Russian President Dmitry Medvedev demanded Monday that sports officials step down over the country's dismal performance at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Current Olympians and others in the ski community are mourning the loss of professional free skier C.R. Johnson, who died in a fall while skiing a steep chute at California's Squaw Valley.

A blizzard howled up the East Coast on Wednesday, making roads from Baltimore to New York City so treacherous that even plow drivers pulled over and bringing more misery to a Mid-Atlantic region having the snowiest winter on record.

Ever hit the slopes only to find 4 inches of fresh snow instead of the 8 inches you were promised?

The bodies of three skiers missing after an avalanche in central Switzerland were found Tuesday, raising to seven the death toll in the country's worst avalanche disaster in more than a decade, rescue officials said.

Snowfall and fog were hampering a search in the Swiss Alps on Monday for three people believed trapped after avalanches killed at least four skiers and a rescue doctor, officials said.

Mark E. Freeman, 59, went cross-country skiing Sunday while some friends were downhill skiing. When he failed to return, his friends went looking and found him unconscious about a mile north of the White Pass Ski Area lodge.

They rang in 2009 a day late in Aspen after a former resident unhappy that his hometown has become a resort playground for the wealthy vowed "mass death" and left four bombs around downtown before killing himself.

Avalanche centers around the Rockies warned that backcountry conditions were hazardous and likely to become even more dangerous with approaching storms.

Asphalt is becoming scarce as U.S. refiners overhaul their equipment to maximize output of highly profitable fuels such as diesel and gasoline, using inexpensive - and hard to process - crude oil.

It is not a tidy anniversary this year. Seven years between that awful day and this Sept. 11, the terrorist attacks linger somewhere between the immediate, a conscious part of our days, and the comfortable remove of the distant past.