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The speaker of Britain’s House of Commons says a pie attack on media mogul Rupert Murdoch at a parliamentary committee hearing could lead to permanent security changes.

An activist launched a shaving foam pie at Murdoch, 80, inside the Houses of Parliament in July as Murdoch testified about Britain’s tabloid phone hacking scandal.

Speaker John Bercow said Monday the incident had exposed inadequate security arrangements.

Visitors in the future may face new restrictions during high profile events, including restrictions on the type of items they can bring into Parliament my credit score. Bercow said officials will also consider creating a new post of director of security.

Jonathan May-Bowles pleaded guilty to assaulting Murdoch and was sentenced to six weeks in jail.

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Finance chiefs from the Group of 20 rich and developing nations were wrangling Friday over whether the eurozone should pick up the whole bill for its escalating debt crisis, or whether the rest of the world should help out more.

The International Monetary Fund _ the world’s lender of last resort for cash-strapped countries _ has until now funded about a third of the cost of the bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal. But while some, including the United States, are arguing that Europe has more than enough money to spend its way out of the crisis, others are pushing for more support as the currency union’s debt troubles risk dragging the world economy back into recession.

Over recent days, markets have been buoyed by hopes that the 17 countries that use the euro will sort out key aspects of a more aggressive solution to their debt crisis in time for an EU summit Oct. 23 and a Group of 20 meeting in early November.

However, the cost of any such deal is going to be extremely costly. As well as shoring up Europe’s weaker banks, the markets are hoping the eurozone will unveil a strategy that will be enough to stop large economies like Italy and Spain from joining the bailout club.

To do that, the region’s bailout fund, the euro440 billion ($608 billion) European Financial Stability Facility, will soon start buying their bonds on the open market _ the hope is that will support their prices and keep a lid on their borrowing costs to allow them to carry on funding themselves in the markets.

But most economists, and a growing number of European officials, believe that the EFSF is way too small to stabilize both countries and recapitalize banks in other cash-strapped countries.

While the eurozone is working on ways to maximize the impact of its limited resources, there is a growing drive to get the IMF to stump up more cash. However, any attempt to get the IMF to play a more hands-on approach, by possibly joining the EFSF in bond market interventions, is likely to meet with some resistance as well as require changes to the IMF’s legal framework.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner indicated Friday that he was in favor of maintaining IMF support, but stressed that Europe had enough money to resolve its troubles on its own payday loans. He also opposed beefing up the IMF’s resources, as might be required if the fund was to take on a more active role.

“The IMF has very, very substantial uncommitted resources because of the actions we took in ‘09 and 2010,” Geithner said in an interview on CNBC. “If Europe has a comprehensive strategy in place that looks like it makes sense and is using the very ample financial resources of Europe, then we’re happy to see the IMF play a continuing role, as it’s been playing in supporting what the Europeans are doing.”

The pressure on Europe to finally get a grip on its debt crisis has ratcheted up in recent weeks amid signs that it’s taking its toll on the global economy. Trouble in Europe’s banks could have spillover effects all round the financial system, similar to what happened after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

“We have lost a million jobs, we have lost on the revenue side and the current events actually create greater uncertainty and lack of confidence, so it is absolutely crucial, that both, as the G20, but certainly as Europe, that we get a higher level of decisiveness in terms of resolving this crisis,” South African finance minister Pravin Gordhan told The Associated Press Friday.

Gordhan also appeared somewhat more open to a larger role of the IMF in Europe.

“It is about getting ahead of the curve and developing the financial firepower, which would enable Europe to assure the rest of the world that either on its own, through the EFSF, or with the IMF, they are able to actually contain this contagion,” he said.

Officials warned not to expect too much of the meeting of G-20 finance ministers and central bankers in Paris. The get-together is a stop on the road to a meeting of EU leaders on Oct. 23, when the eurozone is expected to present its new and improved crisis strategy, and a G-20 summit of leaders in Cannes in early November.

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Sarah DiLorenzo contributed to this story.

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Asian stock markets were mixed Monday after a weekend meeting of the leaders of France and Germany provided a promise of action on Europe’s debt crisis but few details.

Oil prices hovered above $83 per barrel while the dollar slipped against the euro and the yen.

On Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy said a comprehensive response to the debt crisis would be finalized by the end of the month, including a detailed plan to ensure European banks have adequate capital. Few other details were provided.

The market reaction in Asia was lukewarm. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.7 percent to 17,589.15. But South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.7 percent to 1,771.29 and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.5 percent to 4,184.40.

Benchmarks in mainland China, New Zealand and the Philippines were lower. Singapore’s FTSE Straits Times Index rose. Markets in Japan were closed for a national holiday.

“Discussions over the weekend between German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy delivered little in substance,” Credit Agricole CIB said in a research note.

“In the meantime, markets may give eurozone officials the benefit of the doubt, but patience will run thin if no progress is made on these fronts,” it said.

Analysts have urged European officials to identify all the banks in the region that need to replenish their capital reserves, then decide whether to compel them to raise that money from markets and to provide government financing to the ones that can’t unsecured personal loans.

Many experts say the capital cushions of many European banks must be strengthened in order to withstand a possible government bond default by Greece.

Chinese real estate shares fell after a weekend report by a research firm that housing prices in 100 cities declined in September for the first time this year following repeated interest rate hikes and other government efforts to cool an overheated economy.

Hong Kong-listed China Overseas Land & Investment Ltd. lost 5.1 percent. China Resources Land Ltd. fell 5.2 percent. China Vanke Co. dropped 3.3 percent.

Meanwhile, energy shares rose on the back of stabilizing oil and gold prices. Australia’s Woodside Petroleum gained 1.3 percent and Energy Resources of Australia gained 4.3 percent.

The euro rose to $1.3449 from $1.3388 in late trading Friday in New York. The dollar weakened to 76.74 yen from 76.82 yen.

In energy trading, benchmark crude for November delivery was up 67 cents to $83.65 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract climbed 39 cents to end Friday at $82.98 a barrel in New York.

Brent crude was up 16 cents at $106.04 a barrel on the ICE Futures Exchange in London.

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Missouri plans to broaden its business reach overseas by opening three new foreign trade offices, economic development director David Kerr said Tuesday.

The state recently won a federal grant that will fund three new offices for a year, Kerr said. They’ll be placed in Brazil, India and China and Kerr said. The state has already solicited contractors to staff and run the offices, is due to receive applications today and hopes to have them up and running within a month, said Kerr.

Missouri currently has six foreign trade offices, which help small and mid-sized businesses find export clients and develop trade relationships in overseas markets. Four are in Asia, one in western Europe and one in Mexico.

Like President Barack Obama, Mo. Gov Jay Nixon has made boosting exports a cornerstone of his economic development policy. Last year, the value of all goods exported from Missouri grew 35 percent to $12.9 billion. So far this year, exports are running 14 percent ahead of last year’s pace.

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The conspiracy involved enlisting star-studded bait in an exotic locale for a high-stakes job.

Heidi Fleiss, the infamous “Hollywood Madam,” sat among the fountains at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, pleading for a woman she didn’t know to help trap a man almost everybody in St. Louis knew.

The target: Ray Vinson, the homespun mortgage salesman whose twangy rendition of the “99-99″ suffix on his American Equity Mortgage phone number made him a staple of St. Louis radio and TV advertising.

The point: Vinson was embroiled in a nasty, high-stakes divorce, with tens of millions of dollars hanging on the decision of a St. Louis County judge.

The plan: To coax Pamela Brensinger, a former exotic dancer, to claim that she had an affair with Vinson and that he was a dangerous, abusive boyfriend.

The problem: Brensinger didn’t remember anyone named Ray Vinson.

The intrigue that September day in 2005 ran deep. Unknown to Fleiss, Brensinger’s husband, a driver for a Las Vegas escort service, sat at a nearby table, surreptitiously listening in. Unknown to Brensinger and her husband, private detectives who hired Fleiss were nearby.

Those detectives were working with Joe Adams, a flamboyant private eye from St. Louis who was the bodyguard of Vinson’s estranged wife, Deanna Daughhetee.

Court records show that Adams enlisted Fleiss after Brensinger refused entreaties from other investigators. They presumed that a dancer couldn’t turn down Fleiss. And Brensinger didn’t.

In 2006, Daughhetee walked out of the courthouse in Clayton with the lion’s share of American Equity Mortgage. Later that year, she married Adams, whose vanity license plates once read “BYE RAY.”

They may have been done with Vinson, but he was not done with them. He filed a lawsuit in Las Vegas, claiming Adams, Brensinger and others had conspired to discredit him with a fabric of lies. The case plodded through the court system for the last few years.

Finally, two months ago, a jury

Stock futures rose sharply Thursday after applications for unemployment benefits fell to a five-month low. The government also reported that the economy grew slightly faster in the spring than previously reported.

Initial unemployment claims fell to a seasonally adjusted 391,000. That’s the lowest level since April 2 and also the first time applications have fallen below 400,000 since Aug. 6. The big drop suggests that layoffs are stabilizing. Still, economists say unemployment requests need to consistently fall below 375,000 to indicate job growth.

The Commerce Department also said that the economy grew at a 1.3 percent annual rate in the April-June quarter, up from the 1 percent estimate made a month ago. The improvement reflects modest growth in consumer spending and trade.

Both reports gave investors some confidence about the strength of the economy.

“The economy in the rear-view mirror here … was growing at a pretty modest pace; not anywhere near what anyone would like, but not troublesome,” said Rob Lutts, president and chief investment officer of Cabot Money Management. “This gives us a little more confidence that maybe the economy will muddle through here as we go through all these challenges.”

About a half hour before the opening bell, Dow Jones industrial average futures are up 137 points, or 1.3 percent, at 11,113.

Standard & Poor’s 500 futures are up 15, or 1.3 percent, at 1,163. Nasdaq 100 futures are up 35, or 1.6 percent, at 2,253.

In Europe, German lawmakers voted to expand the powers of the region’s bailout fund quick guaranteed personal loans. That reassured investors that Europe is working to contain its debt problems.

The measure needs to be approved by all 17 countries that use the euro before it can take effect. It will allow the bailout fund to buy government bonds and lend money to troubled governments before they get to a full-blown crisis. Finland approved it on Wednesday.

Concerns about Europe have roiled the financial markets since late July. Analysts say investors are reacting to every bit of news from the region, which has contributed to volatility in stocks.

Case in point: Stocks rose earlier this week on hopes that Europe was moving closer to resolving its debt problems. The Dow soared 272 points on Monday, its fourth-largest increase this year, and another 147 points on Tuesday. By Wednesday, a three-day winning streak came to an end on more uncertainties about Europe’s debt. The Dow fell 180 points.

In corporate news, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. fell 9 percent in premarket trading Thursday after the company cut its revenue and earnings forecast for the third quarter, saying it was having problems getting its chips made.

Wheel and tire maker Titan International rose 3 percent ahead of the opening. The company boosted its revenue forecast for the year and said it is in a “great position to grow.”

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The home-buying season was a bust.

March through August are typically the peak buying months. But this time, Americans bought fewer new homes in that stretch than in any other six-month period since record-keeping began a half-century ago.

And sales of previously occupied homes didn’t fare much better. They nearly matched 2009’s total for the peak buying months. And that was the worst since 1997.

Combined, total sales this spring and summer were the weakest on records dating to 1963. The figures underscore how badly the housing market is faring and suggest that a recovery is years away.

Because the economy is barely growing and unemployment exceeds 9 percent, many people see a home purchase as too big a risk. Some worry about losing their jobs. Others can’t afford the 20 percent down payment that most lenders now require.

Not even shrunken home prices and the lowest mortgage rates in six decades are convincing would-be buyers.

“The job engine has really sputtered out, and without jobs, Americans really can’t purchase homes,” said Celia Chen, a housing economist at Moody’s Analytics.

Plunging stock prices and renewed recession fears have led many economists to push back expectations for a housing recovery.

Chen expects prices to bottom at the start of 2012. And she doesn’t expect sales and prices to make a healthy recovery until 2015 at the earliest. In hard-hit areas such as California and Florida, it could take decades for prices to return to normal, she said.

Pierre Ellis, an analyst at Decision Economics, said that until wages increase and hiring picks up, sales will languish.

The “bad news is the evident absence of optimism that sales will pick up to any degree,” Ellis said.

Roughly 168,000 new homes were sold from March through August, the Commerce Department said Monday. That’s fewer than the 180,000 for the same period last year _ and last year’s sales were boosted by a temporary buyer’s tax credit fast cash advance loan. Over the same period in 2009, roughly 208,000 new homes were sold.

In a healthy six-month buying season, about 400,000 new homes would sell.

Among re-sales, about 2.8 million homes sold from March through August this year. That’s roughly as many as in the same periods in 2009 and 2010. In a healthy market, about 3.3 million would be sold in that six-month stretch.

Michael McGrew, who runs McGrew Real Estate in Lawrence, Kan., said many families won’t buy until the economy strengthens. Even in Lawrence, which had a low unemployment rate of 6.4 percent in July and is home to the University of Kansas, people are worried, McGrew said.

What would help most would be a relocated company that’s ready to hire in the Lawrence area, McGrew says. But hopes for the housing market to turn around soon are dim, he said.

“We’re actually seeing more people trading down their home or trading out of our market entirely,” McGrew said.

Nationally, prices are still falling. Prices for previously occupied homes have sunk more than 5 percent over the past year to a median of $168,300. New-home prices have fallen even further, by 7.7 percent, to $209,100.

That suggests builders and Realtors are slashing prices to compete with low-priced foreclosures and short sales. Short sales occur when lenders allow homes to be sold for less than what’s owed on the mortgage.

Combined, foreclosures and short sales are selling at an average 20 percent discount. And they’re lowering neighboring home values.

Devan MacConnell, 28, an administrator at a nonprofit in southeast Virginia, had been renting for years before buying a short sale this month _ a one-bedroom condo in Virginia Beach overlooking the ocean. She picked it up for $215,000, about $35,000 less than neighboring apartments.

“It was a steal,” she said.

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It may almost be time to start hyperventilating.

American Girl, the retailer that has a cult-like following among little girls, is proposing to put a store at Chesterfield Mall. In the words of a tween: OMG!

I have never set foot inside an American Girl store. But my colleagues have regaled me over the years with tales of taking their mesmerized daughters to the company’s flagship store in Chicago. In the store, you can dress up and accessorize the dolls, take them to a hair salon, and have tea parties with them. And that’s just the highlight reel.

So when I told my co-workers on Friday about the proposed store, one of them screamed in delight. But another groaned and said her daughter’s head was going to explode.

“In fact, mine just did,” she said, adding that she enjoys visiting the store, but is not so happy with how much poorer she is by the time she drags her can-we-stay-just-a-little-bit-longer daughter out of it.

An American Girl spokeswoman was quick to note that the retailer hasn’t signed a lease yet.

“Nothing is official or final,” Susan Jevens, the spokeswoman, wrote in an email.

But the retailer has submitted detailed plans to the city of Chesterfield to develop the former Wapango space at the mall into a 10,850-square-foot store.

The submitted architectural renderings, which include a candy apple red facade and pink awnings, makes the store seem more than just a pipe dream.

The proposed development goes before the city’s planning commission on Monday night. The next step will be getting a building permit, said Aimee Nassif, Chesterfield’s planning and development director.

American Girl has been slowly expanding in recent years. It opened its first store in Chicago in 1998 and later opened two more flagship stores

Armed men from Liberia have killed at least 15 people in attacks on villages along the border over the last two days, Ivory Coast’s defense minister said Saturday.

The violence began Thursday night in the country’s southwest, a region that has seen fighting even after the resolution of Ivory Coast’s bloody political crisis earlier this year.

Also Saturday, an international watchdog said it had documented a similar attack that left at least eight people dead back in July.

Matt Wells of Human Rights Watch says the fighters loyal to ex-President Laurent Gbagbo crossed over the border at night and killed villagers, including women and children, and then disappeared back into the Liberia’s dense jungle just a couple of miles away.

“Some had their throats slit and others were shot. They shot a woman from behind at point blank range,” Wells says. “The latest attack looks to be of a very similar nature.”

Ivory Coast was plunged into months of violence after Gbagbo refused to cede power after losing the November presidential election. President Alassane Ouattara has pledged to investigate the killings of thousands of people during the conflict on both sides.

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First Bank is shuttering its small-business lending center in Folsom, Calif., and moving the office to its operations center in Hazelwood.

Having the center closer to other bank operations and executives will enable the bank to focus more on growing small-business lending, said Chris McLaughlin, executive vice president and director of retail banking for First Bank.

First Bank is a subsidiary of Clayton-based First Banks, which has 149 bank branches in Missouri, California, Florida and Illinois.

“For us, it will allow a faster response to our customers,” McLaughlin said. “We were never a large player in (Small Business Administration) loans in St. Louis or most other markets, and we want to grow that.”

Currently, First Bank has 900 small-business loans totaling about $100 million, and of that amount, 20 percent of its portfolio are SBA loans.

McLaughlin said that with the new small-business lending center, First Bank is seeking to grow its SBA loans to 60 percent of its small-business lending portfolio.

The California office, which had 25 employees and opened five years ago, will close this month. The expanded Hazelwood office will open Monday at First Bank’s current office space at 600 James S. McDonnell Boulevard.

First Bank has recently hired several senior-level employees to staff the small-business lending office, said Wayne Henson, the bank’s SBA lending manager. It also has shifted some internal employees to the expanded center. Including sales, underwriting and back office functions, the small business group will have 62 employees.

Low interest rates for some SBA loans are driving an increase in demand for the loans, Henson said. SBA 504 loans, for example, had interest rates of 4.69 percent for 20-year loans this week and 3.75 percent on 10-year loans.

“The opportunities for small business lending are very good right now,” he said.

The bank is focusing on growing loans in its own backyard after some of its nationwide expansion efforts have failed. Privately held First Bank expanded in California in the 1990s and in Florida in 2007, where real estate loan defaults skyrocketed during the recession. Last year, the bank shrank its geographic footprint by selling 19 branches in Texas, 24 in the Chicago area, and 11 in central Illinois.

In 2008, to boost capital, First Bank’s parent company participated in the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Through TARP, First Banks owes the treasury more than $32 million in unpaid dividends on a $295 million investment made by the treasury.

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