Hello Australia!! - A new push to end ivory and rhino horn trafficking once and for all and save the dwindling species - Syria's cease-fire seems to be in name only - Far right patron saint John Wayne will not get his own feast day in sunny California - And more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

"We will not be the Africans who stood by as we lost our elephants," said Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, who will preside over the world's largest burn of confiscated elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn - 120 tons of contraband - at a landmark anti-poaching summit at Mount Kenya Safari Club in Laikipia on Saturday.  Regional leaders will be joined by conservationists, environmentalists, as well as philanthropists and corporate leaders like Virgin's Richard Branson to develop a continent-wide response to poaching.  After that, push for the total ban on trade in ivory at the CITES Convention in Johannesburg, South Africa, later this year. 

By some estimates, poaching will cause the extinction of African Rhinos by 2026, and Elephants at about the same time.

The first group of what will be more than 30 lions rescued from appalling circumstances in Colombia and Peru will arrive in South Africa on Saturday, where they'll be transferred to the Emoya Big Cat Sanctuary to live out their days.  The US-based Animal Defenders International (ADI) says the effort is the largest airlift of lions.  Most were mutilated or injured in run-down circuses.  Peru banned wild animal acts in circuses in 2011, Colombia in 2013.

The first Brazilian journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize has denounced what he calls the "coup" to remove popularly elected President Dilma Rousseff through a dubiously legal impeachment process by lawmakers facing corruption charges.  A week ago, Brazil's powerful corporate media was praising Mauricio Lima for winning a 2016 Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography for documenting the journey of a Syrian refugee family in Europe.  Speaking at a separate award ceremony Thursday night, Mr. Lima said, "I would like to express my support for freedom of speech and democracy - which is exactly what's not going on in Brazil at the moment."  he added, "So I'm against the coup."  News outlets in Brazil have openly incited street protests against and the removal of President Rousseff in a bookkeeping dispute in which she faces no criminal charges.

Colombia's highest court has legalized same-sex marriages, making it the fourth Latin American country to recognize gay marriage rights alongside Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.  The ruling clearly states that judges, notaries and clerks "must ensure that citizens' fundamental rights are observed and that they are all granted equal treatment", so none of that "religious exemption" junk the conservatives are trying to pull in the US.

The world's biggest science project has been shut down by an eight-inch varmint.  An unlucky weasel got into the electrical works at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, causing a short circuit as well as its own demise.  But the damage is limited to a small part of the electrical works, and burrowing creatures have not gotten into the LHC's tunnels - in which scientists discovered the Higgs Boson Particle and hope to discover other teeny little things.

A helicopter ferrying workers out to a North Sea oil rig crashed near Bergen, Norway.  All 13 people on board were killed, but the black box flight recorders have reportedly been recovered.  Norway's civil aviation authority immediately put a flight ban on the type of helicopter that crashed - the Eurocopter (EC) 225L Super Puma.  And the UK also banned it for commercial uses, meaning that it would be unable to carry oil and gas workers.

Fighting in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo has now claimed more than 200 lives in just the past few days, throwing further doubt on the current "cease-fire".  Rebels shelled a mosque in the government-held district of Bab al-Faraj, killing 15 people.  And government air strikes killed at least eleven people in a rebel-held district and destroyed a medical facility - the second to be hit in a week.  A day earlier, an airstrike by government forces killed at least 50 people including six doctors at a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital in Aleppo.

The US military has investigated itself, and determined that it's okay.  The Pentagon on Friday confirmed that its investigation found no war crimes inthe US bombing of the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan last year in which 42 people were killed.  MSF said the Pentagon's non-criminal disciplinary action against 16 service members including a general over the air strike was too light and "out of proportion to the destruction of a protected medical facility".

And now, dumbness:

Dead movie star John Wayne will not be getting his own holiday in California.  A state assembly member from Orange County wanted to declare 26 May as John Wayne Day in California - but ran into opposition over the Duke's startling and offensive racism displayed in an infamous 1971 interview with Playboy magazine.  At the time, Wayne said he believed in white supremacy, that African Americans weren't able to government themselves, and that Indigenous people were "selfishly" trying to keep land from the growing nation of the United States of America.  Wayne also supported the Hollywood blacklist of Leftists and the racist John Birch Society.  Not surprisingly, the measure failed by by 36-19 votes.  

It's not really clear what Republican party State Assemblyman Matthew Harper was trying to prove with the John Wayne measure.  California's ethnic diversity has long been a fact of life in the state's politics, even in the former lily-white bastion of Orange County, so it's not like he didn't know there would be opposition to celebrating a long-dead cowboy movie actor who harbored offensive opinions.  Did he do it for conservative votes?  It's not like a lot of people are talking about John Wayne, except on Turner Classic Movies every now and then.