“Kraft and Heinz merger to create food giant”

Heinz is buying Kraft Foods to create the world's fifth largest food and beverage company. The Kraft Heinz Company will have revenues of about $28 billion. It will have eight brands worth more than $1 billion each and five worth $500 million-$1 billion each. Once the deal is done, Heinz shareholders will own 51% of the combined firm while Kraft shareholders will get a 49% stake. "By bringing together these two iconic companies through this transaction, we are creating a strong platform for both U.S. and international growth," said Heinz chairman and 3G managing partner Alex Behring. "Our combined brands and businesses mean increased scale and relevance both in the U.S. and internationally." Reports of a deal first came after markets closed on Tuesday in New York. Kraft ended the trading day at $61.33, valuing the company at $36 billion. Kraft shares surged by as much as 18% in premarket trading. Kraft owns popular brands such as Jell-O, Maxwell House coffee and Planters peanuts.

In Other News A swarm of questions surrounds what happened on board Germanwings Flight 4U 9525, which crashed Tuesday in the southern French Alps. "We don't know much about the flight and the crash yet," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. "And we don't know the cause.” Here's the key information that's available so far, and the big questions that remain. Flight 9525 took off at 10:01 a.m. Tuesday from Barcelona, Spain, bound for Dusseldorf, Germany, with 144 passengers and six crew members aboard. The aircraft crashed shortly before 11 a.m. in a remote area near Digne-les-Bains in the Alpes de Haute Provence region. All aboard are presumed dead. At 10:45 a.m.,the plane had reached its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. It then unexpectedly began an eight minute descent. The aircraft lost contact with French radar at 10:53 a.m, at a height of approximately 6,000 feet. Then, it crashed. The cockpit didn't issue a distress call. There is a growing body of evidence that children's exposure to smoking increases their risk of heart disease as an adult. Researchers in a study out this week in the journal Circulation, found that simply having a parent who smoked, but tried to limit their child's exposure to their smoking, increased a child's risk of heart disease as an adult by nearly twice that of a child whose parents didn't smoke at all. For kids whose parents smoked in front of them, and didn't really limit their exposure, their risk for heart disease was four times higher than children of non-smokers.