Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday the United States was playing a "shameful" role in the Egyptian crisis and accused it of hypocrisy for supporting, then abandoning, strongmen around the world.

Chavez told Reuters news agency he had spoken to Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi and Syria's President Bashar Assad on the protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.

“In Egypt, the situation is complicated," Chavez said.

“Now you are seeing comments from Washington and some European nations. As President Kadafi said to me, it's shameful, it makes you kind of sick to see the meddling of the U.S., wanting to take control.”

On Sunday, President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other U.S. officials urged an orderly transition to democracy in Egypt to avoid a power vacuum but stopped short of calling on President Hosni Mubarak, an ally of three decades, to step down.

Chavez has generally cast himself as pro-Arab, opposed to the policies of Israel and the United States.

But in brief comments carried on state TV, he avoided any further specific comment on Egypt, saying only that “national sovereignty” should be respected.

Chavez scoffed at what he called the United States' changeable foreign policy.

“See how the United States, after using such-and-such a president for years, as soon as he hits a crisis, they abandon him. That's how the devil pays,” he said.

“They didn't even give a visa or anything to the president of Tunisia,” he said, referring to President Zine el Abidine ben Ali, who fled this month after failing to quell the worst unrest of his more than two-decade rule.

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— Molly Hennessy-Fiske

Photo: President Hugo Chavez in Caracas on Jan. 26. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

When you're the world's richest man, you may find that you suddenly have more extended family than you ever imagined.

But Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu seemed happy with the warm reception he's received in Lebanon, the ancestral homeland of his parents, even though he didn't seem overly eager to open up his wallet for the old country.

"I came to know the country better," he said when asked at an American University of Beirut forum Wednesday whether he was looking into local investments. "But I have seen very clearly that Lebanon is capable of sustaining growth in most economic areas, and I think Lebanon will grow."

Helu, who recently was named the world's wealthiest man by Forbes magazine, has received the welcome of a conquering hero. 

Last week, Helu met with Prime Minister Saad Hariri, and hundreds of students, faculty and guests packed into the American University of Beirut's School of Business to hear the cellphone-service mogul speak about the importance of knowledge and technology as well as recount his personal story.

Helu owns huge swaths of Mexican industries and became known in the United States in 2008 when he invested $250 million in the New York Times, becoming one of the paper's largest shareholders.

Helu emphasized support for education and job creation but also made clear that his trip to Lebanon was of a personal nature and did not indicate he would be investing in the country.

The notoriously fiery Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took on Israel on Thursday during a joint press conference in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar Assad, calling the Jewish state "genocidal," "anti-peace" and accusing it of implementing "America's imperialist policies."

Chavez, a vocal leftist, went on to praise the Syrian people as the "architects and designers of the resistance," condemning American and European hegemony and the "unipolar" world order, according to the official Syrian news agency, SANA.

The Venezuelan president is currently on an 11-day international tour, including stops in Libya, Algeria, Iran, Belarus and Russia.

 

Talk about provocative.

Not only did Venezuela's foreign minister reiterate today that Russia and his nation would conduct joint war games in Caribbean waters just a few hundred miles from America's shores later this year, he also chose an interesting venue to emphasize the news, just as Russian ships entered the Atlantic Ocean: the Islamic Republic of Iran, where he was hobnobbing with top Iranian officials.

At a joint press conference with his Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki today, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro told reporters that in November and December 2008, a contingent of the Russian fleet will come to Venezuelan waters to conduct war exercises.

He also said that Iran and Venezuela were tightening bilateral relations "on a daily basis" in order to become role models for other developing countries (and, presumably, any country with an ax to grind against the U.S.).