Cartagena, Colombia - A Secret Service agent preparing for President Obama's arrival at an international summit meeting and a single mother from Colombia who makes a living as a high-priced escort faced off in a room at the Hotel Caribe a week ago over how much he owed her for the previous night's intercourse. "I tell him, 'Baby, my cash money,' " the woman said in her first public comments on a dispute that would soon spiral into a full-blown scandal.

The disagreement over her price - he offered $30 for services she thought they had agreed were worth more than 25 times that - set off a tense early morning quarrel in the hallway of the luxury hotel involving the woman, another prostitute, Colombian police officers arguing on the women's behalf and American federal agents who tried but failed to keep the matter from escalating.

On Wednesday, in a setback to the reputation of those who protect the president, the Secret Service prepared to fire one supervisor tied to the alleged misconduct with prostitutes on the Cartagena trip, the agency said in a statement. Another supervisor has decided to retire, and a third employee will be allowed to resign, the statement said. Eight other employees remain under investigation.

"These guys have the clearest cases," said a government official briefed on the investigation, referring to the three who are being pushed out.

US defence secretary Leon Panetta has apologised for gruesome, newly revealed photographs that show US soldiers posing with the bloodied remains of dead insurgents in Afghanistan.

He said war can lead young troops to "foolish decisions" and expressed concern the photos could incite fresh violence against Americans.

The White House called the two-year-old photos "reprehensible", joining Mr Panetta and other top military officials in expressing regret for the latest in a string of embarrassing missteps by the US military in a war that is built on earning the trust and confidence of ordinary Afghans.

In recent months, American troops have been caught up in controversies over burning Muslim holy books, urinating on Afghan corpses, an alleged massacre of 17 Afghan villagers and other misdeeds.

"This is war. I know that war is ugly and it's violent, and I know that young people sometimes caught up in the moment make some very foolish decisions," Mr Panetta said. "I am not excusing that behaviour, but neither do I want these images to bring further injury to our people or to our relationship with the Afghan people.

New Delhi - India announced the successful test launch Thursday of a new nuclear-capable missile that would give it the ability to strike the major Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai for the first time, a significant step forward in its aspirations to become a regional and world power.

The Agni-V missile, with a range of 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles), still requires a battery of tests and must clear other bureacratic hurdles before it can be inducted into India's arsenal. But officials hailed the launch as proof the country has taken its place among the world's most powerful and scientifically advanced nations.

"The nation stands tall today," Defense Minister A.K. Antony said, according to the Press Trust of India.

The test came just days after North Korea's failed rocket launch, but sparked none of the same global condemnation aimed at Pyongyang, an internationally isolated regime that has been banned by the U.N. from testing missile technology.

China is far ahead of India in the missile race, with intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching anywhere in India. Currently, the longest-range Indian missile, the Agni-III, has a range of 3,500 kilometers (2,100 miles) and falls short of many major Chinese cities.

"At the moment there is a huge assymetry in China's favor," said C. Uday Bhaskar, the former head of the Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses. After it adds the missile to its arsenal, however, "India's deterrent profile in the region would be appropriately burnished."

Video released by the government showed the Agni-V taking off from a small launcher on what appeared to be railroad tracks at 8:07 a.m. from Wheeler Island off India's east coast. It rose on a pillar of flame, trailing billows of smoke behind, before arcing through the sky.

It's been a terrible week for King Juan Carlos of Spain and, more importantly, for elephants.

The 74-year-old potentate broke his hip trying to slaughter elephants on a hunt in Botswana.

News of his accident didn't play well back home, where high unemployment and bad loans darken Spain's economic future.

Unsurprisingly, the king soon apologized for not hanging around to render comfort to his anxious citizens and lament the rising deficit.

Astonishingly, the King is the honorary president of World Wildlife Fund Spain, a conservation group that takes a dim view of shooting animals.

The group's secretary general, Juan Carlos del Olmo, quickly wrote to the palace to "convey WWF's profound discomfort and concern at recent developments in Spain and the world, which has caused outrage from our partners and the general public against hunting elephants, even when it takes place in a legal and regulated environment."

(The Botswana hunt was technically legal, if morally repulsive).

According to del Olmo, tens of thousands of people have registered their dismay on numerous platforms.

The Spanish WWF has been flooded with calls demanding that the king resign his presidency.

The National Afro-Swedish Association has called for Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth to be sacked after she was pictured cutting the 'genital mutilation' cake

A top Swedish politician is at the centre of a race row storm after she was pictured cutting up a cake depicting a naked black woman.

Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth was pictured enacting female genital mutilation on the racial stereotype cake, prompting calls for her resignation.

The self-confessed 'anti-racist' attended a party at Moderna Museet, the museum of modern art in Stockholm on World Art Day on April 15.

Liljeroth was pictured laughing and joking as she cut the macabre cake was designed by Makode Aj Linde.

The sweet treat featured a black woman's naked torso with the artist's own head, painted black, at the top.

Once cut open, the cake sponge was red, depicting blood.

It is believed the art installation was intended to highlight the issue of female circumcision, as the minister first cut a slice of cake from the 'clitoris'.

The United States Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a law on the books since 1991 precludes organizations, both political and corporate, from sued for torture or murder outside of the U.S.

In a unanimous ruling on Mohamad v. Palestinian Authority (PDF), Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the careful text of the Torture Victims Protection Act of 1991, the way it is written "convinces us that Congress did not extend liability to organizations, sovereign or not."

New York apartment buildings that permit smoking would be identified under a new law proposed Wednesday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Landlords of buildings with three or more units would have to inform prospective tenants and purchasers whether smoking was allowed in apartments and on balconies, as well as in common outdoor areas like rooftops.

Bloomberg said this would give potential renters the chance to choose a smoke-free environment, free from wafts of cigarette smoke from other apartments.

"Smoking kills and people have the right to know if they are going to be exposed to secondhand smoke," Bloomberg said.

The out-of-control Transportation Security Administration is past patdowns at airports - now it's checkpoints and roadblocks

Ever since 2010, when the Transportation Security Administration started requiring that travelers in American airports submit to sexually intrusive gropings based on the apparent anti-terrorism principle that "If we can't feel your nipples, they must be a bomb", the agency's craven apologists have shouted down all constitutional or human rights objections with the mantra "If you don't like it, don't fly!"

This callous disregard for travelers' rights merely paraphrases the words of Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano, who shares, with the president, ultimate responsibility for all TSA travesties since 2009. In November 2010, with the groping policy only a few weeks old, Napolitano dismissed complaints by saying "people [who] want to travel by some other means" have that right. (In other words: if you don't like it, don't fly.)

The following is the background text of Michel Chossudovsky's public lecture at the Society for the Defense of Civil Rights and Human Dignity (GBM), Berlin, 10-11 December, 2003 and Humboldt University, Berlin, 12 December 2003.

On Human Rights Day, 10 December 2003, Michel Chossudovsky was awarded The 2003 Human's Rights Prize of the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity (GBM).

America's War for Global Domination

We are the juncture of the most serious crisis in modern history.

The Bush Administration has embarked upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.

The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are part of a broader military agenda, which was launched at the end of the Cold War. The ongoing war agenda is a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War and the NATO led wars on Yugoslavia (1991-2001).

The post Cold War period has also been marked by numerous US covert intelligence operations within the former Soviet Union, which were instrumental in triggering civil wars in several of the former republics including Chechnya (within the Russian Federation), Georgia and Azerbaijan. In the latter, these covert operations were launched with a view to securing strategic control over oil and gas pipeline corridors.

US military and intelligence operations in the post Cold War era were led in close coordination with the "free market reforms" imposed under IMF guidance in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Balkans, which resulted in the destabilization of national economies and the impoverishment of millions of people.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is working on a project called FAST, the Future Attribute Screening Technology. FAST will remotely monitor physiological and behavioural signals like elevated heart rate, eye movement, body temperature, facial patterns, and body language, and analyse these signals algorithmically for statistical aberrance in an attempt to identify people with criminal or terroristic intentions.

It's useful to briefly talk about a few of the practical problems that such a system would face.

Firstly, the level of accuracy in remote monitoring. Is it possible to engineer a system that can remotely tell you the heart-rate of a hundred passengers passing through a TSA checkpoint? Yes. Is it possible to do so accurately? That is much, much harder. The obvious conclusion is that such a system, were it to be deployed in the wilds of airports (and presumably, other locations where our ever-benevolent technocratic overlords determine "terrorists" or "criminals" may be operating) would - given a large enough number of scans - produce a lot of false positives stemming from erroneous data.

But let's assume that such a system can be calibrated to produce a relatively accurate data set. Now we are faced with the problem of defining "suspicious" behaviour. Surely a passenger with the flu or a cold - who might have an elevated body temperature and a faster heart rate - would set alarm bells ringing. So too would someone suffering from pre-flight anxiety, people taking certain medications, the elderly and so on. Given that TSA screening protocols have prevented precisely zero terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11 (even in spite of the fact that 630 million passengers fly each year ) this merely suggests that vulnerable people will end up getting hassled by the TSA to an even greater extent than they already would be today. This is no laughing matter - a nervous but otherwise perfectly innocent passenger might end up getting tasered and die - something which of course has happened multiple times already. Or - under the NDAA (2011) - false-positives might end up being indefinitely detained on totally erroneous grounds.