IBT Staff Reporter

EBay Inc. on Wednesday posted a 50 percent rise in net profit on strength in its core auction and payments businesses, but left its 2007 outlook unchanged, defying Wall Street's hopes for a boost.

Walt Disney Co. music label Hollywood Records is offering a new CD format with extra features to encourage compact-disc purchases in a bid to reverse declining CD sales.

Washington Mutual Inc. (WM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), one of the largest U.S. mortgage lenders, on Wednesday said it will stop offering some of the most popular home loans for subprime borrowers, after rising defaults caused losses to mount for dozens of lenders.

Hotel occupancy is down in some top vacation spots, not through lack of visitors, but because more travelers are investing in permanent options such as property and time shares in places they love.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission plans to file civil charges against Dow Jones & Co. Inc. board member David Li over an insider trading probe linked to News Corp.'s bid for the media company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke provided cold comfort on Wednesday to those worried that the subprime mortgage mess will infect other areas of finance, though he lifted spirits in the bond market.

Core inflation in the United States is likely to hold below a 2 percent annual rate through the end of 2008, according to a senior vice president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.

The European Union has temporarily suspended its World Trade Organisation (WTO) complaint against India over the latter’s duties levied against European wine and spirit imports.

Honda Motor Co. announced on Wednesday that it plans to build new plants and increase car output as the Japanese carmaker ramps up global capacity to meet the growing demand for its fuel efficient models.

Sony's efforts to turn around its struggling videogame unit during the last week have left mixed reactions, but one analyst believes that further price cuts to its Playstation 3 game console are inevitable.

Canada's population is aging so quickly that in a decade, there could be more people leaving the work force than entering it, a factor which will pose major challenges for employers, Statistics Canada said on Tuesday.

Social networking company Facebook will attempt to convince the court to discard claims that its founder Mark Zuckerberg stole ideas from his college classmates to start his online site.

Bookstore chain Borders said it has removed copies of a book about Belgian comics hero Tintin's adventures in Africa from the children's section of its U.S. stores, as well as British outlets, amid allegations of racism.

Web reports and photographs say they may contain the ending to the eagerly awaited seventh and final book

Sales of Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 game console surpassed one million units in Japan in about eight months after its launch, more than four times as long as it took Nintendo's hot-selling Wii to reach the same mark.

Several brokerages raised their share price targets for Intel Corp. on Wednesday, betting the leading chip maker would improve after reporting disappointing profit margins for the last quarter.

Gulf Arab state Qatar values Britain's third largest supermarket group at $24.5 billion, including debt.

Abandoning long held positions on farm and industrial goods is essential to salvaging a deal, they say.

With Hollywood bracing for a season of possible labor strife, screenwriters and studio executives on Monday opened contract talks expected to hinge in part on how the Internet has altered show business.

Pfizer Inc. on Wednesday reported lower-than-expected quarterly earnings on competition with generics, and said global sales of cholesterol fighter Lipitor fell 13 percent amid slipping demand for the company's flagship product.

The pace of home construction rose 2.3 percent in June but building permit activity, a sign of future construction plans, sank to its lowest rate in 10 years, signaling further weakness in the listless housing market.

Consumer prices rose by a slightly bigger-than-expected 0.2 percent in June on higher food costs and they were up by the same amount after stripping out volatile food and energy prices, the Labor Department reported on Wednesday.

Set the dining table, light some candles and crack open a nice bag of wine.

Delta Air Lines Inc., which emerged from bankruptcy at the end of April, said on Wednesday that quarterly earnings surged on one-time reorganization items.

The dollar rose to session highs against the euro and yen on Wednesday after news that June housing starts were slightly higher than expected, a small sign the sector may be improving prospects for the economy.

Oil steadied below $76 a barrel on Wednesday after two days of losses, as investors awaited weekly U.S. inventory data expected to show refineries running harder to churn out more gasoline.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. announced a new model of its ubiquitous smartphone on Tuesday, this one able to operate on both cellular and Wi-Fi networks.

U.S. investors remain confident in the health of the economy and most expect the U.S. stock market to hold near its recent record levels or extend them modestly, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. said on Wednesday it tripled the amount it set aside for loan losses as home equity borrowers missed payments, hurting the bank's second-quarter net income growth.