The Iranian leader, in his first visit to Latin America since taking office last year, hailed "all the free countries and liberators, all the revolutionaries who are against global hegemony."

The two leaders share a strong enmity towards the United States, which has had a war of words with Chavez and accuses Iran of seeking to build a nuclear weapon.

Chavez, who has visited Iran several times, praised Ahmadinejad as a "distinguished leader of a heroic people and leader of a revolution, sister of the Venezuelan revolution."

The leftist Venezuelan leader denied allegations that his country was secretly extracting uranium but did not rule out nuclear cooperation with Iran in the future.

"I have already begun to fight imperialists and internal enemies who continue to say that Iran is coming looking for uranium ... to make an atomic bomb," Chavez said.

"They don't tire of lying, but their attacks have run up against the power of morality and truth," he said.

Colombia's ambassador to the Organization of American States recently said Venezuela was extracting uranium in buildings disguised as bicycle factories. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said the envoy had made a mistake.

In an interview with CNN television's Spanish-language station, Chavez said a nuclear technology transfer with Iran could be possible.

"There is no agreement for nuclear energy technology for now, but there could be one," he said.

Chavez and Ahmadinejad both attended the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana that concluded Sunday with a final declaration backing Iran's right to pursue nuclear energy.

The United States is pushing for sanctions to force Tehran to stop producing enriched uranium, which can be used both for both nuclear power and atomic weapons.

US officials "are now inventing stories that Iran is building atomic bombs," Chavez said. "This is a lie."

Chavez refused to say whether he would send troops to Iran in the event of a war with the United States.

"I can't reveal that. We are in solidarity and will be in solidarity with Iran," he told CNN.

Chavez also repeated his threat of cutting of oil exports to the United States if Washington attacked Venezuela or supported a coup.

Chavez and Ahmadinejad, whose countries are members of
OPEC, were to inaugurate via satellite Sunday a training center for a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA and a mosque west of Caracas.

On Monday, they will visit a tractor factory in southeastern Venezuela.

Chavez said Iran will help Venezuela build a gunpowder and detonator factory.

Other bilateral agreements include cooperation in the construction in Venezuela of car and computer factories, and petrochemical facilities.

Ahmadinejad travels to New York Monday to attend the UN General Assembly.

Cuban First Vice-President, Raul Castro, who is presiding over the NAM conference, said the Summit leadership and the delegations is likely to discuss the concept of 'Bank of the South'.

However, Chavez said it was action and not debate that was needed to hasten the process of setting up such an institution.

"The reality is that we cannot expect solutions to our problems from the North, they are our own, and we must be capable of dealing with them practically."

Chavez also proposed creating a new 'Commission of the South' by using the recommendations in a book - which he read when he was imprisoned in 1992 - published by the previous Commission of the South chaired by the former President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere.

He claimed, however, that momentum was growing for a conspiracy theory aired on television this week by a Venezuelan journalist.

"It is still not clear what the cause was, nor who directed the terrible act that claimed thousands of lives in seconds and gave the American empire an excuse to hit out with more even brutality and fury at the world," Chavez said in a speech in Caracas.

"It is difficult to believe that the towers of the World Trade Center could have collapsed as they did, in the blink of an eye, because of the planes."

Chavez suggested the towers could have been dynamited and noted that the wreckage of the plane that smashed into the Pentagon had not been recovered.

Cconspiracy theories persist about the 2001 attacks by hijacked airliners which killed nearly 3,000 people when they crashed into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But no evidence has emerged to dispute the accepted version of events.

The US government says al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden masterminded the attacks and al Qaeda itself has claimed responsibility for them. The events of September 11 were also filmed and photographed and seen live on television screens by millions across the world.

The leftist Venezuelan president regularly rails against the United States for sending its forces into Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the war on terrorism it unleashed after the attacks.

In Washington, a US State Department spokesman said he had no comment on Chavez's remarks, which were based on a TV programme on Monday in which Venezuelan journalist Carlos Sicilia aired his theories on the attacks.

"The hypothesis that is gaining momentum, that Sicilia said last night could blow up soon, is that it was the imperial American power itself that planned and committed this terrible terrorist act ... to justify its acts of aggression," said Chavez.

With his confidence underpinned by an oil-fueled economic boom, Chavez has focused his foreign policy on creating what he calls a multipolar alliance of states to counterbalance the world's only superpower.

Although implacable toward the government in Washington, Chavez has cast himself as a supporter of the American people and run a highly-publicized programme to sell discounted heating fuel to poor US communities.

Millions of us told them what would happen if they seized on the events of five years ago to launch what the Pentagon now calls the "long war". Four days after the attacks in New York and Washington I spoke in a sitting of the recalled British parliament. I warned that if the US and its allies mishandled the response, they would create a thousand, ten thousand Bin Ladens. Five years on, is that not what's hapened?

Many tens of thousands of people -- mostly women and children -- have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do the ultimate perpetrators of the killings, as they sit behind their mahogany desks in the White House and Downing Street, imagine that the rest of us have not noticed how they do not deem those Arab and Muslim dead worthy of the same grief as attends their own?

Do they think we have not noticed how they refuse even to count the number killed in Iraq? Did they believe that the pornographic images of Abu Ghraib would be discounted? Did George Bush and Tony Blair delude themselves into thinking they could whet the knife that Israel plunged into Lebanon without being seen as accomplices to war crimes?

Blair certainly gave every appearance of having lost all contact with reality when he flew to Tel Aviv last weekend. With his own MPs plotting to oust him for damaging their re-election prospects, he went to occupied Jerusalem and threw his arms around Ehud Olmert, whose war in Lebanon the vast majority of people in Britain opposed.

As for Bush, he has always struggled even to give the impression of having a connection with reality. Nevertheless, the reality of the last five years stubbornly remains. The world is not a safer place; it is more violent, more dangerous.

There are more, not fewer, jihadists of the Bin Laden stripe. The bitterness in the Arab and Muslim world is deeper, broader and more incendiary.

In Afghanistan, Blair, oblivious to his nation's history of military catastrophe in that proud country, has hurled his soldiers into the most unforgiving terrain, against a ferocious and growing military resistance, in a part of the world that even Alexander the Great could not occupy.

In Iraq, the occupiers have spilt enough blood to turn the two great rivers red. In order to cling on they foment sectarian and confessional strife which, and this may be their parting gift, threatens tragically to trisect the country. Can they with a straight face claim Iraq is better off now than it was before the invasion?

Remember what they said their war would achieve: freedom and democracy, respect for women, prosperity and dignity.

In truth, it was the freedom of US corporate culture, the democracy of the dollar and an Arab world ruled by corrupt kings and puppet presidents just as pliant but a little less gauche, able to rig an election as the Bush's do in Florida rather than tactlessly incarcerating the opposition.

Even these, their own selfish ambitions, have not been achieved. That increasingly stands out as the most salient feature of the reality they have created over the last half- decade. Nowhere symbolises it more than Lebanon.

In March of last year the US State Department and British Foreign Office were incongruously playing the role of revolutionary pamphleteer. The "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon was, we were assured, about to usher an irresistible movement for a "New Middle East".

Fifteen months later and we know what that looks like: the Israeli army pledging to bomb Lebanon back two decades and embarking on an invasion whose success was predicated on reigniting the flames of civil war which the people of Lebanon have done so much to douse.

The war this summer was not merely another episode in the bloody history of Israel lashing out at bordering states. It was a battle in Washington's wider war on terror. It was a front that opened up, ironically, precisely because the US is mired and losing on the Iraq front. The assault on Lebanon was meant to pave the way to further aggression against Syria and Iran.

That makes the reaction of those Arab leaders who denounced the Lebanese resistance all the more emetic. Their spurious claims that this was merely a Shia issue or that threats to bomb Iran are a Persian problem should be met with nothing but contempt.

In backing Israel against Hizbullah and the Lebanese resistance, they sided with the enemy who is garrotting the Palestinians in Gaza. While these leaders humiliated themselves before Washington and Tel Aviv, the name Sheikh Sayed Hassan Nasrallah was on the lips of millions from Rabat to Riyadh.

Israel's defeat at the hands of Hizbullah and the resistance in Lebanon is a defeat also for Washington and London. It has opened up a new prospect for ending the nightmare of the last five years.

It is not only in the Arab and Muslim world that confidence is surging forward that there is an alternative to domination by the US, global corporations and their local junior partners. The same is happening in Latin America where President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela personifies a new radical generation, one that met its counterparts in the Middle East and the older generation of the great Fidel Castro at the Non-Aligned Summit this week.

This, I believe, is going to be the lasting legacy of the last five years: a renewed global movement in direct opposition to the Pentagon and the multinationals on whose behalf it acts as enforcer. The stakes are extraordinarily high. Just as the impasse in Iraq drove the US to support the Israeli adventure in Lebanon, so that defeat may in turn accelerate preparations for an assault on Iran.

That would be one of the most costly miscalculations in history. They stand warned. But they stood warned over their crazed reaction to 11 September, so no one should underestimate their capacity to wade deeper into the river of blood.

The US is not going to tip toe away, despite its losses. To do so would mean the American establishment accepting that its power and prestige had been thrown back to before 1989, when it faced a rival power.

It is going to take the power of the popular resistance from Caracas to Cairo to throw back that behemoth and settle accounts with all the quislings who it depends upon but who crucially also depend on it.

George Galloway, is respect member of British Parliament for the London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow.

The demands of China and other countries are stirring a fear in the West that agencies like the IMF, set up in the 1940s to stabilize the global economy, are in danger of fragmenting - a sobering thought for those worried that the breakdown of global trade talks this year imperiled the future of global economic cooperation.

The richest countries of the world are scrambling to make sure that this fragmentation does not happen. Accordingly, a U.S.-backed plan that would give a bit more of a say at the Fund to China, South Korea, Mexico and Turkey appears headed for passage Monday.

[Rodrigo Rato, the IMF's managing director, said Sunday that he saw "broad consensus" that the 184-member body would approve a plan to increase the voting shares of China and the three other emerging economies - despite opposition from several countries, The Associated Press reported.]

The plan is what the United States calls a "down payment," paving the way for more power to be given to other developing countries at the Fund, which is responsible for monitoring the global economy and rescuing countries from default. But that process is likely to produce much wrangling over the next year or two.

Judging from the comments of countries like India, Brazil, Argentina and Egypt, which have said they oppose the "down payment" idea, there is a clear residue of distrust from the poor or developing countries that feel left out of the process being discussed at these annual meetings. That criticism underscores the general anxiety about the future of the global economy and the systems set up to secure it.

Changing the way the IMF works has proved difficult, in part because countries with existing power at the fund, including some in Europe, are nervous about being marginalized after decades of power.

Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain and chairman of a committee that helps set policy for the Fund, said Sunday that he expected that Europeans and others who might lose power to the Asians "will approach this in a statesmanlike way" and voluntarily give up some of their clout.

Another issue being discussed, people here say, is for the World Bank, which lends more than $20 billion a year to poor countries, to figure out a new relationship with countries like China, Thailand, Mexico and others with economies strong enough that they can borrow in commercial markets more cheaply than from the bank.

A decade ago, the fast-growing countries of Asia and Latin America that were termed "emerging markets" were on the defensive after the collapse of their economies and the embarrassment of elaborate rescues carried out by the United States and the IMF. But now some of these same countries are, along with the oil-producing countries, sitting on piles of reserves while the United States is the world's biggest debtor nation.

There is a new phrase at the World Bank that captures this situation. Many of these countries are "emerging donors," not just "emerging markets." China and India get loans from the World Bank because together they have more poor people than sub-Saharan Africa.

But China is also using its reserves to hand out billions of dollars in loans to Angola, Sudan, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and increasingly in Southeast Asia in a way that the West criticizes because many of these same countries have recently negotiated debt forgiveness packages and are in danger of sinking back into debt.

One reason for the push to give China more power at the Fund, U.S. and European officials say, is to get it to be more "responsible" in its lending practices and also to allow its currency to fluctuate more freely and not artificially intervene in currency markets.

But the countries with the reserves have mixed feelings about the IMF. They say they want more power there, but they also do not look back fondly on the period when they had to swallow harsh austerity plans in return for being saved in the 1990s.

"Many large countries in the world are building up their own reserves to make sure they do not have to come back to the fund," said Ariel Buira, a Mexican economist who serves as a spokesman for a group of 24 African, Asian and Latin American nations. "They are demanding more of a say in what the fund does in the future."

And they are threatening to go their own way, possibly following China's lead to set up an Asian monetary agency that would rival the monetary fund, long the unquestioned province of the United States and Europe. In addition, the poor countries of Africa have joined with the economically better-off poor countries to object to the Fund's overhaul because they fear that they will be left out of the process.

Margarito Teves, the Philippines' finance secretary, said the plan now on the table to overhaul the Fund was inadequate. But "that doesn't mean we would vote against the proposal," he said, adding that voting for it might be the best way of improving it.

In the past, those risking oversimplification tended to see these annual gatherings as battlegrounds between rich and poor countries, especially because of the anti-globalization protests like the one in Seattle in 1999. Protests have not been much in evidence here because of tight security; Singapore has banned demonstrations and refused visas to people it deemed to be troublemakers.

Representatives of 500 nongovernmental groups, many of them dissenting vehemently from policies at the World Bank and the Fund, have been holding quiet seminars on the fringes of the meetings calling attention to the problems of poverty, environmental degradation and diseases like AIDS. What these meetings show is that there are actually three groups of nations here: the rich, the poor and the "middle income" poor, led by China but including India and many of the countries that surround Singapore.

Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary and former Harvard president, has also been on the fringes here, talking about how unprecedented it is that in the past few years, the "poor" countries of the world have ended up being the bankers of the United States. Summers estimates that "emerging markets" possess $2 trillion in "excess reserves," or what is in excess of what is normally considered necessary to protect against trade and economic downturns.

In effect, the poor countries are helping Americans consume more and save less. If the situation were reversed, many economists say, the United States would be enlisting the IMF to demand austerity of the errant poor countries.

Like the Fund, the World Bank is also wrestling with the phenomenon of "middle income" poor countries and plans to issue a report Monday on the subject.

Billed as the largest U.S. gathering of Nobel Peace Prize winners in history, the event served as a starting point for the laureates' "Global Call to Action," an initiative aimed at urging young people to record 1 billion "acts of peace" over the next 10 years.

About 3,000 young people from 31 countries attended the event, held at the University of Denver.

The event's biggest names, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, steered clear of politics. The Dalai Lama was greeted like a rock star yesterday before a one-hour speech in which he urged young people to embrace globalization.

"There are no national boundaries. The whole globe is becoming one body," the Tibetan spiritual leader said. "In these circumstances, I think war is outdated -- destruction of your neighbor is actually destruction of yourself."

At a press conference Friday, however, other peace prize winners criticized U.S. foreign policy, saying the focus should be on social and economic justice.

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the 1980 winner for his Latin American human-rights work, took it a step further with a personal shot at President Bush.

"Bush says he prays. But I think God covers up His ears when George Bush prays," Mr. Esquivel said through a Spanish translator.

The Nobel Peace Prize winners also issued a statement identifying 10 "barriers to global peace." They included disease, poverty, nuclear weapons, social injustice, racism, access to natural resources and the rights of women and children.

Conspicuously absent from the list was global terrorism. Several laureates said that terrorism was an outgrowth of ignorance, prejudice and inequality, and that it cannot be eradicated until those underlying social issues are addressed. Mrs. Williams said the September 11 attacks were a response to U.S. aggression around the world, and that the White House should have tried to understand the reasons behind them before invading Iraq. "They do not like the aggressive policies of the country and they don't like that we're ignorant of that," she said. Mr. Esquivel compared the nearly 3,000 persons killed on September 11 with the tens of thousands of children who die every day of hunger. "I call that economic terrorism," he said. Shirin Ebadi, who won the peace prize in 2003 for advocating democracy and human rights in the Middle East, said she was "very sorry for the sad events of September 11," but added that it would have been better for the United States to build a school in Afghanistan for each victim, rather than invading the country. The founders of PeaceJam, Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, said one of the event's goals was for the laureates to become as popular with young people as actors and musicians. "I want the Nobel laureates to be icons, [instead of] some thumb-sucking [celebrities]," Mr. Suvanjieff said. "I want peace to be hip, sexy and cool."

Following Morony's presentation and a brief discussion by the council, Councilman Pat Cole said, "I make the motion that we cease immediately adding fluoride to our beautiful San Felipe Springs water."

In his letter to the city requesting time to address the council, Morony recommended "that Del Rio cease fluoridating its water supply."

Morony in his letter noted that in the U.S., more than 70 communities have stopped adding fluoride to their water.

He also pointed out that most European countries, Japan and China do not add fluoride to their water supplies.

"Why? Basically for two reasons: fluoridated water cannot be shown to significantly reduce dental caries (tooth decay) and it has proved to be far more toxic than previously thought," Morony wrote.

Morony during Tuesday night's meeting also presented the council with a paper titled "Scientific Facts on the Biological Effects of Fluorides."

The paper listed research references linking fluoride to a variety of medical problems, including the development of bone cancer and premature aging.

The paper stated, "Fluoride consumption by human beings increases the general cancer death rate."

Morony noted that although some fluoride occurs naturally in all water, the fluoride being added to the city's water supply "is a waste product of the phosphate fertilizer industry."

"I'm just trying to get the fluoride out of our water," Morony told the council.

At the end of Morony's presentation, Cole asked him, "So let me clarify: if we continue adding fluoride, we are putting in our water a byproduct of the fertilizer industry?"

"That's right," Morony said.

Councilman Mike Wrob asked, "At what point did we start putting fluoride in our water?"

City administrators asked Mitch Lomas, manager of the city's water treatment plant, to answer Wrob's question.

"We started fluoridating in 1990 as a result of a decision by the city council," Lomas replied.

"At the time we did not have all the information about fluoride that we do now," he added.

Wrob then asked Lomas to give the council his opinion of adding fluoride to the city's drinking water, a question Lomas did not answer directly.

Mayor Efrain Valdez noted that the city spends about $20,000 a year buying the fluoride to add to the city water.

Cole asked Lomas, "How do employees at the water plant feel about handling fluoride?"

"It's a very corrosive chemical. It eats through concrete and metal. When they handle it, they have to wear respirators and chemical-proof suits," Lomas said.

"But how do they feel about handling it?" Cole asked.

"They really would rather not handle it," Lomas replied.

Cole then made her motion to cease fluoridation of the city's water, with Wrob giving the second.

After the council had voted unanimously to approve Cole's motion, Morony told the News-Herald as he had left the council chambers, "The council's decision is very gratifying. Now we can go back to drinking Del Rio water."