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Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has been battling cancer for months, is in a "very delicate" condition, with breathing difficulties and a severe respiratory infection, a government statement says.

The statement, read out Monday by Minister of Communications Ernesto Villegas, spells out the 58-year-old socialist leader's decline since his December surgery in Cuba for an unspecified cancer in the pelvic area:

"From today, there has been deterioration in his respiratory performance, related to the immunodeficiency of his current clinical condition. At present he is suffering from a new and serious respiratory infection.

"The president has been receiving intense chemotherapy, as well as other complementary treatments, with the dosage according to the development of his clinical state.

"His general state of health continues to be very delicate.

"The president is taking refuge in Christ and in life, conscious of the difficulties that he is facing and strictly following the program designed by his medical team."

The cost of college can range from $60,000 for a state university to four times as much at some private colleges. The total student debt in the U.S. now tops credit card debt. So a lot of people are asking: Is college really worth it?

There are several famous and staggeringly successful college dropouts, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. You may not end up with fat wallets like them, but Dale Stephens says you can find a different education path.

Stephens, founder of UnCollege.org and author of a new book, Hacking Your Education, challenges people to learn differently, away from a school campus.

"When you think about education as an investment, you have to think about what the return is going to be," Stephens tells NPR's Renee Montagne.

Stephens points to an alternative self-education system by taking responsibility for learning on your own and using networking to your advantage. He also says school just isn't for everyone.

"I left school because I didn't feel like school was an environment that left me free to learn," says Stephens, who dropped out of college.

His book explores why and how to ditch the cost of tuition and find a personal educational system.

Hunger strikes are often used in India as a method of protest — but try being on one for 12 years.

That's how long it's been since Irom Sharmila last ate on her own. She is protesting an Indian law that suspends human rights guarantees in conflict-ridden parts of the country. The government is force-feeding her through a tube. And on Monday, Sharmila was charged with attempted suicide.

First, some background: Sharmila is protesting the Armed Forces Special Forces Act, an Indian law that gives special powers to the country's military in restive regions. The law is in force in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, as well as across the country's northeast, the scene for decades of several separatist movements. Sharmila is from Manipur, one of these northeastern states. Here's how The Associated Press describes the law:

"Under the law, in effect in Indian-ruled Kashmir and parts of the country's northeast, troops have the right to shoot to kill suspected rebels without fear of possible prosecution and to arrest suspected militants without a warrant. It also gives police wide-ranging powers of search and seizure."

There are more than 1,400 billionaires in the world right now, according to two sources — one in the U.S., and one in China. But the tallies by Forbes and Hurun Report differ on key points, including whether there are now more billionaires in Asia than anywhere else.

Forbes says its list of billionaires, released Monday, "now boasts 1,426 names, with an aggregate net worth of $5.4 trillion, up from $4.6 trillion." Shanghai's Hurun Report, which compiled its first global list this year after long tracking China's wealthy, says it found 1,453 billionaires, with $5.5 trillion in combined worth.

Those numbers aren't far from each other, especially considering recent volatile economic conditions in global markets. And they show that the amount of money held by fewer than 1,500 people — let's split the difference, and call it $5.45 trillion — would earn them a spot as the world's fourth-largest GDP, if we were the type of people who conflate producing wealth with holding onto it.

Both of the lists are topped by Carlos Slim Helu and his family, of Mexico. And they agree that the U.S. has more billionaires than any other country.

But a key difference between the lists arises when Hurun Report states, "Asia was home to the highest number of billionaires this year with most of them operating in real estate sector."

Forbes says the entire Asia-Pacific region has 386 billionaires, while the Hurun list says Asia has 559 of them — not including the 17 who are in Oceania.

So, why the disparity? It could certainly come down to fluctuations in individuals' net worth — Forbes cites Brazil's Eike Batista, "whose fortune dropped by $19.4 billion, or equivalent to about $50 million a day," in 2012.

The differences might also reflect the difficulty of tallying the wealth of people whose holdings are often spread across continents and industries. And not all of them want to advertise their wealth — particularly in China, which Hurun Report says has 317 billionaires.

As The Vancouver Sun reported yesterday, China's wealthy use many means to smuggle their money overseas, hoping to insulate themselves from both the tax office and political shifts.

Citing Global Financial Integrity's estimate that $602.9 billion fled China in 2011, The Sun's Zoe McKnight writes that the methods ranged from using "underground banks" to putting suitcases full of cash on airplanes.

"For every billionaire that Hurun Report has found," the magazine company's chairman Rupert Hoogewerf says, "I estimate we have missed at least two, meaning that today there are probably 4000... billionaires in the world."

The magazine concluded that "valuing the wealth of China's richest is as much an art as it is a science."