Hello Australia!! - Trump's free ride in Congress is over - Catholic Bishops fret over the sex abuse scandal - China goes where no one has gone before - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:

The new US Congress took its place in Washington, DC, electing San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi its Speaker of the House of Representatives.  This House has more women and minorities than ever before, including its first female Indigenous Americans and first female Muslims - one of whom took the oath of office on a Koran that once belonged to US Founding Father Thomas Jefferson.  This comes a day after Pelosi and other Democratic Party leaders went to the White House to tell Donald Trump they are not going to fund his proposed wall along the Mexican border.  Ms. Pelosi is not as far Left as many progressives in her party would like, but she is a sharp and shrewd leader, far more skilled in negotiating and Congressional procedure than the Republicans she replaced.  Trump isn't ready for this.

Pope Francis says the credibility of the US Catholic Church has been undermined by the ongoing sex abuse scandal there.  In a letter read before a retreat of Bishops and Cardinals at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, outside Chicago, Illinois (such detail), Francis said the official cover-ups of sexually abusive clergy made it worse.  "Combating the culture of abuse, the loss of credibility, the resulting bewilderment and confusion, and the discrediting of our mission urgently demands of us a renewed and decisive approach to resolving conflicts," the Pope wrote.  In an attempt at openness, the US Catholic named more than 1,000 priests and others accused of sexually abusing children - regional prosecutors believe there are a lot more.

Professional hit-men believed to have killed a pedophile priest weeks after he walked out of a jail in Italy.  Giuseppe Matarazzo had been convicted of molesting two girls and had just finished an eleven year prison term.  The 45-year-old's body was found with five bullet holes in the town of Frasso Telesino, near Naples.  Two men are under arrested, police are looking for a third, and investigators are looking into whether the hit team was hired by a parent of one of the victims, one of whom committed suicide after being molested by Matarazzo.

Pyongyang's acting North Korean ambassador to Rome has gone missing, and South korea intelligence believes he has sought asylum from an unidentified Western country.  If true, Jo Song-gil - the son and son-in-law of high-ranking North Korean officials - is one of the high-ranking officials ever to defect from the hermit kingdom, and it will be a massive blow to the regime of Kim Jong-un.  The last senior diplomat to defect was North Korea's deputy ambassador in London in 2016.

China's Chang'e spacecraft has landed on the far side of the moon - the first to do so - and its Yutu-2 has rolled out for exploration.  The unmanned mission is sending back the first detailed, close-up images from the side of the moon that never faces the earth.
China Space Agency
And it's about as grey and dusty as the other side.  But it's a huge coup for Beijing, which is moving to establish itself as a science and technology superpower.  "China is on the road to become a strong space nation. And this marks one of the milestone events of building a strong space nation," said Chang'e's chief designer for the lunar mission Wu Weiren to China Central Television.  The US manned missions to the moon 50 years ago took place on the near side of the moon.  The far side is free of light pollution and radio waves and is considered by many to be an ideal location for a deep space observatory.