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Refugee rights activists rallied outside Qantas offices in Sydney and Jetstar offices in Melbourne on August 9 as part of a national campaign calling on the Qantas airline to refuse to deport asylum seekers to danger.

A number of airlines around the world are refusing to take part in deportations. However, Qantas and Virgin Australia have, so far, not joined the boycott.

It is now abundantly clear that the Donald Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy towards parents with children seeking asylum in the US involves separating children from their parents, keeping the children in the US and deporting the parents, writes Barry Sheppard in San Francisco.

New South Wales is now officially in drought and parts of Queensland have been in continuous drought for years. But the climate denier federal government has its head in the sand.

The Finance Sector Union has slammed a plan to "embed" financial regulatory agency officers inside the Big Four banks and the financial management giant AMP. The FSU says that officers from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), which has been criticised for being “too close to the banks”, would be unable to penetrate the unethical internal culture of the banks.

Melbourne researcher into satellite-communication and surveillance Jacob Grech claims Australia is ramping up arms exports to Indonesia at a time when Indonesia is stepping up its militarism in West Papua.

At Green Left Weekly, we know how hard it is to keep a not-for-profit campaigning publication going because we have been doing it for nearly 27 years. 

Each year we try to raise $200,000 for the Green Left Fighting Fund through a combination of donations and fundraising events organised by supporters around the country. So far this year we have raised $87,603.

Given we are over halfway through 2018, we will have to step up our fundraising efforts.

But it is a very different story on the other side of the political battle line. 

The Institute for Postcolonial Studies hosted a forum on August 1 to discuss the November 4 independence referendum in Kanaky-New Caledonia (KNC).

Kanaky is the indigenous name for the Pacific island country known to its French colonisers as Nouvelle Calèdonie (New Caledonia). The independence movement is proposing that the combined name Kanaky-New Caledonia be used.

The entire August 5 New York Times Magazine was composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align.

Sometimes I wonder if New South Wales transport minister Andrew Constance thinks he is a comedian.

Bangladesh students protest over corrupt and unsafe transport

The undersigned Asia-Pacific left parties and organisations condemn the violent repression of the peaceful protests by students in Bangladesh.

The Tasmanian Liberal government might have hoped that by announcing on July 2 that it had secured an abortion provider whose services are due to open in October, the “abortion issue” might have gone away.

It is a vain hope.

Cricket Australia's decision to sack Angela Williamson on June 29 because of her tweets campaigning for abortion access in Tasmania, and her subsequent decision to go public and appeal to the Fair Work Commission, has reignited the issue.

[The following letter was sent by Dr Kamala Emanuel to the Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman on August 8 in response to his government's decision not to allow public hospitals to provide abortion access from July 1. Emanuel sent it to Green Left Weekly in the wake of the public furore over Cricket Australia's decision to sack Angela Williamson because of her tweets campaigning for abortion access in the state.]

Dear Premier,

I lived for 9 years in Tasmania. My daughter was born at home in Glenorchy.