Hello, Australia! – A globe circling solar trip faces its greatest challenge yet – Cops and bigots smash a Moscow LGBT rally – A Syrian man gives Islamic State a taste of its own gruesome medicine – The match between a spear gunner and a swordfish ends in a tragic draw – And more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

The Solar Impulse solar-powered airplane has finally commenced the next leg of its ‘round the world journey, and it’s possibly the most dangerous flight yet.  The plane took off from Nanjing, China, where it had been grounded for more than a month waiting for the exact right conditions for crossing the Pacific Ocean – the planes solar cells must be fully charged by the end of each day in order to stay aloft.  The journey to Hawaii will take about six days, during which Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg will have to stay awake, save for a few catnaps.

No significant damage from a deep, deep earthquake off Japan’s Ogasawara Island.  It was a magnitude 8.5 (felt as a 5 in Tokyo – strong enough to shut down elevators and the bullet train – but too deep in the earth to cause a tsunami.  Also, Japan’s ANN put together a compilation of the best eyewitness video of that volcanic eruption off the southwest of the archipelago.

Russian cops and christo-fascist thugs violently broke up an unauthorized Gay Rights rally in central Moscow, detaining about 20 people.  Supposedly, religious conservative counter-protesters were arrested, too, but the LGBT good guys said cops cracked down on the tenth annual parade as never before.  Gays in Russia face regular harassment, with the government’s tacit approval, and requests to hold pride parades are consistently rejected by authorities in the capital.

Russia claims to have called out fighter jets to ward off a US Destroyer in the Black Sea.  The Kremlin claims the USS Ross was behaving “aggressively” and moving towards Russia’s territorial boundaries.  Russian military planes in recent months have made frequent incursions into the air space of its European neighbors, which have reacted by calling out jets to escort the Russians away.

An Assyrian Christian in northeastern Syria finally had enough of Islamic State’s atrocities and beheaded a captured IS militant.  The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – which monitors the civil war from an anti-Assad, anti-IS perspective – says the Christian fighter was in the ranks of Kurdish forces that successfully dislodged IS from a series of northern villages, including Tal Shamiram, where the IS fighter was captured.  Islamic State has carried out hundreds if not thousands of beheadings, plus mass summary executions, enslavement, and rape.

Syrian government forces dropped a barrel bomb on a town in northern Aleppo province, killing at least 72 people.  Although al-Bab is controlled by Islamic State, most of those killed were civilians at a marketplace.  Barrel bombs are literally old oil barrels or other large containers stuffed with explosives and dropped from a helicopter.  The low-tech weapons have proven remarkably effective in killing civilians.

A suicide bomber killed at least 13 people at a mosque in Maiduguri, Nigeria just hours after President Muhammadu Buhari was sworn in.  No group has taken responsibility, but Maiduguri is in the region where Boko Haram has staged its insurgency.  Buhari has vowed to crush Boko Haram.

The death toll from the Indian heatwave has topped 2,000 lives lost.  Most of them occurred in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where temperatures approached 50C degrees.

France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy has changed the name of his political party from the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) to The Republicans.  Opponents sued, saying that all French citizens are Republicans thanks to the French Revolution, but a judge allowed it.  One opinion poll says 70 percent of the public believes no single party has the right to use the Republican label.

A swordfish facing certain doom made sure he took his attacker with him to the great beyond off Hawaii.  47-year old Randy Llanes spotted the two-meter swordfish, and jumped into the water with a spear gun to try and catch it.  He shot it, but the fish turned to defend itself, swimming straight at Llanes and impaling him in the chest.  Onlookers pulled Llanes from Honokohau Harbor unresponsive, and he couldn’t be revived at hospital.  The Waikiki Aquarium calls it a “very, very unusual” situation.  A man is dead, a fish is dead, and everyone could have just eaten a bean burrito.