Is Ranbaxy Raising Cash to Bid for Merck’s Generics Business?

Was searching for a conclusion to the "Ranbaxy Raid" drama, but found some more substantial breaking news from Reuters India. The company is reportedly raising $1.8 billion in sales of its shares, in a possible bid to buy the above-referenced division. Also found a nice tidbit on Ranbaxy's new R&D director for chemical entities, Pradeep Bhatnagar, previously director of alliances with AstraZeneca...and had to acknowledge the headline, referring to the rising tide of India's returning expatriates as the "return of the natives."  Not to launch into a fit of America-bashing, but I had to ask myself, how many general interest news or magazine headline writers in the U.S. would even know about, or think of alluding to, a Thomas Hardy novel in a headline? And how many of their readers would even get the allusion? And here, we're dealing with readers whose first lanuage is not English....( Although attempts by the immortal sportscaster Howard Cosell to invoke Hardy in the past fell flat enough to earn Cosell his own entry in Words on Words, a dictionary for English usage).  -AMS