Shortly after President Obama publicly endorsed gay marriage, the Republican National Committee's chairman called the move political. "While President Obama has played politics on this issue, the Republican Party and our presumptive nominee Mitt Romney have been clear," Reince Priebus wrote in a statement. "We support maintaining marriage between one man and one woman and would oppose any attempts to change that." During a press conference in Oklahoma City Wednesday afternoon, Romney reiterated, "My view is that marriage itself is a relationship between a man and a woman, and that's my own preference."

Vladimir Putin will not travel to the United States to attend the G8 summit at Camp David next week, the new president instead sending Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev instead. A senior Obama administration official said, “Putin will not attend the G8. He has to finalize the cabinet in the new Russian government. However he will meet with the president on the margins of the G20 summit in mid-June.” However, Putin may also be avoiding the trip because he spent much of his campaign criticizing the U.S. government and suggested that Hillary Clinton was encouraging unrest inside Russia.

Not long after President Obama told ABC News on that he supports gay marriage Wednesday, his campaign team sent out an email explaining his decision and asking boosters to donate to his re-election effort. "Today, I was asked a direct question and gave a direct answer: I believe that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry," the email said. It then went on to say, "More than 1.9 million people like you power this campaign. If you can, please donate today."

An explosion on Wednesday rocked a military vehicle escorting a group of United Nations observers in Syria, and at least three Syrian soldiers were wounded. The head of the U.N. team, Maj. Gen. Robert Mood, was in the convoy and was not wounded, and neither were any of the other observers. Mood called the blast “a graphic example of the violence Syria does not need.” The observers are in Syria in part to monitor the violence, but their presence has not stopped it. U.N. Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen told the Security Council that arms are being smuggled in from both directions, and “what we see across the region is a dance of death at the brink of the abyss of war.”

Queen Elizabeth II called for changes for the House of Lords, and she outlined programs to promote “growth, justice, and constitutional reform” in a speech before the upper house of Parliament on Wednesday. The queen also called for legislative plans for the next session of Parliament, including measures to help support families and children and to break up banks. The queen said that her ministers’ first priority is to reduce the deficit and restore economic stability. The House of Lords reform has been criticized by Tories, but Prime Minister David Cameron has refused to ditch the plans, and it is a key demand from the Liberal Democrats in Cameron’s power-sharing deal.

During an interview with a Colorado news affiliate Wednesday, Mitt Romney lambasted a reporter for asking about gay marriage, medical marijuana, and whether undocumented children should have access to in-state tuition breaks. "Aren't there issues of significance that you'd like to talk about?" Romney asks the reporter about halfway through the interview. The CBS reporter had asked Romney if he would support same-sex marriage, and the candidate answered that he wouldn't, saying he “didn’t support marriage between two people of the same gender.”

A former campaign spokeswoman for John Edwards gave a crucial testimony in court on Wednesday, claiming Elizabeth Edwards was incensed that donor money went towards supporting his pregnant mistress. Jennifer Palmieri said wealthy donors Fred Baron and Lisa Blue befriended Rielle Hunter and had paid for her to go on shopping sprees. According to Palmieri, Elizabeth angrily confronted them in an Iowa hotel room in October 2007. Palmieri, who was friends with Elizabeth and was called into the room by John Edwards to mediate the situation, recalled Blue justifying giving money to Hunter as a way of keeping her from divulging her affair to the media.

Small-town America will still get its mail after all. The U.S. Postal Service announced Wednesday that it was backtracking on a previously announced plan to close some 13,000 rural post offices, instead saying that it will cut hours at the facilities to save $500 million a year. The cuts received major backlash when announced, forcing the USPS to go with a different plan—keeping post offices open for just two hours, six days a week, shifting thousands of employees from full-time to part-time work. Small communities will have the option of keeping their outpost open as a “village post office” run by a private company, or closing it completely. Officials expect most towns to choose the former.

An Indonesian air force official has reportedly located the wreckage of a Russian plane that went missing Wednesday morning. The Sukhoi SuperJet-100, with 48 people on board, left Jarkata during a commercial exercise with reporters, potential buyers, and engineers. The plane was Russia’s newest commercial jetliner. Wreckage from the plane was located on the side of a cliff on Mount Salak in West Java province, where the elevation is around 5,000 feet. The plane fell off the radar 21 minutes after taking off, the pilot requesting to drop from 10,000 feet to 6,000 feet, though inclement weather was not believed to be a factor.

Pop star Rihanna was reportedly rushed to the hospital early Wednesday morning following the Met Gala in New York. The star was treated for "exhaustion" and "dehydration," which have been known to be Hollywood-speak for something far more serious. The singer was reportedly released after a short stay and cleared to fly home to Los Angeles Wednesday afternoon. Rihanna had said she wasn't feeling well a few weeks ago, when she hosted Saturday Night Live, though others worry her partying might be getting out of control. Usually an active Twitter user, Rihanna didn’t post for much of Wednesday before tweeting out an image of her arm hooked up to an IV to her followers confirming she had been hospitalized.

With chatter growing louder that President Obama will come out in support of gay marriage on Wednesday, Mitt Romney said at a campaign event in Colorado that he still does not support equal marriage rights—or even civil unions—for same-sex couples. “When these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts, I indicated my view, which is that I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name,” Romney told a local Fox News-affiliate reporter.

A Saudi bomb maker is believed to be responsible for creating the “underwear bomb” that was a central part of an al Qaeda plot foiled by a CIA double agent, security experts and officials told Reuters. Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who survived a drone strike last year, has been described as one of the most dangerous militants in al Qaeda. He reportedly had created a new, sophisticated, nonmetallic underwear bomb, but U.S. officials said Tuesday that the would-be bomber of a foiled attack planned for the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s killing was a CIA double agent. Asiri is suspected of being the culprit behind three other plots against the U.S., including the 2009 Christmas Day attempt to take over a Detroit airliner.

Russia’s opposition protesters think the election—or, as they would say, “job swap”—of President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is a joke, but you wouldn’t know it if you saw Moscow’s Red Square. The again-inaugurated president held a WWII victory parade, flanked by military generals. Despite the detention of thousands, Putin said that Russia has the “great moral right to stand up for our positions,” citing the fact that the nation suffered the blow of Nazism. While he’s willing to have a relationship with the U.S., the Russian president said that Moscow and Washington need to be on equal terms. Opposition leaders Sergei Udaltsov and Alexei Navalny are among the hundreds being held by police.

Twitter denied reports by the hacking collective Anonymous that 55,000 accounts had been accessed on Tuesday. An Anonymous hacker posted five pages of Twitter user names and passwords, and reportedly some celebrity names were on that list. But a Twitter representative said that Anonymous posted mostly duplicate information or user names and passwords for suspended spam accounts—and further, the representative said, many of the user names and passwords did not even appear to be linked to each other. But Twitter did send out password resets to accounts that may have been affected.

If New York can’t have the actual royal family move here, the city would be more than happy to welcome Pippa Middleton. British glossy Grazia reported Tuesday that the Duchess of Cambridge’s younger sister is moving to New York to work on her party-planning book. She has supposedly quit her part-time job at Table Talk, a London-based event-planning company. Already the speculation has begun as to where she will live, although apparently New York is Pippa’s second choice—she reportedly changed her mind about Paris after the nasty gun-toting scandal and ensuing bad press.

The second-largest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. admitted on Tuesday that the company’s reputation has been harmed by the hacking investigation and that he “really hopes” the scandal is “behind us.” Prince Alwaleed bin Talal said that although News Corp. has “very diversified” holdings, the hacking scandal has harmed not just the print division but the company as a whole. In one of his few previous public appearances, Alwaleed said “ethics is very important” and indicated he was disappointed in former News International chief Rebekah Brooks—and she resigned the next day. Meanwhile, a new report claimed that British Prime Minister David Cameron texted Brooks the day she resigned, saying to “keep your head up.”

President Obama issued a statement late Tuesday that he is “disappointed” that North Carolina passed Amendment 1, which will add a line to the state’s constitution declaring that marriage between one man and one woman is the “only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized.” The law will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013. Fueled by religious voters—and with the high-profile support of evangelist Billy Graham—Amendment 1 passed 61 percent to 39 percent, and the state had one of its largest primary-voter turnouts in years. Gay-rights groups already planned protests against the bill to begin Wednesday, and same-sex couples in Wilson and Durham will seek marriage licenses. Two protesters were arrested in Asheville on Tuesday night.

Just don’t let Rush know about this. Mitt Romney is scheduled to attend a fundraiser at the house of the chairman of the board of directors for Teva Pharmaceuticals, a major manufacturer of contraceptives—in particular Plan B, the so-called “morning-after pill” that Romney has previously denounced as being “abortion pills.” The Florida fundraiser, held at the house of Philip and Pat Frost, will cost $50,000 a plate. Although Romney was a vocal opponent of the provision of the health-care law that would force private employers to pay for birth control, calling it a violation of religious liberty, Romney has had several fundraisers with several major makers of contraceptives.

President Obama was dealt a stinging blow on Tuesday when he lost about 40 percent of the vote in West Virginia’s Democratic primary to a Texas inmate. Keith Judd, who is serving time at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institute, didn't get much campaigning done, but he was still able to win a significant chunk of the vote. Judd is in prison for making threats at the University of New Mexico more than a decade ago. It wasn't just West Virginia where Obama ran into some disgruntled voters. He lost about 18 percent of the vote to Randall Terry, an anti-abortion activist, in Oklahoma. Judd got on the ballot by filling out a form and paying the $2,500 fee, though a Democratic Party spokesperson said no one has filed a delegate for him for the national convention.

Houston neurosurgeon Dr. Dong Kim is live-tweeting brain surgery on Wednesday as part of a teaching experience. Starting at 8:30 a.m., Kim is removing a brain tumor from a 21-year-old patient, in the hope of eliminating seizures. A colleague of Kim’s will live-tweet from the operating room, a video camera will capture overview shots of the surgery, and a still photographer will be taking digital photos. All the material will be available on Twitter, YouTube, TwitPic, CoverItLive, and Pinterest.

Delta Airlines said Tuesday that it pulled its advertising from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart in response to an April skit that featured a picture of a manger between a woman’s legs. In the skit, Stewart joked that women should use “vagina mangers” to “protect their reproductive organs from unwanted medical intrusions.” Since then, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has pressured Delta and other Comedy Central advertisers to cease ads on the comedy show. Catholic League President Bill Donohue has called the skit “hate speech” and says it “discriminates” against Christians. In Delta’s statement, a spokesperson said the company “doesn’t discriminate nor do we condone discrimination.”

The leader of the Greek far left, who has been tasked with forming the country’s government, said that although he finds the European Union’s bailout terms “barbaric,” he will meet with pro-bailout parties on Wednesday. If the two sides fail to come to an agreement, Greece could have fresh elections in a few weeks. Alexis Tsipras has said he wants to move away from the harsh austerity plans, even if it means abandoning the EU bailout commitments—despite Germany’s declaration on Tuesday that if Greece fails to meet its bailout terms, it will not receive any aid. Greek media reported that Tsipras’s reform plans have the support of the smaller left-wing party, the Democratic Left, and he secured agreement from Greece’s center-right party on Tuesday.

Against Me! singer Tom Gabel has come out as transgender, and told Rolling Stone that he will begin living his life as a woman. The first major rock star to come out as transgender, Gabel has dealt with gender dysphoria for years. Gabel will soon begin hormone treatments and undergo electrolysis treatments and will eventually take the name Laura Jane Grace. Gabel will remain married, and said that while his wife has been “super-amazing,” Gabel admitted there would will be some “embarrassing moments ahead.”

A Daily Mail story that went viral on Facebook and was picked up by the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, the New York Post, and many other news outlets, turns out to be completely fabricated. The hilarious, horrifying, but totally unbelievable story described a Polish dentist who took revenge on her ex-boyfriend by pulling all his teeth. “I tried to be professional and detach myself from my emotions. But when I saw him lying there I just thought, what a bastard,” she was quoted as saying. According to the story, she was arrested and charged with malpractice. But local police in Poland say the case never existed, and the journalist whose byline appears on the story said he was “drawing a blank” and could not remember writing it.

A Tennessee man targeted two young sisters in a kidnapping plot that included the murder of their mother and older sister, court documents alleged on Wednesday. The girls, Alexandra and Kyliyah Bain, are believed to be with Adam Mayes, a family friend who has been charged with their mother, Jo Ann Bain, and sister, Adrienne, 17. His wife, Teresa, who has also been charged in the kidnapping and murder, reportedly told police that Mayes intended to take Alexandra and Kyliyah from their home, and the couple took the girls to Mayes’s mother’s house in Guntown, Miss. Mayes’s mother has also been arrested in connection with the kidnappings. The FBI has added Mayes to its “Ten Most Wanted” list.

Russia’s newest commercial airliner disappeared Wednesday during a commercial exercise near Jakarta, with 44 passengers on board, Russian state media reported. The plane reportedly went missing around 2 p.m., after the pilot asked permission to descend from 10,000 feet to 6,000 feet. The plane then began making its descent but vanished near a mountainous area. By the time it was due to return, it would have burned up all its fuel.

He probably never had a bad hair day in his life. Hairstyling pioneer Vidal Sassoon died of natural causes at age 84 on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. Sassoon began working in a salon as a “shampoo boy” and opened his first salon in London in 1954. Sassoon began to transform the rigid hairstyles of the 1950s and but didn’t become famous for his wash-and-wear hairstyles until the ‘60s. “My idea was to cut shape into the hair, to use it like fabric and take away everything that was superfluous,” Sassoon said in a 1993 Los Angeles Times profile. He eventually expanded to the U.S. before developing an eponymous line of shampoos and styling products and founding the Vidal Sassoon Academies.

She’s stronger than yesterday–and $15 million richer too. Britney Spears has signed a deal to join Simon Cowell as a judge on The X Factor, after months of negotiations. The pop star will make $15 million for the season. Cowell got rid of last season’s judges Nicole Scherzinger and Paula Abdul, in an effort to boost the show’s ratings for Season 2. There's still one judge’s seat left to be filled, and Cowell is reportedly considering a long list of names, including pop singers Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato.

President Obama said Wednesday that same-sex marriage “should be legal,” one day after North Carolina voted in an amendment to the state's constitution banning any union between anyone except one man and one woman. In an interview with ABC News's Robin Roberts, Obama said his position on it had evolved: “Over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family who are in incredibly committed and monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together ... at a certain point, I've just concluded that for me, personally, it is important to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” ABC News's full interview will air Thursday morning on Good Morning America.