Hello Australia! - Feuding South American neighbors pull back from the brink - VW's clean diesel problem spreads to Asia - Deadly food poisoning lands an executive in jail for two decades - And more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

The presidents of Venezuela and Colombia agreed to gradually reopen border crossings, and to immediately send their ambassadors back to the others' capitals.  Relations between capitalist Colombia and Socialist Venezuela are usually touchy, but things got particularly tense a month ago when Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro closed the crossings to fight smugglers who buy up Venezuelan price-controlled goods and sell them at a hefty profit in Colombia.  After a meeting in Ecuador, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos acknowledged that "criminal organizations working in the border area is a big problem, but the best way to deal with it is by working together."

Burkina Faso's army has reached the capital Ouagadougou to put an end to the coup and restore the interim government that was planning the country's first free elections in decades.  Negotiations with the coup leaders are underway, but anti-coup protesters are not happy with a reported proposal to allow the plotters to walk away without having to face charges.

South Korea says it will investigate Volkswagen "clean diesel" cars, after the company admitted installing software that makes the makes cheat on emissions tests in the US.  Authorities ordered VW to recall half a million vehicles, and the company's stock plunged 20 percent in trading on Monday.  South Korea will expand the investigation to include Audi A3 vehicles. 

The former boss of a US peanut butter company at the source of a deadly salmonella outbreak was sentenced to 28 years in prison for falsifying health and safety certificates.  At age 61, Stewart Parnell could spend the rest of his life in prison.  After a salmonella outbreak killed nine people in 2009, federal inspectors traced it to Parnell's Peanut Corporation of America - and found the plant with a leaky roof that was infested with rats and cockroaches.  "These acts were driven simply by the desire to profit," Judge Louis Sands said.  "This is commonly and accurately referred to as greed.''

A once-rising star in the US Republican Party has bowed out of the race for the party's 2016 presidential nomination, but not one of the ones caught saying stupid, racist things.  Scott Walker is governor of Wisconsin, and made his conservative bona fides by attacking the Unions.  But his poll numbers went from the respectable 20s in a crowded field to nothing, nada, zilch, zip, and fundraising dried up.  He follows former Texas governor Rick Perry out of the race.  Oddly, wealthy business-clown Donald Trump and Islamophobe surgeon Ben Carson are still in - for now.

A New York City rat went out for some dinner, picked up a slice, brought it back home to the subway.  Perhaps he shared it with his anthropomorphic turtle friends.