Howdy Australia!! - Millions of people demand progress to fight climate change - Scott Morrison visits Trump - Boris Johnson's Brexit plan is a non-starter - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:

The Climate Strike protests that began with huge crowds into the hundreds of thousands dispersed at Australian locations continued all the way around the world, across Asia into Africa and Europe as millions of people demanded out leaders take more concrete action to reverse climate change.  In New York City, hundreds of thousands of people marched down Broadway.  Many are young people who took the day off from school, others from their jobs.  The message is unified:  It is no longer a political issue, there is no more time to delay, global warming is here and governments must act.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has agreed to a plan to meet a 2030 climate target of cutting greenhouse gases by 55 percent from 1990 levels by setting a price on carbon emissions.  Taxes on air travel will go up, but will fall on long-distance rail.  Overall, carbon pricing will come into force gradually from 2021, with a CO2 price slapped on petrol and diesel as well as on gas and heating oil.  Germany was supposed to have cut its carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020, but that isn't going to happen, thus the new focus on 2030 - the ultimate goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison wasn't home to see the local Climate Strike demonstrations because he is in Washington for meeting with Donald Trump, and they didn't go to the Washington protest, either.  Scott was in the room as Trump denied wrongdoing after a series of bombshell reports saying an intelligence official filed a whistle-blower complaint over Trump's contacts with a foreign leader possible putting US security in danger.  Subsequent reporting in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal paint a picture of Trump and his personal lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani putting pressure on Ukraine to open a criminal investigation of Trump's Democratic party rival Joe Biden and his son.  The reports gained a lot of credibility since Rudy basically confessed to the entire scheme in a bizarre live interview on CNN.   

While Trump and his ilk deny the existence of man-made Climate Change, a tropical storm caused widespread flooding in Houston, Texas.  It's the third so-called "500 year flood" in just the past few years.

The European Union has rejected the British government's request for a Brexit deal without an Irish backstop.  In addition to being unacceptable to Ireland the EU, a Brexit without a backstop is a violation of the Good Friday Peace Agreement which ended North Ireland's sectarian troubles in the 1990s.  EU officials also fretted that negotiations on the UK's impending divorce from the European Union are "going backwards", after London insisted that the documents it hands over the the EU in Brussels are not to be shared among the 27 states because they are the "property" of London.  The Brexit is scheduled to take place on 31 October.