OTTAWA - The CRTC says profit margins improved at the country's commercial radio stations in 2012, as expenses shrunk and total revenue grew by 0.4 per cent from the previous year.
The federal broadcast regulator said the 675 commercial radio stations operating in Canada earned revenue totalling $1.62 billion for the broadcast year ended August 31, 2012.
Canada's largest grocer is trying out a new discount small-store format in a bid to attract more customers in urban areas.
Loblaw Cos. Ltd. (TSX:L) said it opened the new 10,000-square foot store a few weeks ago in Calgary.
NEW YORK, N.Y. - ABC News "Nightline" anchor Terry Moran is getting a new posting as the network's London-based chief foreign correspondent.
Moran will head overseas late this summer, ABC said Wednesday. Moran was ABC's chief White House correspondent from 1999 to 2005 and has done many overseas and domestic stories for "Nightline," most recently from Syria.
MONTREAL - Convenience store operator Alimentation Couche-Tard is seen as a likely bidder to purchase retail assets from oil and gas giant Hess as it seeks to further boost its U.S. network, according to an industry analyst.
Hess announced in May that it will exit its retail, energy marketing and energy trading businesses following pressure from its third-largest shareholder — activist investor Elliott Management — to break up the firm. It owns about 1,350 gasoline stations in 16 East Coast states.
TORONTO - The Canadian dollar was higher Wednesday ahead of the mid-afternoon release of the U.S. Federal Reserve's latest policy statement and economic projections.
It is hoped the Fed will shed some light on what it intends to do about curbing some of its economic stimulus.
WASHINGTON - A new report says homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure must wait too long for their loan modification applications to be reviewed by some of the nation's top mortgage servicers. Such delays can plunge borrowers deeper in debt.
Joseph A. Smith, the independent monitor of last year's national mortgage settlement, said Wednesday that while the banks are doing a better job complying with new mortgage servicing rules, more needs to be done.
TORONTO - The Toronto stock market was lower Wednesday as traders hoped that the U.S. Federal Reserve will shed some light on what it intends to do about curbing some of its economic stimulus.
The S&P/TSX composite index index declined 30.2 points to 12,337.26 ahead of the end of the Fed's two-day meeting on interest rates and an announcement at 2 p.m. EDT. This will be followed by a news conference with Fed chairman Ben Bernanke at 2:30 p.m.
WASHINGTON - Supporters of a far-reaching immigration bill in the Senate see fresh momentum from a report by the Congressional Budget Office that says the measure would boost the economy and reduce federal deficits by billions of dollars.
Congress' nonpartisan scorekeeping agency said that the immigration bill would decrease federal red ink by $197 billion over a decade and $700 billion in the following 10 years as increased taxes paid to the government offset the cost of benefits for newly legal residents.
MONTREAL - Orascom Telecom Holding says it's withdrawing an application to acquire control of Wind Mobile Canada, one of the smaller wireless carriers that's seeking to grow into a stronger rival for the country's three main cellphone companies.
The Egyptian company announced Wednesday that it has made the decision to withdraw it application under the Investment Canada Act following discussions with Canada's federal government.
TORONTO - An anticipated financial recovery south of the border is likely to help economic growth in Canada, economists said Wednesday, although the U.S. is likely to outpace its neighbour for the first time in years.
RBC Economics raised its estimate for Canada's 2013 economic growth to 1.9 per cent, from 1.8 per cent in March, citing an improving picture on trade and the strength of corporate balance sheets.
NEW YORK, N.Y. - Shares of gene therapy developer Bluebird Bio Inc. are surging in their trading debut.
Its shares climbed $9.15, or 53.8 per cent, to $26.15 in morning trading Wednesday after trading as high as $27 earlier in the session.
HARTFORD, Conn. - United Technologies Corp. says a federal court ordering it to pay $473 million plus interest to compensate for alleged fraud in its sale of fighter jet engines will cut revenue and profit.
Judge Thomas M. Rose of the U.S. Southern District Court of Ohio issued the order Monday. The Hartford, Conn., aerospace company said in a regulatory filing Tuesday that it will appeal the order. With damages, penalties and interest, United Technologies said the penalty would rise to about $660 million.
NEW YORK, N.Y. - Apparently, Men's Wearhouse Inc. doesn't like the way its founder looks anymore.
In terse release issued Wednesday, Men's Wearhouse said it has fired the face of the company and its executive chairman, George Zimmer, who appeared in many of its TV commercials with the slogan "You're going to like the way you look. I guarantee it."
LOS GATOS, Calif. - Netflix is going Dutch.
The online video giant says it will expand into the Netherlands, its 41st country, later this year.
MILAN - A Milan court has convicted the designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana of tax evasion.
The pair were found guilty Wednesday of failing to declare euros 1 billion ($1.3 billion) in income to authorities. The court sentenced them both to one year and eight months in jail.
NEW YORK, N.Y. - The Blackstone Group LP said Wednesday that General Wesley Clark and Lars Thunell have joined the board of its newly formed power development company Fisterra Energy.
Clark is former NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and Thunell is the former head of the International Finance Corp., which is the financing arm of the World Bank.
WASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses despite an Obama administration directive to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts enacted this year, according to a GOP senator.
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa says his office has learned that the IRS is executing an agreement with the employees' union on Wednesday to pay the bonuses. Grassley says the bonuses should be cancelled under an April directive from the White House budget office.
DETROIT - After initially defying U.S. federal regulators, Chrysler abruptly agreed Tuesday to recall some older-model Jeeps with fuel tanks that could rupture and cause fires in rear-end collisions — a decision that will also affect some Canadian Jeep owners.
But the recall, which came in an 11th-hour deal between the automaker and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, covers only 1.56 million of the 2.7 million Jeeps that the government wanted repaired. The rest are part of a "customer service action" and many may not get fixed.
LE BOURGET, France - Air France-KLM ordered 25 Airbus A350 jets on Wednesday, saying the wide-body plane that flew for the first time last week will be central to its plan to expand long-haul flights after years of struggling against discount carriers in Europe.
Airbus also announced that SriLankan Airlines, the country's national carrier, would buy four A350s and six slightly smaller A330 jets. That deal is worth around $2.8 billion at list prices.
TORONTO - The Bank of Canada is likely to start raising its benchmark interest rate in July 2014, a full year before the U.S. Federal Reserve, BMO's chief economist Douglas Porter said Wednesday.
Porter predicts the overnight rate will go up by half a percentage point, which could put upward pressure on the Canadian dollar until the U.S. raises its interest rates the following summer.
MONTREAL - Quebec's upstart pro-independence party has lost its founding leader.
Jean-Martin Aussant — who created, led, and was the public face of Option nationale — has announced he's leaving politics, placing his party before an uncertain future.
OTTAWA - Bob Rae, a fixture on Canada's political scene for more than three decades, is giving up his seat in the House of Commons in order to devote himself to work on behalf of First Nations in northern Ontario.
Rae said he is leaving politics so he can focus on his new role as chief negotiator for First Nations in talks with the province about development of the Ring of Fire mining development in northern Ontario.
MONTREAL - Orascom Telecom Holding says it's withdrawing an application to acquire control of Wind Mobile Canada, one of the smaller wireless carriers that's seeking to grow into a stronger rival for the country's three main cellphone companies.
The Egyptian company announced Wednesday that it has made the decision to withdraw it application under the Investment Canada Act following discussions with Canada's federal government.
TORONTO - An anticipated financial recovery south of the border is likely to help economic growth in Canada, economists said Wednesday, although the U.S. is likely to outpace its neighbour for the first time in years.
RBC Economics raised its estimate for Canada's 2013 economic growth to 1.9 per cent, from 1.8 per cent in March, citing an improving picture on trade and the strength of corporate balance sheets.
OTTAWA - Homelessness in Canada affects about 200,000 people every year and comes with a $7 billion price tag, the first-ever national report on the issue has found.
The results paint a picture of a disaster in communities across the country, said Tim Richter, one of the report's authors and the president of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.
OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper has returned from his European trip but he won't have to endure another grilling in the House of Commons for a while.
All parties agreed late Tuesday night to end the most bitter spring sitting of Parliament since Harper's Conservatives came to power more than seven years ago.
OTTAWA - Manitoba Conservative MP Shelly Glover has changed her mind and decided to file a new expense claim with Elections Canada for the 2011 federal election.
House Speaker Andrew Scheer announced the decision by the MP for St. Boniface on Tuesday as he handed a committee the tricky question of whether Glover and James Bezan, the Tory MP for Selkirk-Interlake, should be suspended over doubtful campaign spending.
OTTAWA - One week after defeating Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's attempt to open MPs' expenses to public scrutiny, the NDP has won approval for a proposal of its own.
New Democrat MP Peter Julian won unanimous consent late Tuesday for a motion aimed at creating an independent body to oversee House of Commons spending, including MPs' expenses.
OTTAWA - The Canada Border Services Agency is warning of a possible telephone scam.
The CBSA says it has recently learned that people purporting to be employed at the agency's Border Information Service have been calling Canadians and requesting personal information and payment over the phone.
TORONTO - A campaign that raised $200,000 dollars to purchase an alleged video appearing to show Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack was a "beautiful example" of the fundraising power of the Internet, says the website that hosted the controversial crusade.
"That campaign really just speaks to what crowdfunding is about, which is giving the power to people to decide what matters to them and to fund what matters to them," said Danae Ringelmann, co-founder of crowdfunding website Indiegogo.
TORONTO - Half of Canada's First Nations children are living in poverty, triple the national average, according to a new analysis of census statistics that pegs the cost of easing the problem at $580-million a year.
The study by the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives being released Wednesday also paints a grim picture of Metis, Inuit, and non-status Indian children, as well as of children of immigrants and visible minorities.
OTTAWA - The most bitter spring sitting of parliament since Stephen Harper's Conservatives came to power more than seven years ago has ended with a rare piece of agreement — unanimous consent to adjourn for the summer.
All parties agreed late Tuesday night to pull the plug after almost a month of late-night sittings.
VANCOUVER - A B.C. Supreme Court decision over land use on Vancouver Island could force the provincial and federal governments to implement a treaty first negotiated by the Crown more than 160 years ago, says a lawyer for a First Nation.
In a decision posted online Tuesday, Justice Gordon Weatherill refused to reverse a decision by the provincial government, allowing Western Forest Products Inc. to remove 14,000 hectares land from a tree-farm licence on the island's northern tip.
GENEVA - The last day of Ahmad Mokaled's short life dawned on a sunny spring February morning in the southern Lebanon town of Nabatieh.
Feb. 12, 1999, was Ahmad's fifth birthday. So his father, Raed, pulled him out of school for an impromptu celebration with Ahmad's older brother, Adam, at a bustling public park where the boys sprinted into a growing throng of children.
MAPLE, Ont. - The Great One firmly believes the NHL will return to Quebec City.
The Quebec capital has been without an NHL franchise since the Nordiques left in 1995. But hockey legend Wayne Gretzky said Tuesday his gut feeling is that Quebec City will again have its own pro hockey franchise.
OTTAWA - A Postmedia News and Ottawa Citizen investigation exposing the use of "robocalls" to mislead and harass voters during the 2011 federal election campaign has won the 2012 Michener Award.
The foundation handing out the award noted that the "detailed and sustained reporting" led to Elections Canada investigating complaints, a Federal court ruling that electoral fraud occurred in six ridings and a PC campaign worker facing charges.
TERRACE, B.C. - There is a growing imbalance between oil supply and delivery in Canada and doing nothing is not an option, the lawyer for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers told a federal panel weighing the Northern Gateway project.
Keith Bergner told the review panel Tuesday that current pipeline capacity is not sufficient, and producers are finding themselves with product on their hands and no way to ship it to buyers — "shut-in" as it's known in the industry.
OTTAWA - Refugee numbers around the world are at their highest level since 1994, the United Nations refugee agency reported Tuesday in a sobering look at global displacement.
More than 45.2 million people either fled their own countries or were internally displaced in 2012, compared to 42.5 million the year before, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in its annual global trends report.
TORONTO - A team of Canadian and U.S. researchers has developed a new "sharp-shooter" drug they hope may be a breakthrough in treating several types of aggressive cancer.
The drug, known for now as CFI-400945, is a new class of cancer agent that targets an enzyme involved in some malignancies, among them certain types of breast cancer, and ovarian, colorectal, pancreatic and prostate cancers.
WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain urged the world on Tuesday to learn from past mistakes as it passively observes Syria's bloody civil war while Canada's defence minister, Peter MacKay, stood by the Canadian government's decision against arming the Syrian rebels.
"There's an old line about those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them," McCain told reporters at the Canadian embassy in the U.S. capital.
REGINA - It didn't take Daryl Stephenson long to land with another CFL team.
The former Hec Crighton Trophy-winning running back signed Wednesday with the Saskatchewan Roughriders after being released earlier this week by the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
EASTBOURNE, England - It wasn't quite the Wimbledon warmup Canadian Milos Raonic was hoping for.
The top seed from Thornhill, Ont., dropped his second-round match Wednesday at the Eastbourne grass-court tournament, falling 6-2, 7-6 (7) decision to Croatian Ivan Dodig.
FORTALEZA, Brazil - The historic wave of protests that has swept across Brazil in recent days has gained some important allies — the players of the Brazilian national football team.
Brazil is hosting the Confederations Cup, a tournament of continental champions which serves as a warm-up for next year's World Cup, but the Brazilian players' focus has turned to the demonstrations which have taken over a country fighting for improvements in basic services such as public transportation, schools and hospitals.
BOSTON - It's just a game, but maybe this Stanley Cup final can heal as well as entertain.
The Boston Bruins know nothing can take away the pain of the Boston Marathon bombings that ravaged their city. Still they know that stringing together wins in the NHL post-season is bringing a smile to their sports-crazy home town.
BOSTON - Jonny Gomes hit a two-run homer in the ninth inning to lift the Boston Red Sox to a 3-1 win over the Tampa Bay Rays on Tuesday night, completing a doubleheader sweep.
Daniel Nava was aboard on a leadoff walk when Gomes followed with a towering shot off Joel Peralta (1-3) that cleared the Green Monster and bounced off the sign just to the right of the foul pole.
ATLANTA - Zack Wheeler lived up the hype in his major league debut, pitching six scoreless innings to lead the New York Mets to a 6-1 victory over the first-place Atlanta Braves and a doubleheader sweep on Tuesday.
Wheeler gave up only four hits and struck out seven while consistently reaching the upper 90s on the radar gun. He struggled a bit with his control, walking five, but got out of every jam.
MIAMI - LeBron James saved a championship reign, cancelled a celebration.
The toughest part now might be topping this performance in Game 7.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Tomas Tatar scored twice as the Grand Rapids Griffins won the Calder Cup on Tuesday with a 5-2 victory over the Syracuse Crunch in Game 6 of the American Hockey League's championship series.
Tatar scored on the power play 12:41 into the second period then added an empty-net goal for some insurance in the final minute of play.
TORONTO - A seven-game win streak and the emergence of Esmil Rogers as a reliable starter is taking some of the pressure off injuries to the Blue Jays' pitching rotation.
Edwin Encarnacion had a home run and three RBIs to back Roger's strong outing against his former club and Toronto took a 8-3 interleague victory over the Colorado Rockies on Tuesday night.
NORTH ATTLEBOROUGH, Mass. - State and local police spent hours at the home of New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez on Tuesday night as another group of officers searched an industrial park about a mile away where a body was discovered the day before.
Police at the scene and prosecutors would not comment on the actions while Sports Illustrated, citing an unidentified source, reported that Hernandez was not believed to be a suspect in what was being treated as a possible homicide. Police had spoken with Hernandez, the magazine said.
Serena Williams says in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine that, while not blaming the victim in the Steubenville rape case, "she shouldn't have put herself in that position."
The comment is made in one paragraph of a lengthy story posted online Tuesday about Williams, a 16-time Grand Slam title winner who is ranked No. 1 heading into Wimbledon, which starts next week.
VANCOUVER - Many golfers would consider a pair of top-10 finishes on the PGA Tour in the same season as a breakthrough.
But not Graham DeLaet.
KINGSTON, Jamaica - Veronica Campbell-Brown's agent insists one of the cornerstones of Jamaica's wide-ranging sprint success "is not a cheat," even though the test results disagree.
While her case is being decided, the three-time Olympic gold medallist will sit out and her country will try to make sense of one of its longest-held fears: a high-profile track star getting busted for doping.
BOSTON - The trend of hiding injuries is nothing new in sports. But Chicago coach Joel Quenneville may have added a new wrinkle to the art of deception.
Blackhawks star Marian Hossa was a late scratch for Game 3 Monday against the Bruins, replaced by Ben Smith.
MAPLE, Ont. - The Great One firmly believes the NHL will return to Quebec City.
The Quebec capital has been without an NHL franchise since the Nordiques left in 1995. But hockey legend Wayne Gretzky said Tuesday his gut feeling is that Quebec City will again have its own pro hockey franchise.
SAN FRANCISCO - Major League Baseball is dragging its feet on having team owners vote on the Oakland Athletics' proposed move to a new ballpark over 60 kilometres south in San Jose, Calif., said San Jose city officials in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The lawsuit — filed in federal court in San Jose — is disputing MLB's exemption from federal antitrust law, which MLB has used as a "guise" to control the location of teams, according to the suit.
VANCOUVER - Brad Knighton will attempt to improve his job security Wednesday night.
The Vancouver goalkeeper is looking to cut down his goals against as the Whitecaps host Chivas USA at B.C. Place Stadium. His role as the club's starter — and future with the team — have come into question amidst reports that the Whitecaps are attempting to secure the services of a new 'keeper.
NEW YORK, N.Y. - The game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees was postponed by rain Tuesday night, delaying the renewal of their old October rivalry.
The game was called about 30 minutes before the scheduled first pitch. It will be made up as part of a day-night doubleheader Wednesday, with start times of 1:05 p.m. and 7:05 p.m.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. - Defenceman Slava Voynov agreed to a new six-year, $25 million contract Tuesday with the Los Angeles Kings, who signed yet another young cornerstone to a long-term deal.
The 23-year-old Siberian would have been a restricted free agent this summer after his breakout playoff performance for the Kings, whose Stanley Cup title defence ended in the Western Conference finals against Chicago.
