Hello Australia!! - A guy "with a few screws loose" steals a passenger plane for a suicidal joyride - Erdogan threatens to shop for new allies - How the earthquake changed Lombok - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:

A ground worker at Seattle's main airport stole a passenger plane and took it on a joy ride while air traffic controllers unsuccessfully tried to talk him down, eventually crashing it onto an island in Puget Sound.  The 29-year old man seemed manic in his communications with the Sea-Tac International Airport tower, referring to himself as a "broken guy, got a few screws loose", while haphazardly soaring around over the heads of tens of thousands of people in the Bombardier Q-400, a 70-passenger turboprop that luckily was empty at the time.  At one point he performed a barrel role, almost touching the water.  Military F-18 aircraft were in the sky within seconds of the theft and shadowed him the entire time.  Officials say the military jets didn't play a role in the aircraft's crash on Ketron Island near Tacoma.  The "pilot" is dead; so far, he's described only as a 3-1/2 year veteran ground crew worker who initially passed a psych test to get hired.

The US congressman charged in an insider trading scheme involving a Sydney pharmaceutical company has suspended his reelection campaign.  Western New York state Republican Rep. Chris Collins was defiant earlier in the week, but now says it's in the "best interests" of his constituents in western New York state.  Prosecutors say he used his position on the board of Innate Immunotherapeutics to warn his son, who in turn warned others, about negative results on a trial of the company's experimental multiple sclerosis drug.  Collins didn't sell his stock, but others did and avoided hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses incurred by those stockholders who didn't have the inside information.  Collins denies the charges. 

Thousands returned to the streets of Bucharest, Romania for peaceful protests after 450 were injured on Friday night in clashes with security forces. The anti-government protests are so big, ex-pat Romanians even returned home to join them.  The demonstrators want the governing Social Democrat Party (PSD) to step down and call early elections over widespread corruption, and for legalizing some of the crimes officials were accused of, therefore interfering in the legal process.  It's likely the biggest anti-government protest in Romania since the fall of Nikolae Ceausescu in 1989.

NASA will try again on Sunday morning to launch the Parker Solar probe to the Sun.  Saturday's planned launched was scrubbed when an alarm went off during the countdown, and the problem couldn't be resolved within the launch window,  The weather should be better when Sunday rolls around to Cape Canaveral in Florida.  Named after 91-year old University of Chicago astrophysicist Eugene Parker, the unmanned probe is designed to get closer to the Sun than any previous attempt.

The earthquake that killed more than 300 people on Lombok Island on 5 August also lifted the island 25 centimeters higher.  NASA and the California Institute of Technology's joint rapid imaging project made the determination days after the killer quake.  It's hoped these observations could lead to better predictions of how and where earthquakes cause catastrophic damage.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is warning that Ankara could start looking for new allies because of its row with the United States.  "Before it is too late, Washington must give up the misguided notion that our relationship can be asymmetrical and come to terms with the fact that Turkey has alternatives," Erdogan wrote in an editorial published by The New York Times.  Donald Trump on Friday slapped Turkey with extra-high tariffs on metal imports because Turkey is detaining a US pastor as part of the crackdown following the 2016 coup attempt.  The Lira crashed against the Dollar as a result, and Turkish corporate stocks tanked. 

The International Criminal Court is threatening to open its own investigation into the "False Positives" scandal in Colombia, if the government there doesn't take its investigative role seriously.  A special tribunal is investigating up to 2,000 deaths between 2008 and 2014 in which government forces killed civilians and then posthumously logged the fatalities as anti-government rebels.  The probe was part of the peace deal that ended the civil war with the Marxist FARC guerillas - but the new ultra-conservative government has promised to roll back many of the promises made by its center-right predecessor.

Lebanon is "preparing to study and adopt the legislation necessary to legislate the cultivation of cannabis" said the country's Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri.  Cannabis is a hearty crop that can survive the harsh desert climate, and legally growing it "for medical uses in the manner of many European countries and some US states" would add millions of dollars to the country's struggling economy.  Farmers in the Bekaa Valley have been growing it for years, but for the black market.