IBT Staff Reporter

A Canadian charity, appropriately named EARS, is offering to help a Rocky Mountain town deal with its bunny problem, promising to neuter and spay the unwanted rabbits rather than let the city carry out its trap-and-cull proposal.

Imperial Oil Ltd said on Wednesday it will go ahead with an C$8.9 billion ($8.65 billion) plan to double the size of its Kearl oil sands project, even as it said total costs for the massive mining operation have climbed by nearly a quarter.

Current speculation among investors include deals with Dish Network, Sprint Nextel and Clearwire.

Fitch Ratings on Wednesday warned again that the United States' rising debt burden was not consistent with maintaining the country's top AAA credit rating, but said there would likely be no decision on whether to cut the rating before 2013.

Facebook agreed on Wednesday to overhaul privacy protection for more than half a billion users outside North America, after a three-month investigation found that its privacy policies were overly complex and lacked transparency.

On a night with little original programming, NBC's Saturday Night Live special SNL Presents: A Very Gilly Christmas and a repeat of CBS' NCIS: Los Angeles were the top-rated shows, while NBC took an overall ratings win for the night, according to preliminary numbers.

You better watch out -- because Santa Claus isn't always such a jolly old elf after all. In fact, sometimes he can be a real creep. At least in the movies.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty imposed what he called a fiscally sustainable formula for increasing federal transfers to the provinces for health care, one that will eventually increase spending by less than the current 6 percent a year.

Don't throw your wallet away yet.Many big-name retailers from Gap to Toys R Us are partnering with banks, payment processors and Google to let shoppers tap their mobile phones instead of swiping their credit cards to pay for goods. But the new mode of payment is not expected to take off in earnest for at least another couple of years.

Thanks to monster hits like The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1 and art-house breakouts such as The Artist, many of the major players in the independent film market racked up an impressive year despite the industry-wide box office decline.

TLC announced at the end of this week's Next Great Baker episode that contestant and Iraq War veteran Sgt. Wesley Durden had died -- not mentioning that it was reportedly of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Daniel Mudd, the embattled former chief executive of mortgage financing company Fannie Mae, is taking a leave of absence from him current job as head of hedge fund Fortress Investment Group , the company said on Wednesday.

Kevin Ryan, chief executive of online retailer Gilt Groupe, is keeping close tabs on congressional legislation that might enable him to have more shareholders in his young company.

The Vatican said on Wednesday an unknown buyer had snapped up the internet address vatican.xxx, a domain combining its name with an extension reserved for pornographic content.

More than a dozen Italian banks, including top lenders UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, tapped 116 billion euros ($143.52 billion) of new three-year loans offered by the European Central Bank, nearly a quarter of the total, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

North Korea will shift to collective rule from a strongman dictatorship after last week's death of Kim Jong-il, although his untested young son will be at the head of the ruling coterie, a source with close ties to Pyongyang and Beijing said.

Stocks declined modestly on Wednesday as equities retreated from recent gains, while weak earnings from Oracle raised concerns about the health of the tech sector, pressuring the group and pushing the Nasdaq down more than 1 percent.

Canadian telecom upstart Globalive wants to buy rival Mobilicity but no deal is imminent or indeed likely until the government clarifies rules on foreign ownership and airwave allocation, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.

Stocks fell on Wednesday as weak earnings from Oracle raised concerns about the health of the tech sector ahead of the start of fourth-quarter earnings season in January.

Walgreen Co posted an unexpected drop in quarterly profit as the largest drugstore chain's margins were hurt in part by its contract dispute with pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts Inc .

Newt Gingrich got a rude welcome at a campaign stop at an Iowa grocery store on Tuesday, when a patron shook his hand and called him an obscene name.

The starter's gun sounds Christmas Day on an National Basketball Association (NBA) sprint of a season that will reward cohesiveness and fitness in a compressed 66-game campaign that has the Miami Heat as clear front-runners.

Steven Spielberg is among the most prolific film directors ever, and as if to prove it, he has two movies in theaters this holiday week during what is one of the biggest box office periods of the year.

Daniel Mudd, the embattled former chief executive of mortgage financing company Fannie Mae, is taking a leave of absence from him current job as head of hedge fund Fortress Investment Group , the company said on Wednesday.

Europe's highest court gave unreserved backing on Wednesday to an EU law to charge airlines for carbon emissions on flights to and from Europe, a decision likely to escalate tension with trading partners, especially the United States.

Home sales rose in November, adding to hints of recovery, but updated data showed the housing crash was much deeper than previously thought.

New York City's pension funds want three big Wall Street banks to impose tougher compensation-clawback rules for top executives.

After breezing through the euro zone debt crisis for the past two years, Germany's economy could fall into recession as anxious businesses hold off on investment and exports wither.

U.S. commodity markets have shrunk almost 9 percent since MF Global's collapse as farmers, investors and traders close out positions, according to a Reuters analysis of data that suggests there may be lasting effects from the industry's most disruptive broker failure.