Thailand’s junta prepares charges against the country’s last democratically elected leader – Good news in the Ebola fight – One of the world’s richest men blasts inequality – And a lot more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

Thailand’s military coup government charged former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra over a controversial rice subsidy scheme.  She faces up to ten years in prison.  Prosecutors claim the policy funneled money to her party’s northern power base. If the military-backed legislature also votes to impeach her she will be immediately banned from politics for five years.  Yingluck’s party, under various names, has won every election since 2001, leading to occasional coups from the sore loser militarists and royalists in Bangkok.

The bosses at Japan’s radiation-spewing Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant won’t face charges?  Are you kidding me?  Read all about it on CareerSpot’s Energy Career News!

The first talks between the US and Cuba apparently went well.  Both sides agreed to meet again after the session broke up in Havana.  There’s no timeline for reopening Embassies in each other’s capitals.  After more than five decades of Cold War, neither side is expecting anything to be settled overnight.

The World Health Organization is cautiously celebrating what could be the “turning point” in the West African Ebola Epidemic.  Cases have fallen in the three main countries that form ground zero: Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.  Most of the epidemic’s 8,641 deaths and 21,724 infections occurred in those three countries.

It turns out that Ebola isn’t just a threat to humans.  Ecologist Ria Ghai says about a third of the world’s Great Apes – Chimpanzees and Gorillas – have died since 1976 during sporadic Ebola outbreaks in the rainforest.  This is because these apes and human share 98 percent of a common genome, putting them at the same risk of certain infections as humans.  Conservationists hope for a simian vaccine to be developed.

South African officials say poachers killed a record 1,215 rhinos in 2014 – that’s a 21 percent increase on the previous year.  Environment minister Edna Molewa said this is despite some successes with the government policy of moving some of the animals to “more secure locations”, including out of the country.  Poachers have developed more efficient means of killing the animals for their horns, which are trafficked to China and other Asian markets for use in completely ineffective traditional medicine.

Billionaire investor George Soros says the Eurozone may be enforcing a regime of inequality.  Speaking at a dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the 84-year-old said an “excessive reliance on monetary policy tends to enrich the owners of property and at the same time will not relieve the downward pressure on wages.”  In other words, there is no form of “trickle down economics” that works.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be allowed the prestige of a White House visit, nor a sit-down with US Secretary of State John Kerry during his trip to Washington, DC in a few weeks.  Republican lawmakers invited their fellow conservative Bibi to address both houses of congress, just a short time before the Israeli Parliamentary election.  But that is an unprecedented breach of US protocol, since it is the Executive Branch of government that is supposed to handle foreign policy, as dictated by the constitutional separation of powers.

Watch this story over the next few weeks – there is deep resentment in the White House over Netanyahu’s inserting himself in the middle of US politics, when the US has been very careful not to do the same thing before Israel’s election.  Could there be more repercussions?