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Thank you Miranda Devine for your wild overreaction to the bill before NSW parliament to treat abortion as a health issue, as it will no doubt lose you and News.com a lot of support.

Eighty people attended the launch of Ben Hillier’s new book Losing Santhia, which was organised by the Tamil Refugee Council on July 27. Santhia was a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka who had been a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and who died in Indonesia in 2017.

In a 40-minute interview with the Guardian, federal “opposition” leader Anthony Albanese's arguments for Labor’s serial capitulation to the Coalition government were weak, inconsistent and based on a fool’s reading of political reality.

Kurdish community members and supporters gathered on July 27 to celebrate the 7th anniversary of the Rojava Revolution in northern Syria.

July 19 marked the seventh anniversary of northern Syria’s Rojava Revolution. On that day in 2012 the nascent People’s Protection Units (YPG) took control of the Kurdish-majority city of Kobanê. The outnumbered forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad surrendered and were allowed to depart (without their weapons). Other Kurdish cities and towns in the north were soon liberated as well.

Just days out from first-year Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) students beginning exams, University of Technology Sydney’s (UTS) Dean of Science Professor Dianne Jolley sent out an email saying the course was to be discontinued.

About 100 waterside workers and supporters rallied outside the offices of global container terminal operator DP World (DPW), in Martin Place on July 30. The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) is currently in a dispute with DPW, which has threatened to sack 200 workers and replace them with casuals.

The United States and Britain are ensuring that tensions remain high in the Straits of Hormuz as they continue beating the drums of war against Iran.

Though Boris Johnson was swept to power with apparent ease in the leadership election, deep divisions in parliament and the British public at large mean that delivering his three promises “deliver Brexit, unite the country and defeat Jeremy Corbyn“ will be a great challenge, writes John Lawrence.

While researching Japanese working-class resistance to World War II, Kaye Broadbent discovered in a Japanese university archive Masao Sugiura’s 1964 memoir, detailing the formation and activities of the Shuppanako Kurabu (Print and Publishing Worker’s Club). Based upon Sugiura’s 1981 second edition, the English translation of Against the Storm provides an inspiring account of how Sugiura and his comrades were able to organise and sustain links between workers, despite increasing wartime repression by the Japanese military regime.

Welcome attention was drawn to the issue of poverty with the 2014 publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, which became an international bestseller.

The Political Economy of Inequality by Frank Stilwell, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, gives a more rounded overview of the issue in a more manageable volume than Piketty’s hefty magnum opus.

Legendary Scottish-Australian folk singer Eric Bogle, best known for his anti-war classics “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and “The Green Fields of France”, will headline the Sydney Folk Festival this month.