Hello Australia!! - Bolsonaro attacks the messenger - The world is too hot and Oz prepares for a troublesome summer - Trump and the Republicans are dealt two setbacks - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:

The head of Brazil's space agency is out - sacked or quit in disgust - after a public row with far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who denied the horrifying scale of deforestation in the Amazon.  The National Space Research Institute said tree clearing had increased 88 percent since Bolsonaro became Brazil's president - Bolsonaro declared the scientific agency's data to be false and accused it of smearing Brazil's international reputation and trying to undermine the government.  The Amazon Rainforest is the world's largest, and the deep-rooted trees play a vital role in slowing Global Warming by taking the carbon out of the atmosphere.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says July at least equaled and may have surpassed the hottest month on record.  No where is that more apparent then in normally-cold regions that are now suffering under extreme heat:  Siberia is ablaze with wildfires scattered over an area as big as Australia.  And in Greenland, Europe's historic heat wave has caused the Ice Sheet to melt unprecedentedly fast, creating roaring torrents where there usually is a trickle.  Officials say 11 billion tons of ice melted across the island country on Wednesday alone, the biggest melt in the season.  There is still one month left to go in Greenland's melt season, and the warm air mass is still lingering.

July in Australia was the third hottest on record, 2.23 C degrees above average.  That's surpassed only by the same month in 2017 and 2018.  And there hasn't been a lot of rain, either:  The first seven months of the year saw the fifth lowest rainfall on record.  With a hot and dry summer coming, the New South Wales fire service started the bushfire danger season in Eurobodalla and the Bega Valley on south coast, on the earliest day ever.  Ten other regions in the state also got the warning.

Anyway..

Donald Trump pulled the name of loyalist Texas Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe as his nominee to be director of national intelligence (DNI).  Trump blamed the media for some reason, but the truth is that fellow Republicans in the Senate - which would have to confirm him - were less than impressed with Ratcliffe's scanty CV for the job.  

Another Texas Republican Congressman announced he is not running for reelection, and that's bad news for the GOP and Trump.  Will Hurd is the only African-American in the Republican delegation, and his district along the Rio Grande River bordering Mexico is not Trump country.  Political analysts already believed it was going to swing to the Democrats in the next election, and now it won't have an incumbent Republican defender.  Mr. Hurd is the sixth GOP congressman to announce he's getting out in the last few days, with most being in the non-Trump wing of the party.

German customs officials say agents at the Port of Hamburg intercepted a shipment of 4.5 tonnes of cocaine with a street value of 1 Billion Euros.  It was disguised as soya beans in a shipment from Montevideo, Uruguay to Antwerp, Belgium.  Officials say the bust shows two things:  Their detection methods are getting better, but South America cocaine cartels are growing bolder.