Company: Safeway Inc

(Reuters) - A beef company that makes the ammonia-treated beef that critics called pink slime said on Monday it will close three of its four plants after sales dropped and did not recover following recent attacks on the product.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Safeway Inc, the second-largest U.S. grocery chain, said on Monday it plans to stop using pork suppliers that cage pregnant sows as part of their production process, a practice animal rights groups have called inhumane.

Grocery chain Safeway Inc. is reporting a sharp jump in net income for the first quarter, fueled by the sale or closure of 27 Genuardi's stores to Giant Food Stores LLC.

Stocks closed at session highs Monday, logging their best one-day rally in almost two weeks, boosted by Ben Bernanke's earlier comments that the Fed may continue its easy monetary policy if the jobs market continues to show signs of weakness. Stocks are on track to post their best quarter since 1998.

Stocks eased off their best levels in the final minutes of trading Monday but still managed to eke out a small gain, following a sharp rally from the previous week.

It's the basic question when investing in a stock: is it on the way up or will it go down? To answer this question,  Wall Street has developed numerous ways of attempting to predict what will happen, estimating various attributes tied to stock performance in order to determine what the future holds for a company's valuation.