An embarrassing scandal involving prostitutes and US Secret Service agents deepened as 11 agents were placed on leave and the agency designed to protect President Barack Obama was forced to apologise.

A dozen US Secret Service agents sent to Colombia to provide security for President Barack Obama at an international summit have been relieved of duty over alleged misconduct.

Russia's spy agency authorised a raid on a British investment firm in Moscow that led to a massive tax scam by allegedly corrupt officials and the death of a lawyer who tried to expose the fraud, new papers show. Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow-based lawyer, died in November 2009 during pre-trial detention after he was arrested by a group of officials who were being investigated for tax fraud. No one has been imprisoned for his death.

New allegations coincide with rocket launch to mark North Korean founder's centenary

The millionaire owner of London Wasps rugby club and Wycombe Wanderers Football Club has been arrested over suspected computer hacking by detectives investigating similar alleged offences at the News of the World.

In Modern Spies, Peter Taylor was at pains to make it clear to us that contemporary intelligence work isn’t a bit like film and television fictions would have us believe. This will presumably come as a relief to the parents of young people who find themselves intrigued by the increasingly open recruitment procedures of the UK’s intelligence and security services. One British intelligence officer here revealed that when she’d told hermother what her new job was, she’d replied, “Oh my goodness, you’re going to end up with your head in a fat-fryer!” her knowledge of MI5 having been largely gathered from watching Spooks. Her daughter assured Taylor that it isn’t really like that, just a little wistfully, I thought: “Unfortunately, I’m not running around the streets of London, chasing terrorists, being nearly blown up every week,” she said. Apparently, there’s a lot of paperwork. But, despite such testimony, Taylor had a problem with his project of de-glamourisation, which was the deep devotion of television to the visual rhetoric of the spy movie.

These nine stories are a surprise. Ostensibly about conflict, and those caught up in the business of war, they come at their subject sideways, not from an explosive, terrorised frontline, but from the quieter voices of child civilians, an accidental spy, a former wren at a commemoration ceremony.

The queer case of the comedy Blackshirts

Simon McBurney brings dazzling technology to his Bulgakov adaptation but little clarity. A Sondheim evergreen, meanwhile, is as fresh as ever

Hollywood star George Clooney and his father were released tonight following their arrest at a demonstration in Washington.

At first sight, Lysander Rief, standing on the corner of the Augustiner Strasse in 1913 Vienna, looks like a hero. He's young, "almost conventionally handsome", clean-shaven, well-tailored, and broad of shoulder. "He presented," we're later told, "a highly plausible rendition of a worldly, informed, educated man – but he knew how flimsy the disguise was whenever he encountered people with real brains."

When writing a recent novel, I spent time thinking about the concept of identity; the idea that people can fool not just their close associates, but even themselves, and literally become the person they believe they are. It became increasingly clear to me that nobody ever really knows another person. And my mind kept returning to John le Carré's 'A Perfect Spy', where the world of spies and double-spies becomes a metaphor for the treachery of the human heart, where identity can become lost and confused in a web of hidden corridors.

British spies accused of helping in the rendition and torture of two Libyan rebels will be investigated by police, officials said today.

As a 'CIA agent' is sentenced, Patrick Cockburn deciphers a dangerous diplomatic game