Hello Australia!! - Trump is accused of attempted blackmail - Germany's achieves a major milestone in civil rights and decency - One of the most-criticized figures from the Grenfell Tower disaster has stood down - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:

First things first!  Three Baby Lynx born at the Paris Zoo in May had their first check-ups.  Scampering dogs help rebuild a Chilean forest after a bushfire. 

Germany has legalized gay marriages, after Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed a conscience vote in the parliament.  The new law takes effect before the end of the year and will allow married same sex couples to adopt children as well.  Merkel and her center-right alliance have opposed marriage equality for decades, and she voted against it.  But it isn't clear that canny veteran allowed the vote without knowing or suspecting what the outcome would be, and some of her own Christian Democrats felt bulldozed by the speed at which the measure was rushed through.  Most or all of the Social Democrats, Greens, and Die Linke lawmakers voted for it, joined by enough conservatives for a winning coalition.

Veteran French politician Simone Veil is dead at age 89.  The Holocaust survivor was instrumental in securing women's reproductive health rights in France in the 1970s.

The Tory leader of the Kensington Chelsea Council, Nicholas Paget-Brown, has finally stepped down in the wake of the Grenfell Tower Fire Disaster that killed scores of people.  Paget-Brown said he was doing so to accept some responsibility for "perceived failings" by the council in West London.  Community members and opposition Labour lawmakers had deeply criticized Paget-Brown for the council's absence in the days after the deadly fire in the 24-storey building, proving little or no help to survivors and failing to come up with a realistic death toll or even a list of people who lived in the tower.  Deputy council leader Rock Feilding-Mellen is also going; he was responsible for the refurbishment project that covered the tower with the flammable cladding that is believed to have allow the inferno to get out of control so quickly.

A crowd-sourced attempt to determine how many people died in Grenfell Tower indicates the UK government is underestimate the true death toll.  Demographer Michelle vonAhn from Devon led the volunteer effort to put names on each of the units and determined that at least 103 people died - and that's a low estimate.  "I wanted to make sure that these people aren't hidden, so that nobody notices," she said, "I wanted them to be visible."  The UK government says at least 80 people died, but the Kensington Chelsea council still has not made public its own list of residents.

Two American morning news hosts say Donald Trump attempted to blackmail them.  Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski say they were approached by senior White House officials who warned that a smear story would appear in the National Enquirer tabloid newspaper unless they personally appealed to Trump for forgiveness for the friction between them.  Brzezinski says her teenage daughters were harassed with frequent phone calls.  The tabloid, which is closely associated with Trump and whose owner frequently brags about his friendship with the orange clown, denies the claim.  The two say they ignored the White House threat, the story did eventually appear in the Enquirer, but no one gave a shyte.  Yesterday, Trump distracted from his failure to secure a healthcare reform deal and the Russia investigation by putting out a weird tweet disparaging Brzezinski's appearance.

Brazil issued arrest warrants for 95 "rotten" Rio de Janeiro police officer accused of essentially being double agents for drug gangs, selling weapons in the Favelas and tipping off the bad guys before raids.  "We have extracted these rotten oranges, these bad policemen, to strengthen the safety of the state," said Inspector Fabio Barucke.  Another 70 warrants are being served on suspected drug runners and other criminals are part of the investigation.

French prosecutors announced a formal investigation of far-right leader Marine Le Pen for allegedly paying her European Parliament staff to do political work in France.  The National Front leader, coming off two disappointing elections that saw her xenophobic party practically wiped out of government, denies the charges.

Austria's constitutional court finally approved seizing the building where Hitler was born, an effort that's been going on for decades after World War II.  The government wants to prevent it from becoming a nazi gathering place, and will convert it into a center for people with learning disabilities. 

Three former executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) have gone on trial on negligence charges in the 2011 triple melt-through at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.  All three pleaded not guilty.