Hello, Australia! – Austerity knives already start slashing at help for the disabled in the post-election Tory UK – US feds investigate a racially troubled police department – An X-ray reveals the attempt to smuggle an 8-year old boy in luggage – And more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

The UK elections went from tied, to a slight edge for the Tories, to a Conservative landslide – all in a space of 24 hours.  Weird, huh?  In the end the Conservative Party won 331 seats in Parliament, more than enough to govern unopposed and without a coalition partner or partners for the next five years.  As predicted, Labour leader Ed Miliband and Lib-Dem chief Nick Clegg stepped down from their party posts.  So did the Ukip’s head xenophobe Nigel Farage, although he hinted he might stand for the job again.  And in addition to the scalps collected last night, the UK’s #2 Labour leader Ed Balls lost his Parliament seat.  Quite a fall for someone occasionally mentioned as a possible future PM.

So, here is the first day of Tory Prime Minister David Cameron’s UK:  The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is planning to slash a fund that helps disabled people into employment.  Yay, austerity!  Good job!  The money would have been spent to remove barriers that would prevent disabled people from working, especially people with sight and hearing difficulties.  According to a DWP document, bureaucrats complain that spending “has risen significantly over the past five years”.

Here are some more of the wonders that UK voters chose to inflict upon themselves:  The Draft Communications Data Bill, or “Snoopers’ Charter”, faces smooth sailing with a Tory majority – now that the Lib-Dem coalition partners who slowed it down are now out of the way.  Tax cuts for the top one percent will increase inequality.  And some opponents are worried the Tories will step up privatization of the National Health Service. 

A court in Venezuela sentenced a police officer to 18 years in prison for the death of a teenager in an anti-government protest.  23-year old cop Javier Mora Ortiz admitted responsibility for the shooting death of 14-year old Kluvier Roa Nunez.  President Nicolas Maduro at the time condemned the killing and promised a full investigation, and it resulted in a conviction.

America’s top law enforcement official, the new Attorney General Loretta Lynch, has launched an investigation into the Baltimore police department.  This comes at the request of the city’s mayor, and after the death of 25-year old African American man Freddie Gray, who died a week after suffering a severed spine in police custody.

And the hits don’t stop.  A white cop in Dover, Delaware, a small eastern state next door to Baltimore, are caught on video kicking an African American man in the face for no reason.  That cop is charged with assault.

A US appeals court overturned the ridiculous sabotage convictions of an elderly Catholic Nun and two other men who broke into a nuclear weapons site as a protest in 2012.  Justices ordered the lower court to pass reduced sentences on 85-year old Sr. Megan Rice, Michael Walli, and Greg Boertje-Obed.  In July 2012, the senior citizens broke into Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee with simple chain cutters, and spent two hours inside spray painting slogans and hanging mock-crime scene tape before they were discovered.

North Korea claims to have successfully carried out an underwater ballistic missile from a submarine, and Kim Jong-un himself purportedly supervised the test.  It could pose a new security threat to the region, although some analysts say North Korea is still years from perfecting the technology to perform underwater launches.

China is expanding its island building campaign in the South China Sea, far beyond its internationally-recognized maritime boundaries.  US officials say China has reclaimed 810 hectares since the beginning of 2014.  China claimed most of the South China Sea as its exclusive economic zone, which was news to the nations that are actually on the South China Sea.  It’s feared the man-made islands will be used as a Chinese military outpost.

An army helicopter crash in mountainous northern Pakistan killed the ambassadors from the Philippines and Norway – Domingo Lucenario and Lief Larson respectively – as well as the wives of the Indonesian and Malaysian envoys, two pilots and a crewmember.  Five others were injured, including the Polish and Dutch Ambassadors.  The chopper was carrying the VIPs to the inauguration of a chair lift project at a ski resort.  The Taliban tried to claim responsibility for the crash, but the military insists the cause was a mechanical failure.

Spain’s child protective services took custody of an eight-year old boy found curled up in a woman’s suitcase.  This happened in the exclave of Ceuta, a small Spanish territory on Africa’s Mediterranean coast.  Customs asked the woman to hand over the suitcase for an x-ray and they couldn’t believe what they saw.  The kid told authorities his name is Abou and he’s from Ivory Coast – more than 3,150 kilometers to the south.  Authorities detained the 19-year old woman carrying the suitcase, and the boy’s father – who admitted arranging for the kid to be smuggled in to join him at his new home in the Canary Islands.