Hello Australia!! - Who wants to open Australia's door to US Gun money? - IS is defeated on the battlefield but the prisoners remain - Mexico's leader says colonizers need to apologize - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:

The One Nation party is in damage control mode after an Al Jazeera investigation caught senior party officials James Ashby and Steve Dickson discussing taking money from the US gun right lobbying group National Rifle Association to push for a repeal of Australia's gun control laws.  It turned out the gun rights activists were Al Jazeera journalists, and Mr. Ashby and Mr. Dickson claim they were drunk.  The ABC reports that Ashby said "party leader Pauline Hanson was unwell and unable to respond to media inquiries, despite calls from politicians for her to reveal what she knew about the meetings".  Prime Minister Scott Morrison criticized One Nation for this ridiculousness, but wouldn't say if the Coalition would preference One Nation last at the federal election, as critics have increasingly demanded.

Austrian police raided the home of a far-right activist after he was found to have received a large cash donation from Brenton Tarrant, the Australian man charged with the cowardly murders of 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, NA earlier this month.  Martin Sellner leads the Identitarian Movement of Austria; Tarrant is known to have visited Austria, among other places, prior to the massacre.  Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz - himself a far-rightist with the People's Party - tweeted that "any connection between the Christchurch attacker and members of the Identitarians in Austria needs to be comprehensively and ruthlessly investigated". 

Kurdish officials are asking for an international tribunal to determine the fates of captured fighters from the so-called Islamic State.  The US is asking 50 nations to repatriate their citizens who fought in the Syrian Civil War and deal with them at home, but many Western governments are refusing.  The Kurds are under strain holding about 1,000 in jails, while the US-led coalition has 5,000 prisoners.  Establishing an international tribunal will be difficult, because the Kurds are not a recognized governing body, and Syria never signed the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Mexico President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is asking Spain and the Vatican to apologize for human rights abuses committed during the conquest of the region 500 years ago.  Standing in front of colossal Mayan ruins, AMLO said: "The so-called conquest was done with the sword and the cross.  They raised churches on top of temples."  Indeed, Spanish conquistadors and papal missionaries did commit massacres and other heinous crimes in the name of spreading the faith and "civilization".  Spain, which ruled Mexico for 300 years until independence in the 1800s, already rejected the idea and called for a "constructive perspective" instead. 

Prosecutors in Chicago dropped charges against actor and singer Jussie Smollett, who had been accused of faking a homophobic hate crime against himself.  Smollett walked out of court a free man on Tuesday morning, agreeing to surrender his bail money to the City law department.  The highly publicized case got Smollett dropped from his hit TV show "Empire".  Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson reportedly learned about all this during a graduation ceremony at the police academy, and was extremely angry; outgoing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel called it a "whitewash of justice".