Good Morning Australia!! - Merle Haggard has died - Investigators target European Football because of the Panama Papers - A US state is losing millions of dollars because of a new anti-LGBT law - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:

It's Cherry Blossom season in Tokyo!

Swiss investigators raided the offices of the European Football governing body UEFA, after its ex-secretary general Gianni Infantino was named in the Panama Papers.  It turns out that Infantino co-signed a television rights deal in 2006 with two businessmen who have since been accused by the FBI of bribery, and who he later claimed not to know.  Infantino became president of FIFA; but another Fifa official also named in the papers - Juan Pedro Damiani - has resigned from the world football body.

Two Australian men are linked to companies striking mining deals with North Korea, according to an investigation involving the Panama Papers conducted by the ABC.  Sydney businessman David Henty Sutton and Brisbane geologist Louis Schurmann were directors of two companies that the ABC says were banned by international economic sanctions on the repressive Pyongyang regime.  One of the deals was announced on the ASX, which didn't catch on that the shell corporation was sanctioned.  A former UN Security Council expert on North Korea told the ABC that the government should investigate this.

American Country Music legend Merle Haggard has died of pneumonia on his 79th birthday.  "Hagg" had been dealing with a number of health complications since battling lung cancer in 2008, and has recently cancelled several scheduled performances.  He was Country Music's bona fide outlaw, growing up dirt poor and picking vegetables near Bakersfield, California and spending three years in San Quentin prison before making it big.  Although he became famous for American Populist songs like "The Fighting Side Of Me" and "Okie From Muskogee" that defied the hippy peace and love of the 1960s, he later admitted he was "dumb as a rock" when he wrote those songs.  Swinging towards the progressive side, he spoke openly of marijuana use, embraced prison reform, and defended President Barack Obama from racist criticism.

PayPal has cancelled plans to invest millions of dollars in new facilities in North Carolina, because the the southern US state's conservative legislature and governor recently passed state legislation targeting transgender people.  "The new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal's mission and culture," the company said in a statement.  Several large banks and corporations have warned North Carolina over it.  The law is blatantly unconstitutional:  It allows for discrimination against sexuality under the guise of protecting religious rights; and most bizarrely, attacks transgender people by requiring them to use public restrooms of the gender listed on their birth certificates.  That means that bodybuilder Shawn Stinson might be standing up to pee next to the governor's wife at some point. 

France leveled a AU$45,000 fine against far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen for calling the Nazi gas chambers a "detail" of World War Two.  It's not his first brush with trouble for holocaust denial, which is a crime in France - in 2012 he was convicted of the same charge and fined.  His daughter Marine Le Pen last year kicked him out of the Front National political party he founded for his extreme statements.  The younger Le Pen has tempered the fascist FN's image by transferring the scapegoating from Jews to Muslims and walking a finer, less prosecutable line of rhetoric.

Lima, Peru has had its largest political protest in decades, with at least 30,000 people marching against the candidacy of Keiko Fujimori for president.  She's the daughter of dictator Alberto Fujimori, the thoroughly corrupt and bloodthirsty fascist leader from 1990 to 2000 who was later convicted of ordering illegal searches and seizures, crimes against humanity for directing death squads to kill opponents, and looting the country's treasury to pay off cronies in the military.  Despite her father's crimes and the intensity of the opposition, Keiko Fujimori is a leading candidate in this Sunday's upcoming elections.  Keiko Fujimori's campaign is allegedly being funded with dirty money, as detailed in the Panama Papers.