** With its stock sliding and depositors lining up to withdraw their savings, pressure is rising for a sale of British bank Northern Rock. Britain’s fifth-biggest mortgage lender was rescued with emergency Bank of England funding on Friday. It says there is no need for investors or customers to panic and insists it is solvent. Fears have mounted that a run of withdrawals will exacerbate the lender’s funding problems and force a fire sale of the business. 
    
** Irish building materials firm CRH is talking with Cemex about buying up to $4.5 billion of the Mexican company’s U.S. and European assets. CRH said it could raise debt to finance the transaction. Acquisitive CRH, which said last month it was looking at buying Anglo American’s Tarmac business, will acquire Cemex operations in Florida and Arizona. Cemex was obliged to sell the assets because of its acquisition of Australian building materials group Rinker Group earlier this year. CRH said it had already bought four U.S. companies this month for a total cash consideration of $350 million. Last year, it acquired Ashland Paving and Construction for $1.3 billion.    

** Leap Wireless International spurned an unsolicited bid from larger rival MetroPCS Communications on Sunday. At Friday’s closing price, the deal valued Leap at around $4.7 billion. Leap said the deal was not in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. “Your proposal fails to take into account Leap’s robust growth prospects,” Leap President and Chief Executive S. Douglas Hutcheson said. MetroPCS responded by saying: “We are disappointed, unimpressed and studying our options.” 
 
** Aerospace and defense company ITT said it would buy defense electronics EDO for about $1.6 billion, or $56 per share in cash, which represents a 9 percent premium over EDO’s Friday closing price. ITT said its earnings would not be affected in 2008, and would be helped thereafter. EDO designs defense electronic and communications systems, aircraft armament systems and other products. Among ITT’s businesses are water treatment equipment and air traffic technology.
 
** Deutsche Telekom mobile phone division T-Mobile USA plans to buy SunCom Wireless Holdings for about $1.6 billion. It said it would also take on about $800 million SunCom debt and that it saw synergies from the transaction of about $1 billion. SunCom shareholders get $27 per share, a 22.7 percent premium to Friday’s closing price. SunCom operates in the southeastern United States and in the Caribbean. It had more than 1.1 million customers by the end of June, and had revenue of $242.5 million in the second quarter.
 
** Telecoms company Paetec Holding is buying privately held McLeodUSA for $492 million. Paetec expects the deal to boost its business to an equivalent of 3.4 million access lines and 17,000 miles of fiber-optic routes.         
 
** Shares of Business Objects rose as much as 9.2 percent following a weekend newspaper report that the Franco-American software group was for sale and had retained Goldman Sachs as advisers. Analysts were skeptical a deal would get done in the currently jittery market. Le Figaro reported that German software group SAP was best positioned to acquire Business Objects and could enter into exclusive talks in the coming weeks.