Toshiyuki Tabata spent 30 years as a Nissan Motor Co. engineer trying to make gasoline-powered cars quieter. Now he’s consulting music composers to make electric cars noisier—and safer.

Electric and hybrid cars, with little or no engine noise, are lauded for their silence, yet some groups including advocates for the blind say pedestrians may fail to notice them approaching.

Henry Jones delivered the good news in a conference call with Tri Energy Inc.’s investors: The gold deal the company had been working on for years was about to pay off.  Jones, 55, a record producer in Marina del Rey, California, and his two partners had raised more than $50 million from 735 investors, which they said they were using to broker the sale to Arab buyers of 20,000 tons of gold owned by a group of Israelis.

Dell Inc.’s proposed $3.9-billion buyout of Perot Systems Corp. reflects the second-largest personal-computer maker’s ambitions in the market for health-care information technology.  Dell offered $30 a share in cash Monday for Perot, 31 times its earnings in 2009, according to Ben Reitzes of Barclays Capital in New York. Hewlett-Packard Co. bought Dallas-based EDS last year for $13.2 billion, 14 times that company’s 2008 earnings, Reitzes said.