News bytes

– Noam Chomsky on “malignant design” and world cruelty.

– Karma Nabulsi, politics fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and a former PLO representative, discusses the Arafat myth and Western ability to humanise the Israelis and demonise the Palestinians.

– George Monbiot on the US using chemical weapons in Iraq, lying about it and covering it up.

– The Australian government continues its immoral ban on abortion drug, RU486.

– American journalist David Corn discusses Ahmed Chalabi and Christopher Hitchens. Chalabi is a crook and Hitchens seems content defending the indefensible: “Christopher, you would not trust Bush to review a single death penalty application, yet you were happy to hand him the keys to this invasion and now you make excuses for how he misrepresented the intelligence he did not even bother to read.”

– Al-Ahram Weekly examines the possibility of a democratic future for the Arab world. Ayman El-Amir writes:

“…The US has never been a net exporter of democratic models to undemocratic countries. If anything, the US has a historical record of supporting tyrannical regimes that served its strategic interests. This remains true today as it was half a century ago.”

UPDATE: The Independent investigates the claim that the US used chemical weapons in Fallujah and concludes that the US military are lying and eyewitness accounts confirm the charges.

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