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Montreal -- Air Canada announced Thursday it was dropping its $25 fee for more than one checked piece of baggage as fuel costs have been decreasing.

Rome -- Airline unions in Italy have until Thursday to agree on a plan to create a new national carrier using the flight operations of failed Alitalia, investors say.

Rome -- Union leaders in Italy expressed optimism Monday that a deal to rescue parts of troubled Alitalia Airline were possible.

Chicago -- United Airlines said Monday it would increase the fee for a second checked bag to $50 for one-way domestic flights.

London -- Britain's Civil Aviation Authority says it is undertaking its biggest effort in 20 years to rescue 85,000 passengers marooned by the collapse of XL Airways.

London -- Britain's Civil Aviation Authority was struggling Saturday to find ways to get 85,000 stranded XL Airways passengers back home, The Times of London said.

Credit card champions Visa (NYSE: V) and MasterCard (NYSE: MA) have been going head-to-head for as long as anyone who's had plastic in his or her wallet can remember. It's a bitter rivalry, because these two companies are about as identical as it gets. Other industries where two competitors share a huge chunk of market share -- like General Motors (NYSE: GM) and Ford (NYSE: F) -- at least come out with different products. But Visa and MasterCard? For consumers, there's almost no distinguishing between the two.

It was a wise man who noted that the only corporate structure more insidious than a government-sponsored monopoly is a government-sponsored and investor-owned monopoly. In the end, as Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) have now so painfully proved, trying to serve the master of public policy while generating returns for investors will lead to disaster.

Are Webizens really the world's most social creatures? You'd think so. Here's a short list of some of the more interesting start-ups profiled at this week's TechCrunch50 and DEMOfall conferences:

Shares of Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI) hit a five-year low today, joining foreign provider 1worldspace (Nasdaq: WRSP) on Wall Street's dollar menu.

Canonical , the company behind the massively popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, thinks its flagship product is about to blow the operating-system market wide open. Next year, founder Mark Shuttleworth believes the company "can reasonably expect Ubuntu to ship on several million devices to consumers who can reasonably expect the software experience to be comparable to those of the traditional big OSV's -- Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)."

Isn't it funny how different analysts will interpret a story in entirely different ways?

A pair of unrelated news stories have resulted in investing implications for Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX), but I don't agree with either one.

After watching shares get nearly chopped in half Monday, Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH) rushed its quarterly earnings report up a week in a desperate attempt to show the world that its future isn't as up-in-the-air as investors anticipated. But if the developments outlined in the report are the best Lehman can give us, I'm not sure why it bothered.