Good Morning, Australia! – An Australian faces Chinese justice today – New video shows trekkers just before they were buried by an avalanche in Nepal – The copilot appears to have thoroughly practiced crashing a passenger jet before doing it – The UK might be on the verge of a new era today – And a lot more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

A 25-year old Aussie goes before a court in China today.  Peter Gardner faces drugs charges after customs inspectors at Guangzhou airport found 30 kilograms of crystal meth in his luggage last November.  Gardner – with dual Australian and New Zealnd citizenship – is in a precarious position, because anyone caught with 50 grams or more of the drug could be sentenced to death under Chinese law.

The co-pilot who authorities believe deliberately crashed a Germanwings flight into the French Alps appeared to have rehearsed the crash before actually making it happen.  The French air accident investigative agency BEA (.pdf link) says Andreas Lubitz had at least five times set the autopilot to take the crowded passenger plane down to 100 feet.  This happened on the outbound leg of the flight, from Dusseldorf to Barcelona.  The crash took place on the return trip. 

EU vessels patrolling the Mediterranean Sea will stop and board unflagged boats to try and put more pressure on human trafficking operations that are sending eave after eave of asylum seekers to the continent.  Just last weekend, some 7,000 people were rescued from rickety migrant ships sent north by the traffickers operating in Libya.  But last month, more than 1,200 people drowned in four shipwrecks before Italian coast guard or merchant vessels could get close enough to rescue them.

New, amazing footage of the 25 April earthquake in Nepal shows the moment it struck on the village Kyanjin Gompa, causing stones to fall from buildings.  Watch all the way until the end for the moment they the trekkers look up to the mountains and realize a massive avalanche was heading their way.  All were buried, all survived, albeit with some serious injuries.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clinched a coalition deal giving him a one-seat majority in the Knesset, inking it just moments before the midnight deadline.  The last members to sign on to the Likud-led government is the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party, which will undoubtedly put intense pressure on Netanyahu to approve more Jewish housing in Palestinian land.

Today’s UK election could very well to just the first step in a long a tortuous process.  Neither Labour nor the Tories appear to have enough support to form a majority government, and either will have to form a coalition.  That could give unprecedented power to the former fringe parties, either the independence-minded Scottish National Party (SNP) or the xenophobic malcontents of the UK Independence Party (Ukip) which want to break off from the European Union. 

Ukip was forced to one of its candidates who was caught on video threatening to murder his Conservative Party rival.  Robert Blay is standing in North East Hampshire, running against Tory Ranil Jayawardena,  Blay refers to Jayawardena as a “monkey”; describes his hatred for the man; and says if the Conservative candidate ever becomes Prime Minister, Blay will “personally but a bullet between his eyes”.  Police are investigating this lunatic.

The Harlem Globetrotters visited Pope Francis at the Vatican.  ‘Turns out that being infallible doesn’t necessarily mean one can spin a basketball on one finger.

In America, the Chicago City Council approved an unprecedented US$5.5 Million fund to pay reparations to people wrongfully arrested and tortured into making false confessions by a band of scumbag rogue cops.  Naturally, most of the victims were African American, and the leader of the so-called “Midnight Crew”, Jon Burge, is still collecting a police pension after being fired from the police force.  His victims were subjected to electric shocks, burning, and other systematic violence.  The package also provides for a public memorial and access to services including counseling and free tuition in city colleges for both survivors and their immediate families.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is asking the US Federal Government to conduct a civil rights investigation into her police force.  This is after the killing of 25-year old Freddie Gray, who died a week after suffering a severed spine in police custody.  She also announced an ambitious (but increasingly popular) program of equipping all police with body cameras.

Bollywood superstar Salman Khan will appeal the five-year prison sentence handed down for killing a homeless man in a 2002 hit and run after a night out drinking.  Khan, who has insisted he was not behind the wheel of the big, giant Toyota Land Cruiser as it plowed over five men sleeping rough, appeared to be shocked by the verdict.  He’ll remain free on bail during the appeals process, but his Movie career might be put on hold because of the bad publicity.

The lead singer of the British soul-pop band Hot Chocolate, Errol Brown, is dead of liver cancer at age 71.  Brown was born in Jamaica, moved with his family to London at age 12, and had a Reggae band which recorded a version of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” as a lark.  To their surprise, Lennon liked it and signed “The Hot Chocolate Band” (later shortened) to Apple records.  From there, the band scored top ten hits in every year of the 1970s, but none more well known than “You Sexy Thing” – which charted in three decades.