The Colombian government has ended their $300,000 contract with Hillary Clinton’s advisor Mark Penn’s firm Burson-Marsteller according to a report by Reuters.

The Colombian embassy issued a statement saying they considered Mark Penn’s apology “a lack of respect to Colombians, and finds this response unacceptable.”

Blackwater Worldwide, the North Carolina company that provides protection for dignitaries in Iraq, has had their contract renewed by the State Department despite an investigation into fatal shootings of Iraqi civilians.

The federal wiretapping and racketeering trial of private-eye Anthony Pellicano is looking more and more like a script out of Hollywood. In yesterday’s testimony, New York hedge fund manager Adam Sender claimed that Pellicano offered to kill a man who Sender had hired Pellicano to investigate.

A five-judge panel of the Court of Cassation in Rome has declined to grant the release from prison of Amanda Marie Knox, 20, a University of Washington student from Seattle according to a report by the U.K. Press Association. Knox has been accused of involvement in the murder British student Meredith Kercher.

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary Alphonso Jackson has announced that he is retiring. In a press release on the HUD website Jackson was quoted as saying that “there comes a time when one must attend more diligently to personal and family matters. Now is such a time for me.”