Good Morning, Australia! – A powerline disaster at a Carnival parade results in several deaths – Police hunt the woman who tried to choke a toddler – Are you getting ready to look for a job today, and wondering, “Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten that snake tattooed on my face”?  Well, we have good news for you! – And a lot more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

A freak disaster at a Carnival Parade in Port-au-Prince, Haiti resulted in at least 18 deaths.  This happened as the parade float featuring the Rap Kreyol group Barikad Crew passed under a sagging power line – but it produced a massive arc directly into the head of lead singer Fantom (warning – graphic video).  You can only hope that he never felt it.  Some people died on the float, others were crushed to death as the crowd panicked.  Barikad Crew is possibly the most-disaster-prone act in all of hip-hop.  Prior to this, three members were killed in a car crash in 2008, and another died in the 2010 Haitian Earthquake.

London police are looking for the 60-year old woman who grabbed a one-year old boy by the throat and muttered, “That baby would rather be dead.”  They baby escaped harm because his mother quickly pushed the assailant away from his pram, and the security guard escorted her from the store.  Metro police released store security video of the 15 January incident in hopes of tracking down the suspect.

France’s government could face a no-confidence vote after President Francois Hollande rammed a business-friendly economic reform bill through parliament by decree.  This managed to anger his ruling Socialist Party backbench and the conservative opposition, which called for a debate on the no-confidence measure on Thursday.  The bill seems mild by the standards of the post-Thatcher-Reagan world in which business gets everything it wants at the expense of all else.  It allows more shops to open on Sundays and evenings, makes it easier to fire workers, and exposes the legal professions to more competition.

The UN Security Council on Wednesday will tackle the worsening situation in Libya, and Egypt’s foreign minister will sit in on the meeting.  Egypt has already carried several punitive bombing raids on Islamic State (IS) targets in its chaotic neighbor, after IS released a video showing militants beheading 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians.   Cairo wants a mandate for international forces to intervene in Libya, which has no effective government following the chaos of the Arab Spring.

IS militants reportedly burned 45 people to death in the town of Al-Baghdadi, about halfway in between the capital Baghdad and the border with Syria.  The local police chief says several of the victims were members of the security forces.  The terrorists also attacked a compound that houses the families of security personnel.

At least 14 people are dead in bombings attributed to the terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria’s restive northeast.  Most of them were killed in the blast at a military checkpoint near the town of Biu.  And a suicide bomber struck at a restaurant in the town of Potsikam, killing two a wounding more than a dozen people.

Four Taliban suicide bombers attacked a police headquarters in eastern Afghanistan, killing 20 officers and injuring eight others.  The militants were dressed as police. 

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has software hidden deep in millions of hard disk drives all around the world.  That’s the accusation from the Russian computer security firm Kapersky Lab, which has previously exposed NSA eavesdropping operations.  The tiny data packets apparently burrow deep into drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, and other top manufacturers. 

A Canadian student has invested a topical cream to get rid of tattoos without the pain, blistering, and scarring of lasers.  27-year old PhD candidate Alec Flakenham’s cream doesn’t target skin cells at all – it triggers a part of the immune system to come and eat up the ink.  Ex-boyfriend?  Gone.  Failed political candidate?  Gone.  Incredibly regrettable decision made while drunk or stoned?  Gone.  And the best part is that if the cream passes the testing phase, it’s only going to cost about $5 per application.