Chavez: Obama's 'Smell of Hope' Beats Bush's Sulfur

Ex-Prez Bush says bailout his idea, and a good one

(NEWSER) - Three years ago, Mitt Romney wrote that President Obama should " Let Detroit Go Bankrupt ," instead of bailing out the struggling auto industry, in a famous New York Times column. And today? Even with the American auto industry on the rebound, Michigan's GOP primary looming on Feb. 28, and Rick Santorum breathing down his neck in the polls , Romney still thinks bankruptcy would have been better than the president's "crony capitalism," he writes in the Detroit News . "I believe that without his intervention things there would be better," he writes. More»

Ezra Klein crunches the numbers and comes up with a lower total than you think

(NEWSER) - Mitt Romney has taken to carrying around a debt clock, blaming President Obama for the ever-climbing number it shows. But the clock doesn't show how much Obama has actually added to that debt, so Ezra Klein set out to find out. "There are two answers," he writes in the Washington Post . The first, which is "simple and wrong" is $4.7 trillion. That's what you get when you subtract the debt when Obama took office (about $10.5 trillion) from the current debt (about $15.2 trillion). More»

Bomb is 'ready' under steps of palace, jokes Venezuela's leader

(NEWSER) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez shared a laugh about a nuclear bomb and Washington during a jovial meeting yesterday in Caracas. Chavez joked that a nuke was ready under a grassy knoll in front of his Miraflores palace steps. "That hill will open up and a big atomic bomb will come out," he said as the two laughed. "The imperialist spokesmen say Ahmadinejad and I are going into the Miraflores basement now to set our sights on Washington and launch cannons and missiles," Chavez added. "It's laughable." More»

Longevity expert debunks myth that White House duty shortens life

(NEWSER) - President Obama's graying hair has set off the typical chatter that serving as president is so stressful it's bound to take years off a person's life. Not so, says a longevity expert in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In fact, our presidents tend to live longer than the rest of us. S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois crunched the numbers involving 34 presidents who died of natural causes and found that 23 exceeded the life expectancy of men in their era, reports Reuters . More»

US increasing spending on HIV treatment by $50 million

(NEWSER) - President Obama marked World AIDS Day with a promise of more money and increased attention both in the US and abroad, reports AP :

• The US will increase spending on HIV treatment within its own borders by $50 million.
• He promised to help 6 million people in hard-hit countries get access to proper medicine by 2014, raising the original goal by 2 million.
• The US also aims to help get drugs to 1.5 million pregnant women who are HIV-positive, to distribute 1 billion condoms in the developing world over the next two years, and to pay for 4.7 million male circumcisions in Africa.