There’s a scandal bubbling up from the world of international currency markets – Murdoch might have blocked Obama’s designs on a key civil rights office – And a 13-year old kid builds a nuclear reactor.  A real nuclear reactor – All that and more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

The Bank of England suspended a staff member as it escalated an internal investigation into alleged manipulation of world currency markets. The British central bank also released minutes of meetings between officials and industry representatives indicating the concerns go all the way back to 2006.  It casts doubt on the British bank’s role as an international watchdog of foreign exchange rates.  Parliament will question the Governor of the Bank of England about the investigation next week.

Three Gulf States have pulled their Ambassadors from Qatar.  Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE claim Doha has been meddling in their internal affairs, by supporting Islamist and extremists groups and political parties in those countries.  Qatar is also suspected of supporting Egypt’s now-banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The conservative candidate is pulling out of Costa Rica’s presidential run-off election, leaving only Left-leaning historian Luis Guillermo Solis with a clear path to the presidency in the 6 April contest.  Johnny Araya weighed his support  - 21 percent in recent opinion polls – and determined it was only “prudent” to stop spending millions of dollars on tilting at windmills and shut down his campaign.

India’s general election will happen in phases from 7 April to 12 May.  It’ll take a month because there are 814 million voters eligible to cast ballots.  The election is viewed as a contest between the long-ruling Congress Party and the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, and polls have indicated an advantage for the BJP.

Seven members of US President Barack Obama’s Democratic party joined with conservative republicans to block his nominee to a key civil rights position in the Justice Department.  Rupert Murdoch’s US media holdings whipped up a panic over extremely qualified attorney Debo Adegbile, because he once wrote legal briefs as part of a team assisting a man named Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose ridiculously flawed prosecution and conviction on charges of killing a cop have long been a Lefty cause celebre.  Abu-Jamal has always maintained his innocence. 

A family from an upscale suburb outside Chicago is in a lot of trouble because of their online business.  The Bogdanovs are accused of masterminding a gigantic, nationwide shoplifting network.  Federal prosecutors say that Dad (58), Mom (52), and Daughter (34) stole more than US$7 Million of goodies over the years, and fenced it over eBay for $4.2 Million.  Prosecutors say they case is notable not just because of the massive volume of hot goods, but for the old-school way in which it operated in plain sight.

For the second time, a baby born with HIV has undergone aggressive drug treatment within 30 hours of birth – and three years later, the little toddler is still HIV free.  It confirms a similar claim from doctors last year, and researchers say there may be five more babies on whom the treatment worked.

13-year old British school kid Jamie Edwards is now the youngest person in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from scratch.  The boy attends Penwortham Priory Academy near Preston, Lancashire.  The school allowed him to build his fusion reactor and this week, he successfully fused two hydrogen atoms into a helium atom.  And he had to do it before the weekend.  You see, it’s his 14th birthday coming up, and the previous youngest person to do this was then-14-year-old Taylor Wilson in 2008.

My last science project in the early 1970s was a solar powered crystal radio from a Radio Shack science kit.  Times have changed.