The Carbon Tax is no more – The new numbers show Ebola in West Africa is spreading out of control – France takes the battle against hate speech very seriously – And a lot more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

Well, they’ve gone and done it.  The Senate voted to repeal the carbon tax, a levy on the 300 biggest polluters passed by the Labor Party in 2011.  It leaves the nation with a policy to achieve even the minimum five percent greenhouse emissions reduction target it has inscribed in international agreements.  Senate Opposition leader Penny Wong said future generations will be appalled “at the short-sighted, opportunistic selfish politics of those opposite, and Mr. Abbott will go down as one of the most short-sighted, selfish and small people ever to occupy the office of prime minister.”  Green party leader Christine Milne said the vote against the tax was an “appalling day for Australia”.

The West African Ebola Outbreak death toll has leapt up – it’s now 603 lives lost since February in the worst-ever outbreak of the vital disease with no vaccine, no cure, and a 60- to 90 percent mortality rate.  The UN World Health Organization (WHO) says Sierra Leone recorded the highest number of deaths, 52.  Liberia reported 13 and Guinea had three more.  Medics are struggling to get access to communities where people feared outsiders were spreading, rather than fighting, Ebola.  “We still face rumors, and suspicion and hostility,” says WHO spokesman Dan Epstein, “People are isolated, they're afraid, they're scared.”

One of Greece’s most-wanted militants was captured after a shoot out with police in central Athens.  A police officer recognized anarchist Nikos Maziotis of the group “Revolutionary Struggle”, who was wearing a wig and sunglasses.  They confronted him, a struggle ensued, and Maziotis was injured in the exchange of fire as were two bystanders and a police officer.  Maziotis was tried and convicted in absentia for an assault on the capital’s US embassy and a car bomb detonated outside Athens stock exchange.

A former candidate with France’s far right “Front National” party has been sentence to nine months in prison for comparing the country’s black justice minister to a monkey.  Anne-Sophie Leclere made the vile comment in a Social Media meme last year.  Leclere was also fined around A$70,000, and the Front National party was fined some A$50,000.  Leclere, who calls the verdict “disproportionate”,  and the FN say they will appeal the verdict.

I know this Israel-Palestinians thing can be polarizing, but please people.  A video of a brawl in Paris is going viral, showing a group of pro-Palestinian protesters clashing with a pro-Israel group right outside a Synagogue on Rue de la Roquette in the 11th Arrondissement.  Because it’s Paris, both mobs start busting up chairs and tables from sidewalk cafes to use as weapons and projectiles.  The riot cops soon arrived, tear gas filled the air, and a good time was had by all (except maybe that guy with the gruesome head wound).  France is home to Western Europe’s largest Muslim population and largest Jewish community.  People, please – and eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

As relations between Moscow and Washington sour, Russia is reopening a Cold War-era spy base in Cuba.  The signals intelligence agency in Lourdes, south of Havana, ran from 1967-2001, when Russian President Vladimir Putin ruled it was too expensive to operate.  Apparently, it’s now too expensive not to operate.  Putin visited Havana last Friday, announcing Russia was forgiving 90 percent of Cuba’s unpaid Soviet-era debt.  The debt and the spy base now appear to be linked.

“Those who disclose human rights violations should be protected, we need them,” says UN high commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay – and that’s why she says former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden should be protect, not prosecuted for leaking top secret material.  Snowden’s revelations prompted an international discussion over the huge Internet and phone data sweeps conducted by US National Security Agency and its Anglophone cohorts in the so-called “Five Eyes” (Australia is one of them) on its citizens, neighbors, and allies.

A Swedish court is upholding an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whom prosecutors want to question over sex assault allegations made by two female former WikiLeaks volunteers.  However, Assange suspects Sweden in reality wants to extradite him to the United States to be tried for one of the largest leaks of classified information in US history.  Assange has spent two years holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition.

Members of an “expert” scrap metal gang in South Africa have appeared in court charged with stealing nearly 10 kilometers of working railway track.  The damage to the railway is more than A$2.5 Million.  Rail spokesman Mike Asefovitz says, “These aren't the little guys.  To take this kind of weight and to cut it up you need specialized machinery.”  The stolen rails are reportedly worth more than A$130,000 on the scrap metal market.