosts “My Cat From Hell” on Animal Planet. While living in Boulder, Colo., he moved across town, whereupon his indoor cat, Rabbi, fled and appeared 10 days later at the previous house, “walking five miles through an area he had never been before,” Mr. Galaxy said.

Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.

Professor Tabor also said a Siamese in the English village of Black Notley repeatedly hopped a train, disembarked at White Notley, and walked several miles back to Black Notley.

Still, explaining such journeys is not black and white.

In the Florida case, one glimpse through the factual fog comes on the little cat’s feet. While Dr. Bradshaw speculated Holly might have gotten a lift, perhaps sneaking under the hood of a truck heading down I-95, her paws suggest she was not driven all the way, nor did Holly go lightly.

“Her pads on her feet were bleeding,” Ms. Richter said. “Her claws are worn weird. The front ones are really sharp, the back ones worn down to nothing.”

Scientists say that is consistent with a long walk, since back feet provide propulsion, while front claws engage in activities like tearing. The Richters also said Holly had gone from 13.5 to 7 pounds.

Holly hardly seemed an adventurous wanderer, though her background might have given her a genetic advantage. Her mother was a feral cat roaming the Richters’ mobile home park, and Holly was born inside somebody’s air-conditioner, Ms. Richter said. When, at about six weeks old, Holly padded into their carport and jumped into the lap of Mr. Richter’s mother, there were “scars on her belly from when the air conditioner was turned on,” Ms. Richter said.

Scientists say that such early experience was too brief to explain how Holly might have been comfortable in the wild — after all, she spent most of her life as an indoor cat, except for occasionally running outside to chase lizards. But it might imply innate personality traits like nimbleness or toughness.

“You’ve got these real variations in temperament,” Dr. Bekoff said. “Fish can by shy or bold; there seem to be shy and bold spiders. This cat, it could be she has the personality of a survivor.”

He said being an indoor cat would not extinguish survivalist behaviors, like hunting mice or being aware of the sun’s orientation.

The Richters — Bonnie, 63, a retired nurse, and Jacob, 70, a retired airline mechanics’ supervisor and accomplished bowler — began traveling with Holly only last year, and she easily tolerated a hotel, a cabin or the R.V.

But during the Good Sam R.V. Rally in Daytona, when they were camping near the speedway with 3,000 other motor homes, Holly bolted when Ms. Richter’s mother opened the door one night. Fireworks the next day may have further spooked her, and, after searching for days, alerting animal agencies and posting fliers, the Richters returned home catless.

Two weeks later, an animal rescue worker called the Richters to say a cat resembling Holly had been spotted eating behind the Daytona franchise of Hooters, where employees put out food for feral cats.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, Barb Mazzola, a 52-year-old university executive assistant, noticed a cat “barely standing” in her backyard in West Palm Beach, struggling even to meow. Over six days, Ms. Mazzola and her children cared for the cat, putting out food, including special milk for cats, and eventually the cat came inside.

They named her Cosette after the orphan in Les Misérables, and took her to a veterinarian, Dr. Sara Beg at Paws2Help. Dr. Beg said the cat was underweight and dehydrated, had “back claws and nail beds worn down, probably from all that walking on pavement,” but was “bright and alert” and had no parasites, heartworm or viruses. “She was hesitant and scared around people she didn’t know, so I don’t think she went up to people and got a lift,” Dr. Beg said. “I think she made the journey on her own.”

At Paws2Help, Ms. Mazzola said, “I almost didn’t want to ask, because I wanted to keep her, but I said, ‘Just check and make sure she doesn’t have a microchip.’” When told the cat did, “I just cried.”

The Richters cried, too upon seeing Holly, who instantly relaxed when placed on Mr. Richter’s shoulder. Re-entry is proceeding well, but the mystery persists.

“We haven’t the slightest idea how they do this,” Mr. Galaxy said. “Anybody who says they do is lying, and, if you find it, please God, tell me what it is.”

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Well: Holly the Cat's Incredible Journey

Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor housecat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown.

Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach.

“Are you sure it’s the same cat?” wondered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, “the cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.”

But Holly not only had distinctive black-and-brown harlequin patterns on her fur, but also an implanted microchip to identify her.

“I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”

There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.

Scientists say it is more common, although still rare, to hear of dogs returning home, perhaps suggesting, Dr. Bradshaw said, that they have inherited wolves’ ability to navigate using magnetic clues. But it’s also possible that dogs get taken on more family trips, and that lost dogs are more easily noticed or helped by people along the way.

Cats navigate well around familiar landscapes, memorizing locations by sight and smell, and easily figuring out shortcuts, Dr. Bradshaw said.

Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,” Dr. Bateson said.

Peter Borchelt, a New York animal behaviorist, wondered if Holly followed the Florida coast by sight or sound, tracking Interstate 95 and deciding to “keep that to the right and keep the ocean to the left.”

But, he said, “nobody’s going to do an experiment and take a bunch of cats in different directions and see which ones get home.”

The closest, said Roger Tabor, a British cat biologist, may have been a 1954 study in Germany which cats placed in a covered circular maze with exits every 15 degrees most often exited in the direction of their homes, but more reliably if their homes were less than five kilometers away.

New research by the National Geographic and University of Georgia’s Kitty Cams Project, using video footage from 55 pet cats wearing video cameras on their collars, suggests cat behavior is exceedingly complex.

For example, the Kitty Cams study found that four of the cats were two-timing their owners, visiting other homes for food and affection. Not every cat, it seems, shares Holly’s loyalty.

KittyCams also showed most of the cats engaging in risky behavior, including crossing roads and “eating and drinking substances away from home,” risks Holly undoubtedly experienced and seems lucky to have survived.

But there have been other cats who made unexpected comebacks.

“It’s actually happened to me,” said Jackson Galaxy, a cat behaviorist who hosts “My Cat From Hell” on Animal Planet. While living in Boulder, Colo., he moved across town, whereupon his indoor cat, Rabbi, fled and appeared 10 days later at the previous house, “walking five miles through an area he had never been before,” Mr. Galaxy said.

Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.

Professor Tabor also said a Siamese in the English village of Black Notley repeatedly hopped a train, disembarked at White Notley, and walked several miles back to Black Notley.

Still, explaining such journeys is not black and white.

In the Florida case, one glimpse through the factual fog comes on the little cat’s feet. While Dr. Bradshaw speculated Holly might have gotten a lift, perhaps sneaking under the hood of a truck heading down I-95, her paws suggest she was not driven all the way, nor did Holly go lightly.

“Her pads on her feet were bleeding,” Ms. Richter said. “Her claws are worn weird. The front ones are really sharp, the back ones worn down to nothing.”

Scientists say that is consistent with a long walk, since back feet provide propulsion, while front claws engage in activities like tearing. The Richters also said Holly had gone from 13.5 to 7 pounds.

Holly hardly seemed an adventurous wanderer, though her background might have given her a genetic advantage. Her mother was a feral cat roaming the Richters’ mobile home park, and Holly was born inside somebody’s air-conditioner, Ms. Richter said. When, at about six weeks old, Holly padded into their carport and jumped into the lap of Mr. Richter’s mother, there were “scars on her belly from when the air conditioner was turned on,” Ms. Richter said.

Scientists say that such early experience was too brief to explain how Holly might have been comfortable in the wild — after all, she spent most of her life as an indoor cat, except for occasionally running outside to chase lizards. But it might imply innate personality traits like nimbleness or toughness.

“You’ve got these real variations in temperament,” Dr. Bekoff said. “Fish can by shy or bold; there seem to be shy and bold spiders. This cat, it could be she has the personality of a survivor.”

He said being an indoor cat would not extinguish survivalist behaviors, like hunting mice or being aware of the sun’s orientation.

The Richters — Bonnie, 63, a retired nurse, and Jacob, 70, a retired airline mechanics’ supervisor and accomplished bowler — began traveling with Holly only last year, and she easily tolerated a hotel, a cabin or the R.V.

But during the Good Sam R.V. Rally in Daytona, when they were camping near the speedway with 3,000 other motor homes, Holly bolted when Ms. Richter’s mother opened the door one night. Fireworks the next day may have further spooked her, and, after searching for days, alerting animal agencies and posting fliers, the Richters returned home catless.

Two weeks later, an animal rescue worker called the Richters to say a cat resembling Holly had been spotted eating behind the Daytona franchise of Hooters, where employees put out food for feral cats.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, Barb Mazzola, a 52-year-old university executive assistant, noticed a cat “barely standing” in her backyard in West Palm Beach, struggling even to meow. Over six days, Ms. Mazzola and her children cared for the cat, putting out food, including special milk for cats, and eventually the cat came inside.

They named her Cosette after the orphan in Les Misérables, and took her to a veterinarian, Dr. Sara Beg at Paws2Help. Dr. Beg said the cat was underweight and dehydrated, had “back claws and nail beds worn down, probably from all that walking on pavement,” but was “bright and alert” and had no parasites, heartworm or viruses. “She was hesitant and scared around people she didn’t know, so I don’t think she went up to people and got a lift,” Dr. Beg said. “I think she made the journey on her own.”

At Paws2Help, Ms. Mazzola said, “I almost didn’t want to ask, because I wanted to keep her, but I said, ‘Just check and make sure she doesn’t have a microchip.’” When told the cat did, “I just cried.”

The Richters cried, too upon seeing Holly, who instantly relaxed when placed on Mr. Richter’s shoulder. Re-entry is proceeding well, but the mystery persists.

“We haven’t the slightest idea how they do this,” Mr. Galaxy said. “Anybody who says they do is lying, and, if you find it, please God, tell me what it is.”

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Comcast Internet Essentials Brings Access to Low-Income Homes

John Gress for The New York Times

Gale Woods and her son, Austin, in their Chicago apartment.

CHICAGO — At the cramped downtown office of the Community and Economic Development Association of Cook County, a line of older residents waited to apply for a federal program that helps pay for heat and other utilities. On the walls, next to posters advertising Head Start and other public services, hung posters for something called Internet Essentials.

“Is the Internet on your back to school list?” read one leaflet being handed out along with information about the Women, Infants and Children program, a Health Department initiative that offers nutritional and breast-feeding support to low-income families.

Internet Essentials is not a government program, although that would be difficult to tell from the poster. Instead, it is a two-year-old program run by Comcast, the country’s largest Internet and cable provider, meant to bring affordable broadband to low-income homes.

Any family that qualifies for the National School Lunch Program is eligible for Internet service at home for $9.95 a month. The families also receive a voucher from Comcast to buy a computer for as little as $150.

The program is not charity: Comcast started Internet Essentials in order to satisfy a regulatory requirement to provide Internet access to the poor, which also happens to be one of the few remaining areas for growth for cable companies across the country. More than 100,000 households in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and other major markets have signed up for Internet Essentials.

But as the program gains popularity, the company has come under criticism, accused of overreaching in its interactions with local communities — handing out brochures with the company logo during parent-teacher nights at public schools, for instance, or enlisting teachers and pastors to spread the word to students and congregations.

“A company like Comcast doesn’t do it out of the goodness of their heart,” said Joe Karaganis, vice president of the American Assembly, a nonprofit public affairs forum affiliated with Columbia University.

The Obama administration has been pushing private-public partnerships as a way to make high-speed home Internet access available to the 100 million Americans who lack it.

The digital divide has traditionally been regarded as one between urban and rural areas of the United States. But only about 7 percent of households without broadband are in rural areas without the necessary infrastructure; the bulk of the rest are low-income families who cannot afford the monthly bill, or do not feel it is a necessity, according to government statistics.

“The broadband divide is a real threat to the American dream,” Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said in an interview. “The costs of digital exclusion are getting higher and higher.”

Comcast set up shop in Chicago in May 2011, a few months after its $13.75 billion takeover of NBC Universal. As part of its approval for the deal, the F.C.C. required the company to devise a plan to make broadband available to the poor. Comcast reluctantly agreed, according to a person involved in the merger who could not speak publicly about private conversations. A Comcast spokesman said the company had volunteered the plan. Broadband subscriptions represent the main driver of Comcast’s $55.8 billion in annual revenue. The company and its competitors have largely reached saturation among households that can afford high-speed Internet. That leaves the poor as one of the industry’s main areas of growth.

“In the long, long run, yes, I hope we’re creating future Comcast customers,” said David L. Cohen, executive vice president of the Comcast Corporation. He added: “There’s no bait and switch here. This is a community investment.”

Before he became Comcast’s chief lobbyist and the overseer of Internet Essentials, Mr. Cohen was a prominent Democratic political consultant and aide to Edward G. Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor.

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Political Heir Says Too Few in India Hold Political Sway

NEW DELHI — Rahul Gandhi is a member of a family that has led India for most of the nation’s 65-year history, but in one of the most important speeches of his life on Sunday he was deeply critical of the Indian government.

“No matter what state you look at, no matter which political party you look at, why do a handful of people control the entire political space?” Mr. Gandhi asked. “Power is grossly centralized in our country.”

Indeed, power in India has mostly been centralized in Mr. Gandhi’s family, and his speech on Sunday was his first major step in trying to ensure that this centralization continues well past 2014, when national elections are scheduled. Mr. Gandhi is the son, grandson and great-grandson of previous Indian prime ministers. He and his mother, Sonia Gandhi, president of the Indian National Congress Party, gave speeches on Sunday on the last day of a party meeting in Jaipur.

“And it does not matter how much wisdom you have, you mean nothing,” Mr. Gandhi said. “This is the tragedy of India. Why is our youth angry? Why are they out on the street? They are angry because they are alienated. They are excluded from the political class.” Mr. Gandhi said the entire system must be transformed, although he said that the Congress Party had already begun that process.

He was formally elevated Saturday to vice president in the governing Congress Party, making him second only to his mother in the party’s hierarchy. His promotion has been years in the making, and many in the party have been quietly pressing him to take a more active role in governing for years. He has never held a cabinet-level position.

In her own remarks, Mrs. Gandhi turned to a recent crime that prompted widespread outrage. “The barbaric gang-rape of a young woman in Delhi has shaken the country, she said. “She embodied the spirit of an aspirational India. We will ensure her death will not go in vain.”

She promised to press for legislation to ensure that 30 percent of the positions in Parliament and the state legislative assemblies would be held by women. India has a vast system of quotas for the historically disadvantaged, and expanding those set-asides has for years been deeply popular with those who benefit from them — which increasingly is much of the population.

Mrs. Gandhi also said that the Congress Party needed to do a better job of explaining its successes, and she lashed out at corruption as “a deep-rooted malice.”

“As a party we must lead the struggle to combat its effect,” she said.

The Gandhi family has long been the glue that held the Congress Party together even as regional rivals have become more powerful. Sonia Gandhi has mostly carried the Gandhi mantel since her husband, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, was assassinated. But she is a native of Italy, and when her party won the 2004 elections, she chose a technocrat, Manmohan Singh, to be the government’s prime minister.

But Mr. Singh is 80. Few expect him to continue as prime minister past next year, and many in the party have looked to Mr. Gandhi to take up his role as the leader of his family and his party.

Whether Mr. Gandhi will thrive in this role is a source of constant speculation. He entered politics in 2004 by taking over a seat in Parliament vacated for him by his mother, who moved to a neighboring constituency. He campaigned aggressively in recent state elections in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, but his party was soundly defeated in both places. Perhaps wary of another poor performance, he and his mother campaigned sparingly in December during state elections in Gujarat, where the Congress Party was again defeated.

It is still unclear whether Mr. Gandhi will be tapped as the party’s pick for prime minister next year. Equally uncertain is who will be the candidate for the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main opposition. Narendra Modi is now that party’s most accomplished leader, but he is deeply unpopular with Muslims because he was in charge in Gujarat when deadly riots erupted there in 2002, leaving nearly 1,000 people dead, many of them Muslims.

Mr. Gandhi has led party youth organizations, and Congress Party leaders hope he will be able to appeal to India’s vast youth population. At 42, he is much younger than most of India’s leaders, whose average age is 65.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

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Media Decoder: 'Jekyll and Hyde' Musical May Become a Movie

LOS ANGELES — Every few years, a film musical puts the genre back in the spotlight. This year, it is “Les Misérables.” In 2008, it was “Mamma Mia!” In 2015, with some luck, it might be “Jekyll and Hyde.”

Mike Medavoy, a prolific film producer whose most musical venture to date was “Black Swan,” and Rick Nicita, a former agent who just started a production company, RP Media, have teamed up to buy film rights to “Jekyll and Hyde.”

The musical, with a book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse and music by Frank Wildhorn, has been on national tour since its revival last year, and returns to Broadway at the Marquis Theater this spring. It was first performed in Houston 23 years ago, and in 1997 opened in New York, where it played for more than three and a half years.

But Hollywood had not picked up the film rights.

“The film musical is a very strange animal,” said Mr. Bricusse, who joined Mr. Wildhorn, Mr. Nicita and Mr. Medavoy in an interview by phone on Friday. “They can bite you in the back, or they can do very well for you.”

“Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a 19th century novella by Robert Louis Stevenson, has inspired its share of films through the years. One starred Spencer Tracy and was nominated for three Oscars in 1942. Another, “Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde,” starred Sean Young and was nominated for three Razzies, which rate Hollywood’s worst offerings, in 1996.

Neither film won an award. But the next version will be poised to try again.

“They’re consistently hits if they’re made well,” Mr. Nicita said of film musicals. For “Jekyll and Hyde,” Mr. Nicita and Mr. Medavoy said the immediate plan is to recruit a director. The producers will then turn to the matter of cast, hoping to get a film on screens in two years.

Casting will be under the watchful eyes of Mr. Bricusse and Mr. Wildhorn, who said they were not simply interested in actors who sing, but rather in first-rate actors who are also first-rate singers.

“That is not a long list,” said Mr. Bricusse.

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