The US Secret Service sex scandal has spawned X-rated jokes, inspired a spicy song set to a local Caribbean beat, and made an unlikely celebrity of a 42-year-old taxi driver who lives with his mother and now seems to be in hiding.

Venezuelan investigators are picking through the shattered wreckage of a plane that crashed with 160 people on board, trying to determine what caused the engines to fail and sent the jet plunging from the sky in the country’s deadliest air disaster in history.

A Los Angeles police commander today defended the actions of officers who killed a young girl in a shoot-out with her father, one of three stand-offs in the past nine months in which officers killed suspects holding hostages.