Good Morning Australia!! - An Australian hostage is seen in a new terrorist "proof-of-life" video - Hawking scolds Trump - An upset in Tokyo might be the first rumbles of a political earthquake in Japan - 30 years on the lam, over - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:

Australian Ken Elliott appeared in a video with five other hostages being held by Islamist terrorists in West Africa.  "To my family I just want to say again I love you all," he says.  Elliot was kidnapped in 2015 along with his wife Jocelyn, who was released in 2016.  This video was timed to coincide with the visit of French President Emmanuel Macron in Mali for a security conference.  Macron is pledging more support for the Sahel G5 countries - Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad - to set up a fighting force to patrol the arid region between the Sahara and the rest of Africa to prevent the spread of terrorists southward. 

The smartest man in the world says Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement could lead to irreversible climate change.  Cambridge University Professor Stephen Hawking told the BBC that failure to act against climate change might put the Earth on course to becoming a hothouse planet, like Venus.  "Climate change is one of the great dangers we face, and it's one we can prevent if we act now," said hawking.  "By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children."  He also expressed fear that the isolationism inherent in the Brexit would lead to less scientific cooperation between Britain and other countries.

The orange clown retweeted an incredibly stupid video from the fetid swamp of Reddit.  It was a clip from his appearance on a WWE professional wrestling show from a few years back in which he play-acts a fight with Vince McMahon (another RWNJ), but the CNN logo was superimposed on McMahon's head.  Haw haw haw!  Get it?  Trump is beating up CNN!  Haw haw haw.  Anyway, instead of talking about Trump's crappy policies which have stagnated the government and ruined relations with America's allies, or his sexism, racism, xenophobia, and anti-environmentalism, the US corporate media talked the stupid video.

A suicide car bomber managed to get into Damascus, killing at least eight people in the Syrian capital's busy center.  Security forces managed to stop two other explosive-laden vehicles from reaching their targets.  The rare attack in the heavily-defended seat of power of President Bashar al-Assad comes as the so-called Islamic state loses more of the territory it once controlled in Syria and Iraq; Russian-sponsored talks on ending the Syrian Civil war are scheduled to resume in Astana, Kazakhstan this week.

As air strikes pound the last remaining IS strongholds in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the remaining civilians - mostly women and children - are fleeing.  They're struggling under intense heat, around 45 C Degrees during the day, and water service has been no better than spotty for months.  Dehydration is a problem among the internally displaced Iraqis.  Government forces are within 450 meters of the Tigris river, leaving the IS terrorists few places to hide. 

Israel's former prime minister Ehud Olmhert got early parole, leaving prison after 16 months of a corruption sentence.  The 71-year old is the country's first PM to be sentenced to prison.  Under the terms of his release, he'll have to check in with police regularly and do volunteer work.  Olmhert was a long-time conservative who pursued peace with the Palestinians until the corruption scandal bubbled over, leading to the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as PM.  The peace process has been frozen ever since. 

Former newscaster Yoriko Koike's upstart Tomin First, or "Tokyo-ites First" party, clobbered the ruling party of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo elections, possibly foreshadowing a national challenge in the near future.  Although her right-wing positions aren't all that different from Abe's, Koike successfully portrayed the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) - which is neither liberal nor democratic - as being a boy's club awash in corruption scandals.  All but one of Koike's candidates won their contests; combined with the conservative Buddhist Komeito party, she'll have more than a clear majority to push her agenda and use the platform to challenge Abe - Japan's third-longest serving post-war PM.

The UK will not prosecute anyone who might have been illegally subletting their apartment at Grenfell Tower, to assist officials trying to determine how many died in last month's high-rise fire tragedy.  "It is a priority for investigators to establish who was in Grenfell Tower on that tragic day and it is crucial that we do everything possible to support them," said the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders.  Police say at least 89 people died in the fire, but a crowd-sourced effort determined that at least 103 people died - and that's their low estimate.

After 30-years on the run, Brazil police captured one of the world's biggest drug dealers in western Mato Grosso State.  Luiz Carlos da Rocha, nicknamed White Head, is believed to have undergone plastic surgery several times to escape capture, amassing a fortune of US$100 Million in the process.