Facing billions of dollars in annual losses, the U.S. postal service announced plans Monday to cut back its capacity for delivering regular mail quickly and focus on letters and packages that are not urgent.

The postal service now delivers mail the next day for first-class letters within a certain radius, a promise that is going away for the first time since the modern postal service was created in 1971.

And letters that used to take two days to arrive will now likely take three days to arrive, though a small fraction of two-day mail will still arrive the second day. Three-day mail will not be pushed out to four-day mail.

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UPDATED 8:34 a.m. ET

Herman Cain may endorse Newt Gingrich as early as today, the local Fox television station in Atlanta is reporting, citing "sources" it did not characterize.

Fox 5 Atlanta, which first reported the news of Ginger White's allegation of a long-term affair with Cain, said Cain "plans to endorse" Gingrich Monday.

Details of the announcement are still being worked out, Fox 5 said.

Asked about the report, Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond said he does not expect a Cain endorsement "today," noting that Cain's campaign chief Mark Block has said he does not expect the pizza magnate to endorse any of his former rivals anytime soon.

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UPDATED 3:44 p.m. ET

Embattled White House hopeful Herman Cain effectively ended his presidential bid Saturday after support dried up in the wake of accusations from a string of women that he had engaged in sexual impropriety.

Cain said he was technically "suspending" the campaign and vowed to press on with his unique blend of conservatism through a new website, thecainsolution.com.

"I am not going to be silenced and I am not going away," he said with his wife Gloria at his side, vowing to continue to be "a voice for the people."

"As of today, with a lot of prayer and soul searching, I am suspending my presidential campaign," Cain said at a rally that was originally planned to be the grand opening of his national campaign headquarters in Atlanta.

"I am suspending my presidential campaign because of the continued distraction, the continued hurt caused on me and my family. Not because we are not fighters," he said. The "suspension" allows his campaign apparatus to continue to raise funds.

The move intensifies the two man race between current frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, the former Massachusetts governor and House speaker, respectively.

Cain's so-called "Plan B" comes less than a week after a woman he characterized as a friend said she and the Georgia businessman had been carrying on a sexual affair for more than a decade. Ginger White said it was not a love affair, but Cain showered her with gifts and offered financial assistance for her monthly living expenses. Cain called the relationship a friendship as he acknowledged that his wife of more than four decades had no knowledge of White prior to Monday.

Cain thanked his supporters for their support as he blamed the media for forcing his hand.

"I am disappointed that it came to this point, that we had to make this decision," Cain said.

"These false and untrue allegations continue to be spinned in the media, and in the court of public opinion so as to create a cloud of doubt over me and this campaign and my family. That spin hurts. It hurts my wife. It hurts my family. It hurts me. And it hurts the American people, because you are being denied solutions to our problems," Cain said.

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Amnesty International has called for several African nations to arrest and detain former President George W. Bush for authorizing the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture.

Mr. Bush is visiting Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia this week to raise awareness about cervical and breast cancer and HIV/AIDS.

The international human rights group's written statement recognizes the value those goals, but says it "cannot lessen the damage to the fight against torture caused by allowing someone who has admitted to authorizing waterboarding to travel without facing the consequences prescribed by law."

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Ginger White, the woman alleging she had a 13-year sexual affair with Herman Cain, apologized Thursday to Cain's wife and their children for her actions, which could end up putting the nail in the coffin on the Republican businessman's bid for the White House.

"I am not a cold-hearted person. I am a mother of two kids. And of course my heart bleeds for this woman because I am a woman and being in a situation like this can not be fun," White said on MSNBC.

"And I am deeply, deeply sorry if I have caused any hurt to her and to his kids, to his family. That was not my intention. I never wanted to hurt anyone and I'm deeply sorry. I am very sorry," she told host Lawrence O'Donnell.

The candidate is set to meet late Friday with Gloria Cain for the first time since White's allegations became public to decide whether to press on with his campaign.

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After months of largely staying away from Iowa, Mitt Romney is making a play for the voters who make the first choice for president in just five weeks.

The former Massachusetts governor plans to run television ads in the state starting Friday and his message is simple: he is the Republican who has the best chance of beating President Obama in November 2012.

"Going on television is just another tool in getting Mitt Romney's message out that Barack Obama has failed as a president, and that he is the best choice to grow the economy, cut spending and create jobs," said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul. She added that Romney had always planned to compete in Iowa. It was not immediately clear how frequently the ad would run.

Romney has spent much more time in New Hampshire, where he is widely expected to win in the first-in-the nation primary held a week after the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses.

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Herman Cain is trying to hold on to his flailing campaign. But that may not be possible as rivals pile on and even his alleged former lover said he would not be a good president.

Ginger White, the woman who says she carried on a "casual" affair with the Georgia businessman for more than a decade, told ABC News Wednesday that "I honestly do not think that he is, in my opinion, would make a good president as far as I'm concerned."

Herman Cain has been on a roller coaster ride for the past few months. At the back of the pack in the Republican presidential race over the summer, the former Godfather's Pizza chief executive surged to the top after rival Rick Perry's collapse and then plunged in the polls after allegations of sexual harassment emerged about a month ago.

When the White story emerged on Monday, political observers, and even his rivals, assumed Cain was cooked.

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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Monday launched a broadside at President Obama, rhetorically asking "what the hell are we paying you for?" after Democrats and Republicans were unable to come to a deal on long-term deficit reduction by the Thanksgiving holiday.

The Republican governor, who decided against a White House bid of his own last month, urged Mr. Obama to return to the Senate, where he can be one of a hundred legislators.

"If he wanted to run for Senate again and just be 1 of a 100, I'm sure he could have gotten reelected over and over again in Illinois," Christie said at a press conference in Camden, New Jersey.

Christie said Mr. Obama should adopt the style of governing he uses in New Jersey, where he summoned lawmakers from both parties to work out their differences over such contentious issues as changing the pensions and benefits for state workers.

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UPDATED 8:58 a.m. ET

Newt Gingrich got a big boost Sunday in his bid to oust Mitt Romney as the inevitable Republican nominee for president when the conservative New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed the former House speaker in his bid for the White House.

And Monday, he may have gotten some more help from an unlikely source: the Democratic National Committee. The DNC unveiled a scathing attack ad on Romney's record, highlighting changes he has made to his policy positions.

Titled "Mitt v. Mitt," the ad portrays the former Massachusetts governor as "the story of two men trapped in one body" in a movie-style trailer, complete with booming voice narration used for Hollywood blockbusters.

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CNN, in conjunction with the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, sponsored the second debate on foreign policy in ten days. Here's our take on the winners and losers from Tuesday night.

WINNERS:

Newt Gingrich

Success begets success. Newt has done well in past debates and it has helped him in the polls. With his polling success, moderators gave him more airtime, which allowed the one-time afterthought and current front-runner to show off his debating skills. He took a risk by going against conservative Republican orthodoxy on immigration, and that could backfire, but overall Gingrich showed that he has been thinking about these issues for decades. And since it was a debate focused on foreign policy, no one asked him about his relationship with mortgage giant Freddie Mac and the $1.6 million he earned, which also helped the former House speaker.

Jon Huntsman

As the former ambassador to both China and Singapore, Tuesday's national security debate was Jon Huntsman's moment to shine. And for the most part, he succeeded: Huntsman, who touted throughout the debate his experience living abroad, presented clear policy positions on Pakistan and Afghanistan - at one point getting into a heated debate with Mitt Romney over the Afghan troop drawdown ?- and even managed to bring the conversation back around to the American economy. Perhaps for the first time in the campaign, the former Utah governor was able to set himself apart from the rest of the GOP crowd.

Republican debate: Winners and Losers
Gingrich willing to "take heat" for immigration stance
Bachmann: Perry "naive" on Pakistan policy

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Tuesday said the United States should not break up families of immigrants who entered the United States illegally and he was willing to "take the heat" from Republicans for deviating from his party's orthodoxy.

"I don't see how the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century," Gingrich said at the CNN debate on foreign policy in Washington, near the White House.

"And I'm prepared to take the heat for saying, let's be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families," Gingrich said.

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney are the top picks for registered Republican likely voters in the latest Gallup poll released Monday.

Gingrich edged out Romney by one point among registered Republicans, 22 percent to 21 percent, within the poll's four percentage point margin of error.

And Romney topped Gingrich by one point among all Republicans, 20 percent to 19 percent.

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UPDATED 8:32 a.m. ET

President Obama should give up on the idea of another four years in office, paving the way for Hillary Clinton to run as the Democratic nominee, two Democratic pollsters wrote in Monday's Wall Street Journal.

Doug Schoen, who worked for Bill Clinton, and Pat Caddell, who worked for Jimmy Carter, argued that Obama should follow the example of Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, who each decided not to run again.

"He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president's accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton," they wrote, reviving an argument they first made in the Washington Post a year ago.

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White House hopeful and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann on Wednesday slammed rival Newt Gingrich for working with Rep. Nancy Pelosi when he was speaker of the House in the 1990s.

Bachmann launched a new website, nosurprises2012.com, which aims to highlight the differences between the conservative lawmaker and her seven rivals for the Republican nomination for president.

"This highlights just one of the many examples where former Speaker Newt Gingrich had positions that are really against what the people in the primary states are looking for," Bachmann said on CBS' "The Early Show." (watch above)

Republican primary voters tend to be more conservative than Republicans as a whole and are certainly more conservative than general election voters.

"He was standing with Nancy Pelosi to advocate for a national sales tax on energy. That's not what we need right now in our economy. He was also the chief author of the individual health care mandate and that is what is (now) known as Obamacare. No one wants to see that either," she said, referring to conservative primary voters who oppose the president's signature legislative achievement.

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