A federal judge has ordered that US immigration agents can no longer separate parents and children caught crossing the border from Mexico illegally.

Dana Sabraw, a district court judge in San Diego, granted the preliminary injunction on Tuesday, which set a hard deadline for US immigration to work to reunite those families that have already been split up within 30 days.

The court also ruled children younger than five must be reunited with their families within 14 days.

New South Wales Police have reviewed 86 historical cases over the past three years after a report by the Australian Institute of Criminology questioned whether some cases had been sufficiently investigated.

27 deaths have been revealed to have been hate crimes. Police have acknowledged previously they had played a part in "marginalising" the LGBTQI community.

It found that hate crimes were either confirmed or suspected in 27 deaths, and that further investigation was needed in another 25 cases.

It has been revealed in an estimates hearing that 100% of the children in detention in the Northern Territory are Indigenous.

“The royal commission provided evidence that the ways that the Balanda [white] system treats Aboriginal children is inhumane, costly and does not work," said the member for Nhulunbuy, Yingiya Mark Guyula in a statement to the committee.

Dale Wakefield, Northern Territory’s family minister, told the committee it is an area that they are going to need to continue to develop.

The ABC this morning revealed Ipswich City Council’s development business, Ipswich City Properties has lost almost $85 million.

The development arm of the council has lost almost half of the annual rate haul for the city in the venture.

It has lost money on operations every year it has been in existence.

The venture was started with a $45 million loan from the Queensland State Treasury, which will have to be repaid.

The RSPCA is appealing for information from the public to help find those responsible for leaving seven puppies suffering from a severe case of mange on the side of the road west of Brisbane.

The puppies were found in the Forest Hill area near Gatton on Tuesday night by a member of the public.

All seven were suffering from a severe case of mites which has caused significant hair loss and scarring, and could have been deadly if left untreated.

In the Netherlands overnight, a British-led proposal will empower the international agency responsible for the control of chemical weapons to assign blame for attacks.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons member states voted to allow the organisation to name organisations or states that it believes has used banned munitions.

The proposal received 82 votes for and 24 against, with Russia, Iran, Syria, and their allies opposing the motion.

Russia now openly questioned the future of the OPCW.

The world’s tropical forests lost roughly 39 million acres of trees last year, an area roughly the size of Bangladesh, according to a report released on Wednesday by Global Forest Watch.

The report has revealed 2017 as the second-worst year for tropical tree cover loss in the satellite record, just below the losses in 2016.

Key areas of loss were found throughout Brazil, Colombia, and the Caribbean.

Researchers from Griffith University have used sediment analysis to reconstruct weather patterns from 1500 years ago.

Using sediment from the mouth of the Brisbane River in Moreton Bay, the researchers were able to show that rainfall was highly variable across the period.

Large periods of drought were followed by prolonged periods of being wetter than average, challenging water planning that had relied on the last two hundred years of data.

Charles Sturt University is doing things differently after a report exposed a culture of sexual assault and harassment on campus.

The Australian Human Rights Commission surveyed the nation's students and found more than half had been sexually harassed at least once at university in 2016.

This year, Charles Sturt University introduced a compulsory, intensive education program for its
first year students living on campus.