C atalyst Paper Corp. CTL-T said Monday it has decided to defer a $100-million rights offering originally proposed in November until the paper company has completed its search for a new chief executive officer.

T oday’s top stories from Report on Business : Obama proposes record deficit President Barack Obama is proposing a $3.8-trillion (U.S.) budget with a record $1.56-trillion deficit. The budget sent to Congress would help fight the U.S. jobs crisis, raise taxes on high income earners and cap spending on many government programs.

L ou Is Boralex Power Income Fund at its current price a good long term play. Is the dividend safe? Tom Hi Tom, Boralex Power Income Fund BPT.UN-TSX is a power utility that operates ten power generating plants, eight in Quebec and two in New York State.

R oyal Dutch Shell PLC RDS.A-N plans to make the biggest-ever foray into biofuels by an oil major, striking a deal with Brazil’s Cosan SA Industria e Comercio to create a $21-billion (U.S.) a year ethanol joint venture. The venture, which will be the No. 3 fuel distributor in Latin America’s largest country, marks Shell’s entry into ethanol production and underscores the biofuel’s lure as an alternative to gasoline.

D emand for flights within Asia has outstripped the North American air sector for the first time, led by growth in China and India. There were 647 million air travellers in the intra-Asia market last year, surpassing the 638 million passengers within North America, the International Air Transport Association said Monday. “Achieving Asia-Pacific’s tremendous potential is contingent upon short-term efforts to battle the impacts of the economic downturn with cost reductions and efficiency gains.

Retirement savings for workers automatically enrolled in individual retirement accounts under the administration’s fiscal-2011 budget proposal would be invested in Roth IRAs — unless they chose otherwise. That detail about the automatic-IRA proposal emerged today from the administration. Under the proposal, employers who did not offer their employees retirement plans would be required to make payroll deductions of up to 3% of employee salaries into the “automatic IRAs,” unless employees specifically elected not to participate in the program

Utah announced modifications to its Section 529 college savings plan today, including lower fees on some investment options and more flexibility in asset allocation. The Utah Educational Savings Plan, which now has about $3 billion in assets under management and which offers investments from The Vanguard Group Inc. to its participants, cut its administrative asset fee on three of its investment options.