Chavez nails US again

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez suggested on Sunday that chickens in Cuba get better treatment from authorities than black residents of the hurricane-ravaged US city of New Orleans.

"In Cuba, when they know a hurricane is coming, chickens, hens and people are all evacuated," Chavez said in an interview with The Washington Post and Newsweek magazine, stepping up his rhetoric against the US government.

"A hurricane recently destroyed many towns in Cuba but not a single person died because no one was there. The government prepared its people and took them to shelters, whereas here (in the United States) they left the poor without protection, especially the blacks."