U.S. Stocks Lower on Debt Impasse; Dunkin Jumps

U.S. stocks fell for a fourth straight session Wednesday amid signs of economic softness and a deepening impasse on the debt crisis in Washington, D.C.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 99 points, or 0.8%, to 12402, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fell 17 points, or 1.3%, to 1315 and the Nasdaq Composite lost 51 points, or 1.8%, to 2789. The Dow has shed more than 300 points over the course of its losing streak.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled, led by Cisco [CSCO 15.7801 -0.5099 (-3.13%) ] and Caterpillar [CAT 101.7727 -3.4273 (-3.26%) ], after closing lower for the third-straight session.

The S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq were also sharply lower. The CBOE Volatility Index, widely considered the best gauge of fear in the market, jumped above 22.

All three major averages are in negative territory for the week.

Most S&P sectors were lower, led by industrials and techs.

debt bill until Thursday. Most people still expect a last-minute deal but it is still likely the rating agencies could downgrade the nation's credit rating.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the plan by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., would result in savings of just over $2 trillion, some $500 billion less than Reid had promised.

The Senate bill, however, would save more than a House Republican proposal by Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. Nonpartisan congressional scorekeepers said his proposal would cut spending less than advertised, about $850 billion over 10 years, not the $1.2 trillion originally promised.

Meanwhile, the Treasury rejected claims from a recent Barclays report that said the debt deadline may not be Aug. 2 but around Aug. 10 instead.

“There’s clearly uncertainty in regards to the debt ceiling and [investors] are waiting for a resolution,” said Zahid Siddique, portfolio manager at Gabelli Equity Trust. “But we think this is a near-term headwind that should pass.”

While there may be further volatility in the market in the next year due to ongoing issues in the euro zone and as Japan recovers from its earthquake in March, Siddique said fundamentals are still on a “positive trajectory” overall and noted that today’s weaker-than-expected durable goods report was an “aberration.”

Gold rose to a new high above $1,625 an ounce, marking the sixth time it's reached record levels in two weeks. Meanwhile, oil prices slipped to session lows after a government report showed that crude inventories unexpectedly jumped for the first time in nine weeks. U.S. light, sweet crude fell below $98 a barrel, while London Brent crude slipped under $118.

John Boehner tries to rally Republicans to his debt plan

Congress remained deadlocked over the debt crisis on Wednesday, with House Republicans unable to muster the votes needed to pass emergency legislation before next week's deadline.

Faced with a revolt by hardline members of his own party, House leader John Boehner was having to hastily rewrite a bill he proposed earlier in the week to cut $3 trillion (£1.83tn) in federal government spending.

Boehner hopes to put his new bill to the vote on Thursday after being forced to cancel a planned vote because of lack of numbers.

Although the Treasury may be able to conjure up a short-term solution to prevent default on Tuesday, the row and the failure of America to tackle its burgeoning debt problem could now lose the US its triple-A credit rating, a move that could have damaging consequences for the US economy and beyond.

The country's national debt reached its congressionally set $14.3tn ceiling on 16 May and Washington has since been forced to use spending and accounting adjustments, as well as higher-than-expected tax receipts, to continue operating normally, but it can only do so until 2 August.

Without agreement, the US will probably become unable to pay all its bills some time the following week. Federal spending would have to be reduced by as much as 44% for the remainder of the month, forcing the treasury to decide whether to suspend social security benefits, defence spending or stop paying government employees.

Finance and business leaders have warned that failure to raise the US debt ceiling by then would send shockwaves through the fragile world economy, while President Barack Obama has predicted that a default would trigger economic "Armageddon".

Boehner needs to secure 217 votes to get his bill through, a job made more difficult by a report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) saying that the Republican leader's bill would only reduce the deficit initially by $850bn, not the $1.2tn that Boehner had claimed. Hardline conservatives are demanding still bigger spending cuts.

However, even if the bill were to be passed, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, promised that the Senate would kill it and Obama has said that he would veto it.

A solution is most likely to come from negotiations between Reid and the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell. Reid is proposing raising the debt ceiling from $14.3tn until after the 2012 elections, in return for immediate spending cuts of $1.7tn.

But the CBO has also challenged Reid's budget cuts. The office concluded that his plan would deliver $500bn less in deficit reduction than the $2.7tn Democratic lawmakers had said it would save over 10 years.

Stock markets have remained relatively sanguine even as the deadline looms ever closer. The major US stock markets fell on Wednesday, but the rhetoric in Washington has not yet triggered a major sell-off. Economists and market watchers argue that investors believe the two sides will eventually hammer out a compromise.

Republican leaders told the group that they need to stay united and rally around the bill. Boehner also said his bill will be rewritten to either cut more from the deficit or to raise the debt ceiling by less than the $900 billion he had proposed earlier this week.

That way, his plan would hew to his promise to match the debt-ceiling hike with spending cuts. Members said leaders did not tell them which approach will be taken with the revisions.

“We’re making progress,” Boehner told reporters after Wednesday morning’s meeting. Asked whether he thought the CBO report had dealt a blow to his plan and whether a vote was still scheduled for Thursday, Boehner declined to say.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said after the meeting that House Republicans “just had a very good conference.”

“Members are rallying around the speaker’s plan, and we’re going forward,” Cantor said. He declined to say whether he thought the plan would pass with the support of Republicans alone, saying only, “We will pass the speaker’s plan.”

There were signs Wednesday that Boehner was having some success at converting wary undecided votes into possible supporters.

After the meeting, several Republicans who had been wavering said they now back Boehner’s revised proposal — in part because they fear undercutting the speaker just days before the Aug. 2 deadline to raise the debt limit.

If the House plan were to founder because of lack of Republican support, it would leave only a proposal by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) still standing.

Reid’s plan to raise the ceiling by $2.4 trillion would remove the pressure of a possible default from debates about reducing spending in coming months — a far less preferable option, several Republicans said.

Race on to get debt plans in form for vote

Taking square aim at the White House, Republicans prepared to bring to a House vote Thursday a two-step $2.5 trillion debt ceiling bill that will avert default next week but threatens more conflict — and renewed instability — in six months.

Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell remain in conversation over how to defuse the building confrontation before the threat of default next week. But with stocks falling again Wednesday, the fight between Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama has become so personal that each side says the other needs to find some way to save face before reaching a deal.

Fifty-three senators, 51 Democrats and two independents, signed a letter to Boehner on Wednesday vowing to oppose the House bill. But the speaker is unapologetic about his intentions to use the default crisis to try to jam the Senate. And at a GOP conference Wednesday morning, he enlisted conservatives to be his “army” after he had stood “toe to toe” with the president and put his “neck on the line” for them.

“There are only three possible outcomes in this battle: President Obama gets his blank check; America defaults; or we call the president’s bluff by coming together and passing a bill that cuts spending and can pass in the United States Senate,” Boehner told the rank and file, according to aides to the speaker. “There is no other option.”

Republicans will hold another conference Thursday morning at which a final decision can be made about moving ahead. But after retooling the bill and getting a higher savings score from the Congressional Budget Office late Wednesday, there was growing confidence that Boehner will move ahead.

As now written, the measure allows for two adjustments in Treasury’s borrowing authority, each contingent on achieving at least matching savings.

The CBO said Reid's plan also didn't add up to the advertised spending cuts, but Reid said he was "comfortable" with the non-partisan budget agency's $2.2 trillion figure for savings.

A House vote on Boehner's proposal is expected today.

President Obama has said he support's Reid's proposal and will veto Boehner's proposal if it makes it out of Congress.

Reid would not commit to the timing of a Senate vote, or how much time it would take to work a bill through the system to get it to the president by next Tuesday.

"Probably … soon," Reid said.

"Magic things can happen in every Congress in a short period of time, under the right circumstances," he added.

So instead of voting on the debt plans, congressional leaders used Wednesday to attend to other business — an Interior Department spending bill in the House, the confirmation of FBI Director Robert Mueller to another term by the Senate — and to work at drumming up votes for their proposals.

During a closed-door morning meeting of the House Republican conference, Boehner told members to "get your ass in line" and vote for the bill, according to several GOP sources in the room.

"I can't do this job unless you are behind me," Boehner said.

His comments came as GOP staffers worked to rewrite the bill to bring the savings up to the level initially advertised.

Particularly at issue with conservatives is the ability to tie the vote allowing an increase in the debt ceiling to a vote on a balanced budget amendment.

The Boehner plan requires a vote on the amendment this year, but does not link that vote directly to a vote on the debt-limit increase, as an earlier Republican plan did.

Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said he's undecided on the Boehner plan but pleased that leaders had agreed to move a vote on a balanced budget amendment to Friday, up from later this year.

"I don't want to vote for any increase in the debt ceiling unless we've done everything in our power to send a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution to the Senate and to the states," Pence said.

House GOP members will meet behind closed doors again this morning to round up votes ahead of the House vote.

Recuperating From Surgery, Perry Persists in Campaign

Despite holding personal pro-life beliefs, Texas Gov. Rick Perry categorized abortion as a states’ rights issue today, saying that if Roe v. Wade was overturned, it should be up to the states to decide the legality of the procedure.

“You either have to believe in the 10th Amendment or you don’t,” Perry told reporters after a bill signing in Houston. “You can’t believe in the 10th Amendment for a few issues and then for something that doesn’t suit you say, 'We’d rather not have states decide that.'”

The 10th Amendment reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Perry is not shy about touting his pro-10th Amendment beliefs, despite being a staunch social conservative who opposes same sex marriage and promotes pro-life initiatives. Late last week, he labeled same-sex marriage as a states’ rights issue, a position shared by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.

"Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That's New York, and that's their business, and that's fine with me," Perry said Friday at a speech in Aspen, Colo. "That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business."

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum took a veiled swipe at Perry’s comments Tuesday, vowing to work to overturn same-sex marriage laws.

“I am not, as some in this race have said, OK with New York doing what they're doing,” Santorum said Tuesday in Ankeny, Iowa. “What New York did was wrong. I will oppose it and I will go to New York, if necessary, to help overturn it.”

The National Right to Life Committee responded to Perry’s categorization of abortion as a states’ rights issue in a statement, saying, “Our society has an obligation to enact laws that recognize and protect the smallest members of our human family. Prior to Roe, states had the ability to enact laws that extended full legal protection to unborn children. We look forward to the day when Roe v. Wade is changed, and the states will once again have the ability to pass legislation that fully protects mothers and their unborn children.

Mr. Perry’s spokesman, Mark Miner, said the surgery had not affected the governor’s schedule or travel in any way. Asked if Mr. Perry was having any problems recovering from surgery, Mr. Miner said: “Not at all. Look at his schedule.”

Indeed, Mr. Perry has traveled extensively in recent days. Last week, he attended several events in Austin, met with business leaders in five California cities and spent the weekend in Colorado at Republican Governors Association gatherings.

Mr. Miner declined to discuss the details of the ailment that the back surgery was intended to correct. But he said the governor had been wearing a back brace as needed. “It’s optional,” Mr. Miner said. And at a bill-signing ceremony in Houston on Wednesday, Mr. Perry again wore the black tennis shoes. Mr. Miner played down the significance of the change in the governor’s footwear.

“He wears shoes that are comfortable,” Mr. Miner said. “It’s nothing more than that.”

As Mr. Perry increases his national profile, and carefully orchestrates what many in Austin believe will be his entrance into the presidential race, he and his advisers have no interest in having Mr. Perry appear weak. The day Mr. Perry had the surgery, in fact, his office sent out four news releases, including a statement he issued describing President Obama’s disaster declaration for parts of the state hit hard by wildfires as “good for Texas.”

Dr. Robert E. Isaacs, the director of spine surgery at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., said that lower-back spinal fusions had become fairly common — about 250,000 are performed each year in the United States — and that the governor’s wearing of a brace was probably not a sign that he was having a difficult recovery. “The smaller types of spine fusions people can recover from quickly,” Dr. Isaacs said.

Crystal Harris

Crystal Harris is an American model, singer and Playmate. She was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for December 2009. On December 24, 2010, she became engaged to Hugh Hefner (then age 84), to become his third wife. Harris broke off the engagement on June 14, 2011, five days before their planned wedding.

Early life

Harris' parents were British entertainers, who were working at the England-themed amusement park in Lake Havasu City, Arizona when she was born. After Crystal's birth they returned to England, before returning for good to the United States and settling in San Diego, California, where she and her two elder sisters grew up. Harris was first exposed to the entertainment industry through her late father, Ray Harris, who was a singer and songwriter.

Harris attended La Jolla High School and San Diego State University, majoring in psychology, where she started modelling. It was during this period that she came to the attention of the Playboy organization.

Career

Harris met Hugh Hefner on Halloween 2008. She was attending a party at the Playboy mansion, to which she had been invited by a friend. She then appeared as "Co-Ed of the week" on Playboy.com magazine in the week of October 30, 2008, under the name Crystal Carter. From late 2009, Harris has appeared in E!'s The Girls Next Door.

In April 2010 Harris signed a recording contract with Organica Music Group, a label run by producer Michael Blakey. Her debut single "Club Queen" was released on June 14, 2011. She appeared in an episode of The Hills in season 2.

Personal life

In January 2009 she started dating Hugh Hefner, joining the Shannon Twins after his previous number one girlfriend, Holly Madison, left him. This was to be the third marriage for Hefner. Harris broke off their engagement on June 14, 2011, five days before their planned wedding. In anticipation of the wedding, the July issue of Playboy, which reached store shelves and customer's homes within days of the wedding date, featured Harris on the cover and a photo spread as well. The headline on the cover read "Introducing Mrs. Crystal Hefner.

Postal Service lists 3,700 branches for possible closing

U.S. Postal Service is studying the possibility of closing three Plymouth County post offices.

Brunsville, Oyens and Westfield's post offices are on a list of 178 Iowa post offices and 3,700 across the nation the USPS is reviewing for possible closure in an effort to save money.

In the past five years, mail volume has dropped 20 percent across the nation, due in part to electronic mail and the poor economy, according to Brian Sperry, a regional spokesman for the USPS.

"The postal service lost $8.5 billion last year, and it's projected to lose $8 billion this year," he said, noting that the USPS uses no tax dollars to operate.

Post offices put on the list to review for possible closure have the least amount of traffic and retail sales and have a workload of less than two hours a day, Sperry said.

Just because a post office is on the list to review doesn't mean it will be closed, he added.

"It's not a quick process," Sperry said. "It's long and it provides our customers plenty of opportunities to provide us feedback and let us know, if their post office were to close, how it would affect them."

A community public meeting will be held in each location to discuss the process and gather input.

The dates and times of those meetings are not set yet.

The next step in the process for Brunsville, Oyens and Westfield is for the USPS to study and gather data on them.

Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, who chairs the subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, called closings a "difficult but necessary step" to save the Postal Service from collapse.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said the plan would hurt rural communities without solving the Postal Service's money problem.

"The fact is, maintaining our nation's rural post offices costs the Postal Service less than 1 percent of its total budget and is not the cause of its financial crisis," she said. "While there are some areas where postal services could be consolidated or moved into a nearby retail store to ensure continued access, this simply is not an option in many rural and remote areas."

As it closes branches, the Postal Service plans to set up what it calls "village post offices" in supermarkets and gas stations to provide basic services such as stamps and flat-rate package shipping.

The Postal Service has cut 110,000 jobs and reduced costs by $11 billion since 2008 to offset a sharp drop in mail as people do more business online. Still, the Postal Service projects a deficit this year of $8.3 billion.

First-class mail, one of the largest revenue sources, declined from 103.7 billion pieces in 2001 to 78.2billion pieces in 2010.

Collins has proposed a bill she says would ease the Postal Service's budget deficit by reforming workers' compensation and contracting requirements and letting the postmaster tap "an enormous overpayment" into retirement funds.

Hugh Hefner

Hugh Marston Hefner, born April 9, 1926 is an American magazine publisher, founder and Chief Creative Officer of Playboy Enterprises.Hefner was born in Chicago, Illinois, the elder of two sons born to Grace Caroline (née Swanson; 1895-1997) and Glenn Lucius Hefner (1896-1976), both teachers. Hefner's mother was of Swedish descent and his father had German and English ancestry. On his father's side, Hefner is a direct descendant of Plymouth governor William Bradford. He has described his family as "conservative, Midwest, Methodist. He went to Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz High School, then served as a writer for a military newspaper in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946. He later graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign with a B.A. in psychology with a double minor in creative writing and art in 1949, earning his degree in two and a half years. After graduation, he took a semester of graduate courses in sociology at Northwestern University but dropped out soon after.

Personal life

Hefner married Northwestern University student Mildred Williams (born 1927) in 1949. They had two children, Christie (born November 8, 1952) and David (born August 30, 1955). Before the wedding, Mildred confessed that she had had an affair while he was away in the Army. He called the admission "the most devastating moment of my life." A 2006 E! True Hollywood Story profile of Hefner revealed that Mildred allowed him to sleep with other women, out of guilt for her infidelity and in the hopes that it would preserve their marriage. They divorced in 1959.

Hefner remade himself as a bon vivant and man about town, a lifestyle he promoted in his magazine and two TV shows he hosted, Playboy's Penthouse (1959–1960) and Playboy After Dark (1969–1970). He admitted to being "'involved' with maybe eleven out of twelve months' worth of Playmates" during some of these years. Donna Michelle, Marilyn Cole, Lillian Müller, Shannon Tweed, Brande Roderick, Barbi Benton, Karen Christy, Sondra Theodore, and Carrie Leigh—who filed a $35 million palimony suit against him—were a few of his many lovers. In 1971, he acknowledged that he experimented in bisexuality. He moved from Chicago to Los Angeles.

Hefner had a minor stroke in 1985 at age 59. After reevaluating his lifestyle, he made several changes. The wild, all-night parties were toned down significantly and in 1988, daughter Christie began to run the Playboy empire. The following year, he married Playmate of the Year Kimberley Conrad. The couple had two sons, Marston Glenn (born April 9, 1990) and Cooper Bradford (born September 4, 1991). The E! True Hollywood Story profile noted that the notorious Playboy Mansion had been transformed into a family-friendly homestead. After he and Conrad separated in 1998, Conrad moved into a house next door to the mansion. According to an update on Hefner's Twitter account on April 25, 2010, Conrad and her mother are moving to Reno in a new home to be closer to family.

Hefner then began to move an ever-changing coterie of young women into the Mansion, even dating up to seven girls at once, among them, Brande Roderick, Izabella St. James, Tina Marie Jordan, Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson. The reality television series The Girls Next Door depicted the lives of Madison, Wilkinson and Marquardt at the Playboy Mansion. In October 2008, all three girls made the choice to leave the mansion. Hefner was quick to rebound and soon began dating his new "Number One" girlfriend, Crystal Harris, along with 20-year-old identical twin models Kristina and Karissa Shannon. The relationship with the twins ended in January 2010. After an 11-year separation, Hefner filed for divorce from Conrad stating irreconcilable differences. Hefner has said that he only remained married to her for the sake of his children, and his youngest child had just turned 18. The divorce was finalized in March 2010. On December 24, 2010, Hefner presented an engagement ring to Harris, publicly announcing the proposal the following day. Hefner and Harris had planned to marry June 18, 2011. Harris called off the wedding just 5 days before they were due to be wed.

Career

Working as a copywriter for Esquire, he left in January 1952, after being denied a $5 raise. In 1953, he mortgaged his furniture, generating a bank loan of $600 (or $800—he cannot recall which) and raised $8,000 from 45 investors—including $1,000 from his mother ("Not because she believed in the venture," he told E! in 2006. "But because she believed in her son.")—to launch Playboy, which was initially going to be called Stag Party. The undated first issue, published in December 1953, featured Marilyn Monroe from her 1949 nude calendar shoot and sold over 50,000 copies. (Hefner, who never met Monroe, bought the crypt next to hers at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.)

After it was rejected by Esquire magazine in 1955, Hefner agreed to publish in Playboy the Charles Beaumont science fiction short story, "The Crooked Man," about straight men being persecuted in a world where homosexuality was the norm. After receiving angry letters to the magazine, Hefner wrote a response to criticism where he said, "If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too." Hefner is portrayed as a gay rights pioneer in the documentary film, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel.

On June 4, 1963, Hefner was arrested for selling obscene literature after an issue of Playboy featuring nude shots of Jayne Mansfield was released. A jury was unable to reach a verdict.

His former secretary, Bobbie Arnstein, was found dead in a Chicago hotel room after an overdose of drugs in January 1975. Hefner called a press conference to allege that she had been driven to suicide by narcotics agents and federal officers. Hefner further claimed the government was out to get him because of Playboy's philosophy and its advocacy of more liberal drug laws.

In 2009, Hefner talks about making a film about his life. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for television and has made several movie appearances as himself. In 2010, he received a "worst supporting actor" nomination for a Razzie award for his performance in Miss March.

A documentary by Brigitte Berman, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel was released on July 30, 2010. This was reportedly the first time that Hefner granted full access to a documentary filmmaker.

In 1999, Hefner financed the Clara Bow-documentary, Discovering the It-girl. "Nobody has what Clara had. She defined an era and made her mark on the nation," he stated.

Politics and philanthropy

The Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award was created by Christie Hefner "to honor individuals who have made significant contributions in the vital effort to protect and enhance First Amendment rights for Americans.

He has donated and raised money for the Democratic Party.

In 1978, Hefner helped organize fund-raising efforts that led to the restoration of the Hollywood Sign. He hosted a gala fundraiser at the Playboy Mansion and personally contributed $27,000 (or 1/9 of the total restoration costs) by purchasing the letter Y in a ceremonial auction.

Hefner donated $100,000 to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts to create a course called "Censorship in Cinema," and $2 million to endow a chair for the study of American film.

Both through his charitable foundation and individually, Hefner also contributes to charities outside the sphere of politics and publishing, throwing fundraiser events for Much Love Animal Rescue, as well as Generation Rescue, a controversial autism campaign organization supported by Jenny McCarthy.

On April 26, 2010, Hefner donated the last $900,000 sought by a conservation group for a land purchase needed to stop the development of the famed vista of the Hollywood Sign.

Jesse James Awarded Sole Custody of Daughter

Not all has been bad this week for Jesse James, who confirmed his split with Kat Von D on Monday.

The motorcycle mogul, 42, was awarded sole custody of his daughter Sunny, 7, in an Orange County, Calif., courthouse on Monday, following a several-years-long acrimonious court battle with Sunny's mother Janine Lindemulder.

James's attorney John Schilling tells PEOPLE that if Lindemulder chooses to relocate to Texas to be near Sunny, she'll be ordered to inpatient rehab. If she remains in California, she'll only get monitored visitation of her daughter.

James got the news in an Orange County, Calif., courthouse. He had been fighting Lindemulder on the issue for years, with her often making negative comments about James (and even ex Sandra Bullock) to the press.

And Lindemulder has been given stipulations. If she relocates to Texas to be near James and Sunny, she'll be ordered to inpatient rehab. If she remains in California, she'll get monitored visitation of her daughter.

James announced his split from Von D late Monday evening. See what she Tweeted after the announcement after the jump.

Hugh Hefner: Crystal Harris Lied About Our Sex Life

Crystal Harris crudely claimed that sex with Hugh Hefner last just 'two seconds'.

But the Playboy mogul, 85, today defended his reputation as a legendary lothario.

'Crystal lied about our relationship on Howard Stern but I don't know why,' he tweeted last night. 'Maybe a new boyfriend?'

He has since removed the message from his Twitter page.

In another message to a fan, he again hit out at Harris, 25, for being dishonest.

'Crystal convinced me that she adored me,' he replied to another follower. 'That was the first lie.'

The 25-year-old broke off her engagement to the Playboy mogul last month, and said that during their time together, they only had sex once.

During an interview on on Sirius XM Radio's Howard Stern Show yesterday, she said: 'Then I was just over it.

'I was like, "Ahhh." I was over it. I just like, walked away. I'm not turned on by Hef, sorry.'

'He doesn't really take off his clothes,' she added about her former partner.

'I've never seen Hef naked.'

Since the split, she is rumored to have grown closer to Dr. Phil's son Jordan McGraw, who she was spotted with at New York bar Knave recently.

Crystal lied about our relationship on Howard Stern but I don't know why," Hef Tweeted Tuesday night, although he has since removed the message from his account. "Maybe a new boyfriend?"

Hefner continued to call out Harris, 25, for what he pegged as dishonesty. "Crystal convinced me that she adored me," he replied to another follower. "That was the first lie."

The only sympathy he had for Harris, who has been spotted keeping close company with Dr. Phil's son Jordan McGraw, came in the form of another seeming dig. "I feel sorry for Crystal," he continued. "She seems lost."

Although insisting that he is "pro-Crystal," Hefner said he's "happy to be in a better place with new girlfriends Anna Sophia Berglund & Shera Bechard."

But there's one thing the iconic ladies' man, who publicly moved on from Harris days after their wedding was called off in June, said is indeed true: his feelings for the Playmate when they were in a relationship.

"When I said, 'I missed a bullet' when Crystal left, I didn't mean I didn't love her," Hef explained. "I meant that I realized she didn't love me.

Hina Rabbani Khar

Hina Rabbani Khar, حنا ربانی کھر  , born 19 January 1977 in Multan) is a Pakistani politician and Minister of Foreign Affairs since 20 July 2011. She is Pakistan's youngest and first female Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Early and personal life

Hina Rabbani Khar was born on 19 January, 1977 in Multan, Punjab, Pakistan. She is the daughter of politician Ghulam Noor Rabbani Khar and niece of Malik Ghulam Mustafa Khar. A businesswoman by profession, Hina Rabbani Khar's family has roots Khar Gharbi village located in Kot Addu, a tehsil in Muzaffargarh District in Punjab. The Khar family has many land holdings: an estate that includes fisheries, mango orchards and sugarcane fields. She graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) from Lahore University of Management Sciences in 1999 and received her M.Sc. in Hotel Management from the University of Massachusetts in 2001.

Personal life

She is married to Feroz Gulzar, a businessman and they have two sons and one daughter. She is co-owner of the Polo Lounge, an upscale, popular restaurant located on the Lahore Polo Grounds and in Islamabad.

Political career

She was elected to the National Assembly from the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) (PML-Q) in 2002 from NA-177 Muzaffargarh-II constituency, Punjab. However, PML-Q denied her a ticket for re-election in 2008, consequently she ran on the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) ticket and won with more than 84,000 votes.

She served as the State Minister for Economic Affairs and Statistics in the cabinet of Yousaf Raza Gillani. On 13 June, 2009 she became the first woman to present a budget speech in the National Assembly.

Foreign Minister

She was appointed Minister of State for Foreign Affairs on 11 February, 2011, as part of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani cabinet reshuffle. After Shah Mehmood Qureshi's resignation as foreign minister, she became Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs on 13 February. She was officially appointed foreign minister on 19 July by President Asif Ali Zardari and was sworn in 20 July. Zardari described Khar’s appointment as a demonstration of the PPP government’s "commitment to bring women into the mainstream of national life.

After becoming the first women foreign minister of the country she first visited India for peace talks. Her first visit to India brought about much attention among the general public because the national media in the country was much talking about her beauty instead of the talks at hand. It actually got the sting out of the context for which she was visiting India.

GOP retools plan as Congress seeks debt fix

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it’s time for Republicans to “face facts” and agree on a compromise plan to raise the U.S. debt ceiling.

“We’re running out of time,” Reid said at a news conference today in Washington with other Senate Democratic leaders. Reid said his plan to trim spending over 10 years is the only one with “true compromise,” and it can be modified by “tweaking” in the wake of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s finding that it would save only $2.2 trillion instead of the $2.7 trillion he had advertised.

House Democrats, for their part, said Obama should invoke a little-known constitutional provision to prevent the nation from going into default if Congress fails to come up with a plan to raise the debt ceiling.

Rep. James Clyburn, a member of the Democratic leadership, said he told fellow Democrats on Wednesday that Obama should both veto the House GOP plan for a short-term extension of the debt ceiling and invoke the 14th amendment, which says that the validity of the nation’s public debt “shall not be questioned.”

The White House has rejected resorting to this tactic to keep the nation from defaulting. But Democratic Caucus chairman John Larson said that with only days left before Treasury’s borrowing authority lapses, “we have to have a failsafe mechanism.”

Amid all the heated rhetoric, the differences between the sides were narrowing.

Boehner’s plan represents significant movement from a bill the House passed last week, this one requiring less of the long-term spending cuts that had made Democrats balk. And Reid no longer is insisting on having tax increases, anathema to Republicans, as part of any plan to cut deficits.

Boehner needs to do more than pump up the legislation, however. He has to shore up his standing with tea party-backed conservatives demanding deeper spending cuts to accompany an almost $1 trillion increase in the government’s borrowing cap. Many conservatives already had promised to oppose it.

Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., said he remained undecided, but predicted that the reworked Boehner plan was “about as good as it’s going to get. That’s a pretty strong argument.”

“It’s much less than I would like,” said Rep. John Fleming, R-La., but he said he doubted Republicans would get the spending cuts they want “until we get a new president. So I’m willing to take something less than I would otherwise.

Norway’s Prime Minister Says Attacks Will Not Curtail Tolerance

Norwegian prison where confessed spree killer Anders Behring Breivik could spend the rest of his life has been cast as more of a comfortable retreat facility than an institution protecting the public from dangerous criminals.

Breivik is being held in isolation as he awaits trial for killing at least 76 people in a coordinated attack on the Scandinavian country's government Friday. He has confessed to going on a killing spree a governing Labor Party island camp, gunning down at least 68 people, and detonating a bomb at government headquarters in the capital, killing at least eight more.

The British newspaper The Telegraph focused on Norway's 1-year-old Halden Fengsel prison as a possible place where Breivik could serve his likely sentence. With a flatscreen television for every cell, cooking classes in its "kitchen laboratory" and female prison staff to create a less aggressive atmosphere, Halden was intended to have its inmates re-enter society better than when they left it to serve time. That approach to its prison system has given Norway a 20 percent recidivism rate.

But the man behind the worst attack on Norway since World War II might never re-enter society. While the country limits prison sentences to a maximum of 21 years, Breivik can continue to be incarcerated after his sentence if he's still considered to be too dangerous.

At a news conference in Oslo, the prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, said he had cried over the bombing attack in Oslo and the shooting attack on the island of Utoya, the site of a political retreat for young members of his governing Labor Party. The authorities in Denmark confirmed that one of the shooting victims was a 43-year-old Danish woman, the first confirmed foreign death in the killings, The Associated Press reported on Wednesday.

Anders Behring Breivik, 32, a self-declared warrior for Christian values, has admitted responsibility but not “guilt” for the attacks. He left a 1,500-page manifesto that examined a series of lethal options to battle Muslims and “traitors.” His lawyer said Mr. Breivik believed he would die fighting his war against the threat he saw from Islam. Psychiatrists have yet to evaluate Mr. Breivik, but the police said they were holding him in isolation under a suicide watch.

Mr. Stoltenberg, asked whether Norway’s societal tolerance had allowed Mr. Breivik to pursue his radicalism unnoticed, said extremist views could be allowed but not violence. “We have to tolerate also views we don’t like,” he said. Later, he said that no one should confuse openness with naiveté. “We have been aware of the danger for violent attacks in Norway,” he said.

He said that Norwegians would “defend themselves against violence by showing that they are not afraid” and said it was “very important” for his party to return to Utoya. He himself had attended the annual political retreats every summer since 1974, he said.

Norwegians have given themselves over to an extraordinary outpouring of grief since the attacks. More than 200,000 people attended a commemoration in Oslo on Monday evening — a number equal to a third of the population of the city proper. The enormous blanket of flowers and candles in front of the Oslo Cathedral is still growing.

Pakistan's new foreign minister charms India

New Delhi, India -- India and Pakistan are set to open a new round of talks this week in the latest attempt by the Asian rivals to build mutual trust.

No breakthroughs are expected in the bitter disputes that divide the nuclear neighbors, but some progress might come in the area of Kashmiri trade.

On her arrival in India Tuesday, Pakistan's Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar struck an optimistic note about the prospects of relations between the neighbors.

"(I) hope that these two countries will have learned lessons from history, but are not burdened by history and we can move forward, forge forward as good friendly neighbors, who have a stake in each others' future and who understand the responsibility that both the countries have to the region and within the region," she said, a day before her meeting with her Indian counterpart S.M. Krishna.

Top bureaucrats from the two sides were in discussions in the Indian capital, New Delhi, ahead of Wednesday's talks. Indian and Pakistani officials have exchanged ideas on how to improve trade and travel across Kashmir -- the disputed region divided between the countries.

The current three-year agreement involves 21 locally made items, but business groups have been demanding expansion in the list of products. They'd also like to see an introduction of banking facilities, and improvements in communications and infrastructure.

Her appearance appeared to vindicate Pakistan President Asif Zardari's decision to nominate her as foreign minister in the hope that it would "send positive signals about the soft image of Pakistan."

Her own comments on a "mindset change" and a "new era in bilateral co-operation between the countries" reflected the same theme.

"A new generation of Indians and Pakistanis will see a relationship that will hopefully be much different from the one that has been experienced in the last two decades," she said.

India and Pakistan have fought four wars and they came close to a fifth in the months following the 2008 Mumbai attacks when Pakistani commando-style militants killed 166 in a three day rampage. Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, later accused elements of Pakistan's security forces of supporting the terrorists. Since then tensions have flared over Pakistan's failure to convict the terrorist masterminds or to rein in militant leaders calling for 'jihad' against India.

Yesterday's talks did not produce a breakthrough on Kashmir, but agreed a series of confidence-building measures to double trade over the Line of Control, relax controls on travel, and increase sporting and cultural ties.

They agreed to strengthen co-operation against terrorism and "reiterated the firm and undiluted commitment of the two countries to fight and eliminate this scourge in all its forms and manifestations." They would also co-operate to "bring those responsible for terror crimes to justice."

The ministers also agreed to convene a meeting of each country's nuclear experts to reduce tensions and to resolve their disputes over control of the Siachen glacier and the Sir Creek.

Mirwaiz Farooq, the moderate Kashmiri Separatist leader who met Ms Khar in New Delhi ahead of the talks, said he was disappointed there was no time frame for the new talks on the Kashmir, but welcomed the role Ms Khar had played.

"Here's a minister from Pakistan, young, educated, articulate and she brings something fresh to the table," he said.

Seema Goswami, a leading Indian social commentator, however said she feared Ms Khar's style and glamour could put India at a disadvantage.

"She's incredibly young pretty, glamorous and has no fear of appearing flash. She wore pearls when she arrived and diamonds for the talks," she said. "We're so obsessed with her designer bag and clothes that we forget she first held talks with the Hurriyat Kashmiri separatists. She could be Pakistan's new weapon of mass destruction.

Blagojevich asks for third trial over Senate fraud

Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted last month on more than a dozen corruption charges, is seeking a new trial, accusing the judge who presided over his case of bias.

According to the Chicago Tribune, lawyers for the 54-year-old filed a motion accusing Judge James Zagel of prejudicial rulings during Blagojevich's time on the stand despite allegedly assuring the defense that the former governor could testify that he was unaware and was not informed that he was doing something illegal.

Blagojevich was convicted in June of 17 of 20 charges, including trying to sell an appointment to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama. His first trial last year on similar charges ended with the jury finding him guilty of lying to the FBI and undecided on 23 other charges.

His latest motion resurrects his oft-repeated argument that all federal wiretaps of his phone conversations should have been played during trial.

In pre-trial proceedings in February, he cited a phone call "mysteriously missing" from wiretaps that has an aide negotiating with former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel about appointing Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan in what he said was a legal political deal. According to his lawyers at the time, the missing call "clearly would provide additional proof that the governor never plotted to sell the U.S. Senate seat."

Jurors found Blagojevich, 54, guilty of the majority of counts against him. These included fraud and attempted extortion for trying to sell or trade the Senate seat Obama relinquished on entering the White House in exchange for campaign donations or a high-paying job.

Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the US attorney's office, declined to comment on the motion. The US government could respond at a status hearing set for next week.

Post-trial motions by the defence are a common way to lay down arguments that legal teams can draw from when they appeal to a higher court. Blagojevich's lawyers had to ask for permission though, for the longer-than-usual filing.

The motion argues that the trial began going awry from the start as the judge, James Zagel, allowed jurors with heavy biases to stay in the jury pool. When there were objections during testimony Zagel almost invariably sided with prosecutors, according to the motion.

"There was a thumb on the scale of justice which resulted in the unconstitutional convictions in this case," the motion says. It also directly accuses Zagel, saying, "This court stacked the deck against Blagojevich."

No sentencing date for Blagojevich has been set. Most legal experts say Zagel is likely to sentence him to about ten years in prison for the recent convictions and his sole conviction at his first trial last year, for lying to the FBI. The initial trial ended in a deadlock, forcing the retrial.