Airlines add seats after snowstorm hits travel

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Major air carriers added extra flights on Monday to accommodate passengers whose travel plans were disrupted by a massive weekend storm that dumped as much as two feet of snow on the U.S. Northeast. The storm buried cities from Washington, D.C., to Boston, resulted in closures or significant delays at airports and forced hundreds of flight cancellations just days before Christmas.

First Solar, fund manager in tussle over cab fare

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Solar power industry bellwether First Solar Inc and a fund manager who has wagered the company's stock will fall are locked in a tiff over a $9 cab fare, after the bear manager was invited to a meeting in Times Square and then asked to leave. Andrew Kaplan, who manages one of five funds at Harvest Capital Strategies LLC, said he accepted an invitation from the company's external media relations company.

Brazil top judge to rule on U.S. custody case

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - The Brazilian Supreme Court's top judge delayed until Tuesday a ruling on whether a 9-year-old boy at the center of an international custody battle will be reunited with his father and return to the United States. A ruling in the case of Sean Goldman, whose father David Goldman is an American and whose mother Bruna Bianchi was a Brazilian who died last year, had been expected on Monday. But a spokesman for Chief Justice Gilmar Mendes told Reuters late on Monday the ruling would be announced the following day.

U.S. crime drops in first half of 2009, FBI says

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Violent crime in the United States, including murder and robbery, dropped 4.4 percent in the first half of 2009 and property crime like car thefts also dropped, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Monday. The latest statistics suggest U.S. violent crime could drop for a third full year in a row, a steady decline despite the harsh economic recession that some policymakers and police groups had feared would lead to an upward spike.

NY socialite Astor's son given 1-to-3 year sentence

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The 85-year-old son of the late New York socialite Brooke Astor was sentenced to at least one year in prison on Monday for looting his mother's estate of money that had been set aside for charity. Anthony Marshall, Astor's only child, was sentenced to a minimum of one year and a maximum of three years by New York State Supreme Court Judge A. Kirke Bartley, who rejected a request from Marshall's lawyers to spare him prison time.

U.S. court urges misconduct probe into Polanski case