Lorry loads of snow will continue to be dumped at Vancouver’s troubled Winter Olympic venue of Cypress Mountain until Tuesday, organisers said on Monday.

The freestyle and snowboard site, just to the north of Vancouver, has been plagued by a drastic lack of snow caused by the warm temperatures which have seen the city enjoying unseasonal highs of around 10C (50F).

In an effort to get the venue ready, organisers took the controversial decision to ban media from the site until Tuesday when training resumes.

Read the rest of this entry »

US magazine circulation fell in the final six months of 2009 with both newsstand sales and paid subscriptions showing a drop-off, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) reported on Monday.

Total circulation for 472 titles was 328.4 million for July to December, down 2.23 percent compared with the same period the previous year, the ABC said.

Single copy, or newsstand, sales fell 9.1 percent to 35.7 million while paid subscriptions were off 1.12 percent at 278.9 million, it said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Business lender CIT Group said Monday it would prepay 750 million dollars on its 7.5 billion dollars in debt, marking a step toward recovery under the new leadership of Wall Street heavyweight John Thain.

Thain, a former head of Wall Street investment bank Merrill Lynch, on Monday took the reins earlier in the day as chief executive and chairman of CIT, a major business lender that recently emerged from bankruptcy.

CIT said its board of directors had “authorized the voluntary prepayment of 750 million dollars on its 7.5-billion-dollar first lien credit facility.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The struggling aid effort in Haiti was hit by another setback Monday as the UN halted deliveries to some 10,000 quake survivors after discovering that fake coupons were in operation.

An agitated crowd of around 100 people continued to wait well into the afternoon at the drop-off site close to the town hall in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Petionville as others clamored to get tickets valid for Tuesday.

“We need food!” one old lady shouted at a guard charged with manning the steel bars blocking the entrance to the town hall offices.

Read the rest of this entry »