Howdy Australia!! - Prince Andrew is banished from public life - Trump's own ambassador throws his administration under the bus - A science fiction staple has quietly become reality - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:

United States Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland pretty much threw Donald Trump and company under the bus at the House Intelligence Committee.  Sondland testified under oath that there was "quid pro quo" with Ukraine, that he pushed for Ukraine to announce investigations into former US Vice President Joe Biden and Son Hunter after demands from Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and that Giuliani was expressing Trump's "desires".  Sondland also implicated Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo:  "They knew what we were doing and why," Sondland told the House Intelligence Committee in his opening statement, "Everyone was in the loop.  It was no secret."  

And now..

Britain's Prince Andrew will step away from all public duties "for the foreseeable future", after his disastrous, unrepentant BBC interview in which he really didn't explain away his friendship with millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a US jail cell in August.  The development comes after corporations and institutions announced they were cutting ties with Andrew - including Australia's Murdoch University, Bond University, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.  The University of Wollongong is still reviewing that relationship.

The prince's denial of knowing a then-17-year old girl - who has since accused him of molesting her - didn't come off as very believable, mainly because he has his arm around her in a now widely-circulated photo.  The statement from prince read, "It has become clear to me over the last few days that the circumstances relating to my former association with Jeffrey Epstein has become a major disruption" to the royals' charitable work.  Observers believe that the Queen called him in and suspended him from public life.

Moving along..

The leader of Israel's Blue and White Party Bennie Gantz says he is unable to form a governing coalition, meaning the country is likely heading towards its third election in a year.  Earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to cut a coalition deal.  Lawmakers now have 21 days to nominate some sort of compromise candidate, if such a thing were possible; but before that, Israel's attorney-general could announce long-expected charges against Netanyahu for alleged bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in three cases.

Members of the Extinction Rebellion climate campaigner group are distancing themselves from the movement's co-founder over remarks that seem to belittle the Holocaust.  Roger Hallam referred to the systemic murder of six million Jews in nazi Germany as "just another f**kery in human history", listing other genocides and slaughters over the past 500 years, including Belgium's killing of 10 million people in Congo in the 1800s.  The remarks were roundly condemned by Germany's government.  Extinction Rebellion tweeted: "We explicitly distant ourselves from Roger Hallam's belittling and relativizing statements about the Holocaust," adding, "He is no longer welcome in XR Germany."

Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyii will go to The Hague to defend her country against allegations of genocide.  Gambia went to the United Nations' highest court to allege Myanmar had carried out a campaign of mass murder, rape, and destruction of communities against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state.  Some 700,000 Rohingya were driven off of their ancestral lands and over the border into refugee camps in Bangladesh.  Suu Kyii was once the world's public face of the human rights movement for her resistance to Myanmar's former military regime; that image has since been muddied by her perceived indifference and even hostility towards the Rohingya and Muslims in general.

Doctors in the US have put humans into a state of suspended animation for the first time.  Calling the process "emergency preservation and resuscitation" (EPR), it is reserved for patients suffering extreme trauma with a less than 5 percent chance of survival.  EPR involves draining the blood and replacing it with ice-cold saline solution, giving doctors perhaps an hour or more to repair catastrophic damage.  Afterwards, the saline is drained, the blood is replaced and the bodies is warmed so that doctors could restart the patient's heart.  Dr. Samuel Tisherman of the the University of Maryland in Baltimore revealed the process at a recent symposium held by the New York Academy of Sciences; he didn't say if EPR was used on more than one patient, or if the patient survived.