Chavez Gets Loudest Applause at UN Summit

Venezuela Pres Hugo Chavez calls the UN Summit document "illegal" because it was delivered to delegates only five minutes before the summit started and only in English.

Chavez Says U.N. to Move to Jerusalem
By KIM GAMEL
The Associated Press
Thursday, September 15, 2005; 11:05 PM

UNITED NATIONS -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denounced the U.S.-led war in Iraq on Thursday and told world leaders they should consider moving the U.N. headquarters out of the United States because of it.

The leftist leader said the fact that the war was fought without U.N. authorization showed that Washington has no respect for the world body...

World leaders had been asked to speak for five minutes, and when Chavez kept talking, the presiding diplomat passed him a note that his time was up. The Venezuelan leader threw the note on the floor and said if Bush could speak for 20 minutes at Wednesday's opening session, so could he.

At the end, Chavez's remarks got what observers said was the loudest applause of the summit.

The article goes on to talk about the intensification of attacks on Venezuela, with the decertification of it's Drug War efforts earlier that day, despite the ackowledged consecutive increases in drug busts since 2000.

+++Then it goes on to mention the preferential oil trade deal (PetroCaribe) that Chavez offered last week to 13 Caribbean countries. Under the plan, Venezuela will soon sell up to 190,000 barrels of fuel a day to countries from Jamaica to St. Lucia, offering favorable financing while shipping fuel directly to reduce costs. It is expected to help those countries save millions of dollars.

On the eve of the summit, negotiations from the 191 U.N. member states agreed on a watered-down document for world leaders to adopt that takes some initial steps to meet U.N. development goals and reform the United Nations. Venezuela and Cuba were the only two countries to reserve judgment on the 35-page document, which is expected to be adopted on Friday when the three-day summit ends.