A group led by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing ’s Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings Ltd. has offered to buy Electricite de France SA’s U.K. power networks unit for 5.8 billion pounds ($9.1 billion).

Nomura Holdings Inc. , Japan’s biggest securities firm, offered jobs to 40 students at triple the normal starting salary under a new plan to strengthen its international business, two people involved in the hiring said.

Shawn Bergerson , founder of Waterstone Capital Management LP, made money when most hedge funds didn’t: in 2007 and 2008, as the housing-market collapse turned into a global financial rout, and in the recovery that has followed.

A bullish stock market trade embraced by the smartest money is backfiring. And that has investors wondering if what Warren Buffett and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. know about derivatives is obsolete.

U.S. stocks fell, sending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index lower for a third day, as earnings and forecasts disappointed investors at technology and consumer companies. A gauge of commodities rose to a 12-week high on speculation the economic recovery will boost demand.

Japan’s unemployment unexpectedly rose for a fourth straight month and industrial production fell the most in more than a year, signaling the economic expansion is poised to slow.

Charles River Laboratories International Inc. withdrew a $1.6 billion bid for WuXi PharmaTech (Cayman) Inc. , citing investor opposition to what would have been the largest foreign takeover of a China company.

The package arrived at Cindy Lohman’s home in Great Mills, Maryland, just two weeks after she learned that her son, Ryan, a 24-year-old Army sergeant, had been killed by a bomb in Afghanistan. It was a thick, 9-inch-by- 12-inch envelope from Prudential Financial Inc ., which handles life insurance for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

At the heart of the Bailadila Hills in central India lie 1.1 billion tons of raw ore so pure and plentiful that half a century after miners first hacked at it with pickaxes, it remains the richest, and one of the largest, iron deposits on the planet.