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The makers of Smithfield Ham, an icon on America's culinary scene for decades, are selling the publicly traded company to China's Shuanghui International Holdings Limited for about $4.72 billion in cash. The deal also includes an exchange of debt.

The purchase values Smithfield Foods at $7.1 billion — a figure that would make the purchase "the largest Chinese takeover of a U.S. company," according to Bloomberg News.

In addition to Smithfield, the company's brands include Armour, Eckrich, Gwaltney, Kretschmar, and others. The company's roots stretch back to 1936, when the Luter family opened a packing plant in Virginia.

Terms of the purchase value Smithfield's stock at $34 a share — a premium of more than 30 percent over the company's closing share price yesterday. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the sale, says the company's shares rose sharply before the markets opened Wednesday.

The deal will require approval from U.S. regulators before it is final.

"This is a great transaction for all Smithfield stakeholders, as well as for American farmers and U.S. agriculture," Smithfield president and CEO Larry Pope said. "We have established Smithfield as the world's leading and most trusted vertically integrated pork processor and hog producer, and are excited that Shuanghui recognizes our best-in-class operations, our outstanding food safety practices and our 46,000 hard-working and dedicated employees."

Shuanghui International is the majority owner of Henan Shuanghui Investment & Development Co. — "China's largest meat processing enterprise and China's largest publicly traded meat products company as measured by market capitalization," according to a news release.

"China is the world's biggest producer and consumer of pork and the third-largest market for U.S. pork," Reuters reports. "In recent months, a series of food safety scandals have dented consumer confidence."

Smithfield's headquarters will remain in Virginia, according to a press release announcing the deal this morning. The companies also said that Shuangui will not close any Smithfield facilities, and will leave all employee agreements — and the existing management team — in place.

The purchase would further solidify an economic relationship between China and Virginia that has been growing. The state has sent several trade missions to Asia in recent years, helping China become what Gov. Bob McDonnell calls "far and away our largest trading partner," as member station WAMU recently reported.

McDonnell made that comment earlier this month, when he announced Virginia's $638 million of agricultural exports to China in 2012. Pork and poultry placed third on the list of the state's exports; the top spot was taken by soybeans.

Members of Congress are back in their home states this week for a Memorial Day recess. It's a chance to talk with constituents about what could become the year's biggest legislative story: the push on Capitol Hill to fix what Democrats and Republicans alike agree is a broken immigration system.

A bill proposed by the Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of senators, to revamp the nation's immigration rules passed out of committee last week and will soon be brought before the Democratic-led Senate. Less clear, though, is where the issue is headed in the GOP-controlled House.

A Senate Truce

The Senate chamber lately has become an even more partisan battlefield than usual, with verbal fights breaking out daily over stalled presidential nominations and a budget stuck in limbo. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is threatening to rewrite the Senate's filibuster rules to break the logjam.

That would infuriate the Republican minority and possibly doom any chance of bipartisan cooperation. But Reid says he's putting all that off until the Senate finishes the immigration overhaul — the one thing Democrats and Republicans do seem able to work on together.

"I'm going to do nothing to interfere with immigration," Reid says. "It is important for our country, and I admire the bipartisan nature of what happened with the Gang of Eight. It's exemplary of what we should do around here on everything."

But fierce opponents of the immigration bill's promised path to citizenship for 11 million unauthorized immigrants are preparing a series of poison-pill amendments. Leading that effort is Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., whose amendments almost all failed in committee.

"I think they would have a considerably better chance of passing on the floor than in the Judiciary Committee," Sessions says.

It's All Politics

Fears Of Killing Immigration Bill Doomed Same-Sex Amendment

Alan Krueger, the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, says he will step down to return to Princeton to resume his post as a professor of economics.

Krueger, who has served as CEA chairman for the past two years, will return to Princeton in time for the beginning of the fall term. The Associated Press quotes a source familiar with the situation as saying Jason Furman, who served in President Obama's 2008 campaign, will be tapped as a replacement.

"Alan was the driving force behind many of the economic policies that I have proposed that will grow our economy and create middle-class jobs," the president said in a statement on Tuesday. "And while we have more work to do, today our economy is improving – thanks, in no small part, to Alan's efforts."

Kreuger called his experience with CEA, "one of the highest privileges of my life."

About 2,200 passengers were being flown back to Baltimore on Tuesday, a day after their cruise ship caught fire on its way to the Bahamas. There were no injuries aboard Royal Caribbean's Grandeur of the Seas.

But in the wake of the incident and others like it, the cruise ship companies have something of a black eye. The industry is now trying to reassure passengers it's OK for them to sail, adopting what it called a passenger "bill of rights."

More people have been taking cruises worldwide and for the cruise ship industry profits have been on the rise. But Jaime Katz, an analyst at Morningstar, says the industry has also found itself struggling with a series of incidents that have eaten into its bottom line.

"The cruise companies were set up to have a much stronger year this year," Katz says. "Then obviously the Carnival Triumph kind of kicked off a lot of noise earlier in the year."

The Triumph is a Carnival cruise ship that caught fire in February, leaving passengers stranded in the Gulf of Mexico for days. Incidents like these have generated bad publicity that has discouraged a lot of new passengers from booking trips. Katz says the industry has responded the way it always does, by lowering its fares.

"As long as they go ahead and fill all those cabins and set sail full, generally they're able to turn a pretty nice profit," she says.

A Difficult Recovery Seen

And yet the fallout from these incidents has been especially brutal. Ross Klein teaches at Memorial University in Newfoundland and writes a blog about cruising. He says the industry won't be able to recover as easily as it has in the past.

"When we have a number of events within a short time, such as was the case with Carnival Cruise Lines in the early part of this year, I think that has a longer term impact," Klein says.

The Cruise Lines International Association, the industry's trade group, recently issued what it called a passenger bill of rights. It guarantees, for example, that cruise lines will fully reimburse passengers for a cruise that is interrupted by mechanical problems. The cruise lines also promise to provide transportation back to port for stranded passengers.

"I think the significance for consumers is it provides them a single source of clearly communicated information that demonstrates the industry's commitments to our passengers," says David Peikin, a spokesman for the association.

A 'Public Relations Move'

But Klein for one isn't very impressed with the move. "The bill of rights is a nice public relations move," he says.

Klein says many of the promises in the bill of rights are already standard practice in the industry. And though the association says the bill of rights amounts to a legal contract, Klein says it's not clear whether a court would see it that way.

Still, there are a lot of people out there who have never taken a cruise before and they represent huge potential revenue. If the cruise ship industry is ever going to lure them on board it needs to convince them it's looking out for their interests, and that means spelling out how passengers will be protected if another disaster occurs.