Tragedy for Phil Hughes – The situation in Ferguson, Missouri damages America’s credibility on Human Rights – Green groups say Satellites prove Brazil is wrong about fighting deforestation – And more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

Phil Hughes is dead at age 25, just two days after the batsman was struck in the head by a ball at Sydney Cricket Ground.  “He was not in pain before he passed and was surrounded by his family and close friends,” said Aussie team doctor Peter Brukner.  He was batting for South Australia against New South Wales at the SCG on Tuesday, and hit by a bouncer.  Hughes fell face first, and was rushed to hospital.  It was later revealed he suffered a fractured skull and “catastrophic” bleeding on the brain.

Missouri’s governor is refusing to authorize another grand jury to investigate the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer.  A grand jury this week failed to charge Officer Darren Wilson with murdering Brown in the town of Ferguson a couple of months ago.  That failure of America’s justice system sparked three nights of protests in cities across the country and violent unrest in Ferguson. 

America is taking a public relations beating for its self-righteous posturing over human rights issues, while the killing of Michael Brown has exposed the institutional racism in its courts and cop houses.  China – which has a lower per capita prison population than the US – ran an editorial in the state-run Xinhua news agency saying that few countries “as self-righteous and complacent as the United States when it comes to human rights issues, but the Ferguson tragedy is apparently a slap in the face.”  Frequent targets of US nagging Russia and Iran also issued similar statements.  But stinging comments have come from America’s allies.  German papers spoke of America’s “grotesquely over-armed police force”; French, Spanish, and Italian condemned US racism; South Africa’s Daily Maverick noted the news footage from Ferguson looks like the township protests from 30 years ago.

In Cleveland, police released security video showing officers shooting a killing a 12-year old black boy with an admittedly realistic looking toy gun.  But whereas the cops said they couldn’t have known, the video shows they couldn’t have known because they didn’t bother to check.  The video shows cops arriving in the park where young Tamir Rice was playing with his toy gun.  Two seconds later, Tamir was dead.  Let’s repeat that:  Two seconds later, Tamir was dead.  The cops released this video, actually claiming it exonerates the officers. 

Egypt opened the Rafah crossing into Gaza for the first time in a month, allowing thousands of stranded Palestinians to return to their homes.  Traffic was only allowed to flow into Gaza, no one was allowed out.  The crossing was closed on 25 October after Islamist militants killed 33 Egyptian security agents in the Sinai Peninsula.

Sierra Leone will soon overtake Liberia as the worst-hit country of the West African Ebola Epidemic, which has killed almost 5,700 people so far this year.  The number of new infections is stabilizing in Liberia, and Guinea is meeting or exceeding World Health Organization benchmarks for containing the killer virus.  That leaves Sierra Leone, where the rate of new infections is still rising.

There’s a disagreement over the status of the rainforest in South America:  Brazil said deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has dropped by 18 percent in the past year, putting the country’s deforestation rate at its second lowest level in 25 years.  But a leading environmental group, World Wide Fund for Nature, said alternative satellite monitoring systems – not used by the government – in fact suggested an increase in the rate of forest destruction for a second year running.  And the non-government group Imazon says satellite photos show that deforestation has increased a disturbing 467 percent from October 2013 to October 2014.