Hello Australia!! - The so-called Islamic State finds another treasure to destroy - Brazil finds a medical emergency is worse than it appeared - Scientists hunt a giant new planet - And more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

Satellite imagery is confirming that Islamic State has destroyed the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq.  St. Elijah's in Mosul has been unreachable since the spread of IS in 2014.  Although the roof was largely gone, the stone walls were still there before IS and it had been in use for 1,400 years - most recently by US troops in Iraq before the withdrawal.  No more:  "Bulldozers, heavy equipment, sledgehammers, possibly explosives turned those stone walls into this field of grey-white dust. They destroyed it completely," said Stephen Wood, chief executive of Allsource Analysis.  St Elijah's joins a growing list of more than 100 religious and historic sites looted and destroyed, including mosques, tombs, shrines and churches.

Brazil has raised the number of babies born with birth defects caused by the Zika virus.  Last week, the government said 3,500 infants had been born since October with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads.  The new number is 3,893 cases of microcephaly.  Zika is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also spreads Dengue and Chikungunya.  So far, the only way to stop the spread of the world's largest Zika outbreak is to get rid of standing water where the hideous little creatures breed.

Japan has not changed its ways and its current whaling program is just as bad as the one it abandoned a couple of years ago after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Japan had absolutely no scientific basis to go back to the Southern Ocean and kill whales.  30 members of the International Whaling Commission's (IWJ) scientific advisory committee posted an open letter in the journal Nature to slam Japan's plans.  "Japan claims to have sincerely taken in account the view of the scientific committee and the view of the independent review panel, but in actual fact they haven't changed anything substantial in their scientific proposal," wrote marine biology Professor Andrew Brierley at University of St Andrews.

Japan is dropping the swastika from its tourist maps, at least on the ones intended for Westerners.  The symbols mark the location of Buddhist temples, but too many gaikokujin associate the Japanese Manji with nazi Germany - even though the version misappropriated by Hitler faces in the wrong direction and is skewed by 45 degrees.  Instead, Japan’s Geospatial Information Authority has released a new set of little icons it believes will clear up any misunderstandings among overseas visitors.  Buddhist temples will be marked with little Pagodas ("Buttou" in Japanese, so good luck if you're going because no one there says "Pagoda").  Japan is expecting a massive wave of tourism for the 2019 Rugby World Championship and the 2020 Summer Olympics.

Russia's most-famous hermit is on the way back to her cabin, located a two week hike from the nearest town in Siberia.  Luckily, 70-year old Agafia Lykova is being flown back after being treated in hospital for pain in her leg.  Agafia's parents were "Old Believers" (who split from the Orthodox Church in the 1600s) and fled Stalin's oppression to one of the furthest corners of the eastern wilderness in the 1930s.  They weren't discovered again until a Soviet geological team bumped into their cabin in 1978.  She's the lone surviving member of her family.  Officials have looked in on her fairly regularly since then, and more recently provided a satellite telephone for emergencies - like her leg.  "There are so many cars.  Why do you need so many?" Agafia asked during her recent visit to the city.  "There's so much smoke from them, there's nothing to breathe."

A big dead turtle is casting a long shadow on Vietnam's Communist Party Congress.  With the death of the reptile in Hoan Kiem lake in central Hanoi, there are only three Swinhoe's softshell turtle (also known as a Yangtze Giant Softshell) left in the world - two in a zoo in China and the remainder in another lake in Vietnam.  They grow to about 200 kilograms, and live a long time - the one that died in Hoan Kiem lake was more than a century old.  But it happened as the Communists gathered for the five-year meeting to pick the leadership, and some are worried that the turtle's death is a bad omen.  In fact, the party even had the initial news items about the turtle's death pulled from newspapers.

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology say there's evidence of a ninth planet in our solar system.  It's not Pluto, that little thing had its membership revoked for being too small in 2008.  No one has actually seen this new body, but the scientists believe it's there because of the behavior of other objects in its vicinity apparently reacting to its gravitational field.  The new planet might have ten times the mass of earth, but it's also way out there - 20 times farther from the Sun than Neptune.  So, will anyone ever actually see it?  "There are many telescopes on the Earth that actually have a chance of being able to find it," said Caltech's Dr. Mike Brown.  "And I'm really hoping that as we announce this, people start a worldwide search to go find this ninth planet."