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Nashville-based wellness program operator Healthways Inc. said Wednesday it will acquire Navvis & Co., a local company that advises health systems on strategy and other issues, for $28.7 million.

The price is made up of $23.7 million in cash and $5 million in Healthways stock. Healthways said it expects to close the deal by Aug. 31. It will have a negligible effect on Healthways’ profit in 2011, the company said.

Navvis, based in Clarkson Valley, will stay in the area instant payday loans. The local company’s CEO Mike Farris also will remain with Navvis.

Navvis advises health systems on organization, strategy, partnerships, physician alignment, and service and facility development.

Shares of Healthways fell 13 cents to $12 on Wednesday.

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In between briefings on Libya, President Barack Obama packed golf, beach time, a stop at a seafood restaurant and a visit to a wealthy friend’s seaside compound into his Martha’s Vineyard vacation Sunday.

Meanwhile, across the globe, rebels stormed into Tripoli as Moammar Gadhafi’s hold on power seemed to crumble.

Asked about the developments as he bought seafood at Nancy’s, a popular restaurant in Oak Bluffs, Obama said: “We’re going to wait until we have full confirmation of what has happened. … I’ll make a statement when we do.”

Then Obama and his family headed to dinner at the house where White House adviser Valerie Jarrett is staying.

Earlier, Obama spent about an hour at the home of Comcast chief executive Brian Roberts after playing golf with some buddies no fax payday loan. The golf foursome included Obama’s Chicago pal Eric Whitaker, UBS America executive Robert Wolf and a White House aide. Obama spent the morning at the beach with his wife, Michelle, and daughters Sasha and Malia.

The president began the day with a briefing on Libya, said the White House, which has been at pains to show Obama’s still fulfilling his duties as president amid international unrest, a shaky economy and high unemployment.

He is scheduled to return to Washington on Saturday.

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British police made their 13th arrest Thursday in the country’s tabloid phone hacking scandal, and a private investigator at the center of the crisis sued Rupert Murdoch’s media empire for breach of contract.

Britain’s phone hacking scandal _ where journalists broke into the voice mails of royals, movie stars, top athletes, politicians and even teenage murder victims _ has shaken Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and forced the resignations of top people in Britain’s government, police and media. It also prompted Murdoch to shut down the 168-year-old U.K. tabloid, News of the World.

Police confirmed a 38-year-old man, who they declined to name, was arrested at a London police station after arriving voluntarily Thursday. He was later released on bail.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported the suspect was James Desborough, formerly the Los Angeles-based U.S. editor for the News of the World and the 2009 winner of the British Press Award for show business reporter of the year. The newspaper claimed his arrest was related to activities that took place before he moved to the United States in 2009.

Both London police and News International, the British division of Murdoch’s News Corp. empire that owned the tabloid, declined to confirm that Desborough was the suspect being questioned.

“We are fully cooperating with the police investigation and we are unable to comment further on matters due to ongoing police investigations,” News International said.

However, News International confirmed it has been sued by private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who was jailed in 2007 along with a reporter at the News of the World for hacking into the voicemail messages of royal staff.

Last month, News Corp. stopped making legal payments to Mulcaire, a day after Murdoch told lawmakers in a special parliamentary hearing that he would try to find a way to stop the payments.

News International spokeswoman Daisy Dunlop confirmed the Mulcaire lawsuit on Thursday but declined to comment further. A person familiar with the case said it alleged a breach of contract in respect to Mulcaire’s legal costs.

In a separate development, lawyers for British television actress Leslie Ash and former soccer player Lee Chapman confirmed they had resolved their legal action against the News of The World.

The tabloid’s parent company had “agreed to pay our family an appropriate sum by way of compensation and costs and it has apologized for the harm and distress it has caused us,” the couple said in a statement.

But they indicated they now plan to sue other British newspapers over allegations that their phone messages _ and those of their children _ may have been illegally accessed.

“We remain concerned that the practices complained of against NGN (News Group Newspapers) are likely to have been prevalent within a number of other media publishers, and we will be instructing our lawyer … to take action against other newspapers,” they said.

Ash and Chapman had been the subject of frequent tabloid stories after the actress suffered health problems and won a then-record 5 million pounds ($8.25 million) compensation payment from a London hospital after contracting an infection during treatment there.

The couple believe their messages were intercepted in 2004 while Ash was recovering in the hospital.

News International said it would not comment on the settlement.

The disclosure this week of new documents in the phone hacking case has piled the pressure on Murdoch’s media empire.

Correspondence published Tuesday by British lawmakers investigating the scandal suggested that one of his closest executives was warned more than four years ago that phone hacking was endemic at the News of the World. The company had previously insisted the practice was not widespread.

The charges were made in a 2007 letter written by Clive Goodman, a former journalist with the now-defunct tabloid whose jailing in 2007 on phone hacking charges first brought the practice into the spotlight.

Then-News International Ltd. Executive Chairman Les Hinton had fired Goodman as a result of his conviction. In his response, Goodman insisted that his activities had been carried out with the support of other members of staff and alleged that phone hacking had been routinely discussed at the paper.

However, in a 2007 appearance before the House of Commons media committee, Hinton assured parliamentarians that no one else at the paper had been engaged in phone hacking.

Hinton, who worked for Murdoch for more than five decades, announced his resignation July 15 as publisher of The Wall Street Journal. He is News Corp.’s first U.S. executive to lose his job in the phone hacking scandal.

Hinton was appointed earlier this year to The Associated Press board of directors. AP spokesman Paul Colford says Hinton has not attended any AP board meetings but has not offered his resignation.

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Police tensions flared Saturday over Britain’s recruitment of a veteran American police commander to advise the government on how to combat gangs and prevent a repeat of the past week’s riots and looting.

Leaders of the police unions in London and the northwest city of Manchester criticized the appointment of William Bratton, former commander of the police forces in Los Angeles, New York and Boston, as an insulting stunt.

Their criticism follows rising friction between Prime Minister David Cameron and senior British police officers over whether the government, or the police, deserve credit for bringing four days of riots under control.

“America polices by force. We don’t want to do that in this country,” said Paul Deller of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents more than 30,000 officers in the British capital.

Deller, a 25-year Met officer, accused the government of not being serious about following Bratton’s recipe for reducing crime.

“When Mr. Bratton was in New York and Los Angeles, the first thing he did was to increase the number of police on the street, whereas we’ve got a government that wants to do exactly the opposite,” he said, referring to Britain’s commitment to slash law enforcement spending as part of debt reduction efforts.

Ian Hanson, chairman of the federation’s Manchester branch, said local officers knew better how to police their own communities than “someone who lives 5,000 miles away.”

Police have been on the defensive over their slow initial response to riots that rapidly spread Aug. 6 from the north London district of Tottenham to several London flashpoints and, eventually, to several other English cities. Cameron also criticized their tactics as too passive and announced Friday his government would receive policy advice from the 63-year-old Bratton, who resigned as Los Angeles police commissioner in 2009 after overseeing strong reductions in gang-related crime in all three of his commands.

Five people were killed during England’s riots, including a 26-year-old man shot to death in his car and a 68-year-old man beaten to death after arguing with rioters and trying to extinguish a fire they had set.

In England’s second-largest city of Birmingham, police said Saturday they had arrested two more men on suspicion of murdering three Pakistani men during street clashes there Wednesday. The arrests rose to five the number of men, aged 16 to 27, being interrogated over the killing of Haroon Jahan, 20, and brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31. The trio were fatally struck by a speeding car that appeared to be driven deliberately into a crowd of South Asian vigilantes protecting a strip of family-owned shops in west Birmingham.

The father of the youngest victim, 46-year-old Tariq Jahan, told journalists at a Birmingham news conference he had received thousands of letters from well-wishers worldwide. He received national praise for declaring, just hours after his son’s killing, that he bore no anger toward his killers, the police or the government, and for appealing to young Muslims in his neighborhood not to retaliate against the black gang members believed responsible. His repeated public appeals appeared to deter any retaliatory violence.

“I would like to thank the community, especially the young people, for listening to what I have to say and staying calm,” Jahan said.

Scotland Yard said that, as of Saturday night, 1,276 suspected rioters and looters have been arrested, of whom 748 have been charged with various crimes.

Nationwide, more than 2,100 people have been arrested. Courts in London, Birmingham and Manchester have stayed open around the clock since Wednesday to process the cases.

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When Nia Lewis was looking for a car to drive to Florida to visit her in-laws, she went to the Atlanta Budget Rent a Car website as she normally does. But she stumbled upon something unusual.

There, on the site’s home page, was a big discount. The catch? The car is a moving ad.

With the price of gas approaching $4 a gallon and the economy still in bad shape, Budget is hoping more deal-hungry vacationers want to rent cheaper vehicles

The economy is at risk of slipping into another recession.

It nearly stalled in the first six months of the year, the government reported Friday. Economic growth was feeble in the second quarter and practically nonexistent in the first no fax payday advances.

The new picture of an economy far weaker than most analysts had expected suddenly made a second recession a more serious threat

Latch on early to a growing market. Relentlessly drive down costs. Research and innovate. Take large but calculated risks. Wait for your competition to weaken, then gobble them up.

Over 25 years, that formula took Express Scripts from a five-person startup in 1986 to a company with $45 billion in revenue and 14,000 employees.

Three times, in 1998, 1999 and 2009, the pharmacy benefits company bought competitors twice or nearly twice its size in bet-the-company gambles that paid off.

On Thursday, it made its biggest bet yet: the $29.1 billion purchase of Medco, its biggest rival.

If antitrust regulators approve, and executives can successfully knit the two firms together, it will become the banner corporate success story of the new century in St. Louis. The bold acquisition further provides a lesson for St. Louis in corporate Darwinism, analysts say.

“If you’re not one of the sharks, then you’re the food,” said analyst Juli Niemann of Smith Moore & Co. in Clayton.

St. Louis has its share of shark food; companies that grew fast in the 19th and early 20th century, only to atrophy once complacency set in.

May Department Stores stood idle as discounters stole business from old-fashioned department stores. It was swallowed by Federated Department Stores in 2005 online payday loan lenders.

The St. Louis banking business was almost entirely home-grown 20 years ago. Now it’s dominated by giant banks based elsewhere.

Anheuser-Busch may provide the most striking comparison to Express Scripts. One was flabby, and the other lean, says Keith Womer, dean of the business school at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

A-B dominated the American beer industry with nearly half the market. But that industry wasn’t growing, and the brewer sat back while competitors sought growing markets overseas. Eventually, one of those overseas giants, InBev, devoured Anheuser-Busch.

“A-B had gotten a little slow, a little comfortable in the way things had been,” Womer said. “If you walked into the executive suite at Anheuser-Busch, it was a very plush place. Walk in to the executive offices at Express Scripts, and you’re hard-pressed to tell the difference with any other office in the building.”

Other old-line companies survived by evolving, in some cases radically. Monsanto morphed from a chemical company to a plant biotech powerhouse in Creve Coeur. It’s now the biggest seed company in the country.

Starting from scratch

Express Scripts had no choice but to innovate

The U.S. government no longer owns a piece of Chrysler.

Italian automaker Fiat SpA paid $560 million for the government’s remaining 98,000 shares of Chrysler Group LLC, the U.S. Treasury Department said Thursday. Fiat has run the company since it emerged from bankruptcy protection in 2009.

U.S. taxpayers gave $12.5 billion to Chrysler and its financing arm after the recession hampered sales and brought Chrysler and General Motors Co. to the brink of collapse. The funds came from the government’s $700 billion bank bailout fund.

Under a bankruptcy deal, Fiat received a 20 percent stake in Chrysler for taking over management of the Detroit carmaker. The Italian automaker has gradually raised its stake in Chrysler, and Thursday’s purchase of the last U.S. shares, along with a small stake held by Canada, means Fiat owns 53.5 percent.

Now that Fiat has majority control of the company, CEO Sergio Marchionne, who runs both, plans to consolidate management. But he faces a thorny decision of where to place the corporate headquarters. Fiat is Italy’s largest employer and a source of national pride. U.S. politicians are likely to be upset if the new company is based in Turin, Italy, where Fiat is headquartered.

Chrysler has made a remarkable turnaround from two years ago, when it was bailed out. After cutting costs and reviving sales of Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge and Ram vehicles, the company earned net income of $116 million in the first quarter. It is forecasting profit of $200 million to $500 million this year.

Of the original bailout, $11.2 billion has been repaid. The Treasury says it likely won’t recover the remaining $1.3 billion. Chrysler also has repaid $5.1 billion in other loans from the government.

Fiat’s stake is likely to rise to 58.5 percent later this year when it begins making a car in the U.S. that gets 40 miles per gallon, a benchmark set by the U.S. government when Fiat took over Chrysler.

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MAPLEWOOD