Concerns that Russia is sabotaging the MH17 investigation – Nigeria fights a wave of female suicide bombers – Cops cook the books by conveniently forgetting crimes – And a lot more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop is worried that Russia might be behind the daily artillery barrages blocking Australian and Dutch investigators from accessing the crash site of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine.  Not only that, Russian-backed rebels appear to be laying landmines on roads that lead to the site – when they’re not just blocking the roads themselves.  298 people died in the crash on 17 July, and not all of the bodies have been recovered.

China charged a prominent ethnic Uighur academic with separatism.  Ilham Tohti is a well-known economist who has championed the rights of the Muslim Uighur community.  He comes from northwestern Xinjiang where there is an active Ughur Muslim separatist movement.  Authorities moved Tohti from Beijing to the Xinjiang capital Urumqi.  It comes as state security forces shot and killed dozens of members of a knife-wielding mob who allegedly attacked a police station this week.

The Air Algerie flight that crashed in Mali last week killing all 118 people on board appears to have plummeted to the ground from an altitude of 10,000 meters in just a few minutes after flying into a storm.  French officials have said they believe bad weather was most likely to blame for the crash, and the flight crew on the McDonnell Douglas MD-83 did seek to alter course because of the bad weather.

A female suicide bomber blew herself up in a college in northern Nigeria’s biggest city of Kano on Wednesday, killing six people and critically wounding another six.  The bomber targeted young people who were reading notice board for national youth service at Kano Polytechnic.  It’s the fourth such attack by a woman in Kano in less than a week, according to Nigerian security sources, and it appears to have been organized by the Islamist terror group Boko Haram.  The latest violence came as the government announced the arrest of a 10-year-old girl with explosives strapped to her chest near Kano.

Bolivia is canceling a free entry agreement with Israel over the Gaza war, and ratcheting up the rhetoric, calling Israel a “terrorist state”.  It’s not apparent that there were a lot of Israeli tourists going to Bolivia in the first place, but travelers will now have to apply for visas, something they haven’t had to do since 1972.  Israel, meanwhile, expressed “deep disappointment” over El Salvador, Peru and, Chile’s decision to recall their ambassadors over Gaza.  Brazil and Ecuador already did so last week.

The US blacklisted two North Korean shipping firms that were caught trying to conceal an arms shipment from Cuba to North Korea.  Pyongyang’s “Chong Chon Gang” tried to go through the Panama Canal to the Pacific Ocean, but a routine inspection reveal a large amount of arms – including two MiG-21 jet fighters – hidden under 200,000 bags of sugar.  The US says that’s a clear attempt to circumvent international sanctions against North Korea.  The two firms’ assets in the US are now frozen.

Japan has a reputation as a very safe country.  Not reporting any crimes to the bureau compiling national statistic might have something to do with it.  Police in beautiful and slightly funky Osaka failed to report roughly 81,000 criminal cases to the National Police Agency between 2008 and 2012.  The underreporting skewed national crime stats to make it appear as though Tokyo had overtaken the western metropolis in bicycle thefts, muggings, and other street crimes – but that turned out not to be the case.  Osaka police brass issued warnings and took other measures against 89 officers, many of whom had been station chiefs or division heads during the five-year period.