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At the same time, the government announced increased aid to Guatemala to fight STDs.

In its first response to the class-action lawsuit filed last March by the alleged victims and their heirs, the U.S. government argued that it is immune to such a lawsuit, in a motion to dismiss the suit filed Monday night.

Because the harm was suffered in a foreign country, and because the Guatemalans have not exhausted other administrative solutions, the United States has sovereign immunity under the Federal Tort Claims Act, it said in the motion.

The government said the Supreme Court has “clarified” that the immunity statute “bars all claims based on any injury suffered in a foreign country, regardless of where the tortuous act or omission occurred.”

The United States has apologized for the study, and President Barack Obama asked the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to look into the details of the research and to assure him that current rules protect people from unethical treatment.

To be fair, lots of those drones are tiny flying spies, like the Army’s Raven, that could never accommodate even the most diminutive pilot. (Specifically, the Army has 5,346 Ravens, making it the most numerous military drone by far.) But in 2005, only five percent of military aircraft were robots, a report by the Congressional Research Service notes. Barely seven years later, the military has 7,494 drones. Total number of old school, manned aircraft: 10,767 planes.

A small sliver of those nearly 7,500 drones gets all of the attention. The military owns 161 Predators — the iconic flying strike drone used over Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere — and Reapers, the Predator’s bigger, better-armed brother.

The charge on the police docket was “disrupting class”. But that’s not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of “you smell”.

“I’m weird. Other kids don’t like me,” said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being overweight. “They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: ‘Put that away, that’s the most terrible smell I’ve ever smelled.’ Then the teacher called the police.”

The policeman didn’t have far to come. He patrols the corridors of Sarah’s school, Fulmore Middle in Austin, Texas. Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.

Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing “inappropriate” clothes and being late for school.

One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils.

“I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her,” it read. “Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother.”

In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city’s poor, has found four children on his door step – including a baby just days old.

Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.

Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable – they feel to Greeks like stories from the Third World, rather than their own capital city.

One of the children cared for by Father Antonios is Natasha, a bright two-year-old brought to his centre by her mother a few weeks ago.

The woman said she was unemployed and homeless and needed help – but before staff could offer her support she had vanished, leaving her daughter behind.

“Over the last year we have hundreds of cases of parents who want to leave their children with us – they know us and trust us,” Father Antonios says.

“They say they do not have any money or shelter or food for their kids, so they hope we might be able to provide them with what they need.”

Germany sold 3.9bn euros (£3.2bn) of six-month bonds at an average yield of -0.0122%, the first auction with a negative yield.

That means investors are effectively willing to pay Germany for the privilege of lending to it.

Meanwhile the European Central Bank revealed a new record for the amount of cash lodged with it overnight by banks.

Overnight deposits hit 464bn euros.

Traders said they could hit half a trillion euros by next week.

The spray, which remains on the suspect’s skin for two weeks and on clothes for up to six months, has been introduced in some of the chain’s busiest NSW stores, including those at Parramatta, Granville, Auburn, Lidcome, Kingsford and Wollongong, reported The Daily Telegraph.

If the SelectaDNA “forensic marking” spray proves successful in apprehending bandits, McDonald’s will introduce the system across all its 780 Australian outlets.

Developed in the United Kingdom by a police officer and a chemist, the spray has been used by McDonald’s outlets in Britain and Europe.

Each outlet keeps the details of its distribution a close secret, but one McDonald’s restaurant in The Netherlands installed above the main door an orange device which was electronically linked to a panic alarm system. Staff could activate the device in an emergency.

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The spray contains a synthetic DNA strand composed of 60 variable chromosomes, said SelectaDNA director David Morrissey.