The U.S Senate has renewed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), with 78 votes in favor and 22 against. According to Think Progress, all of the 22 votes against renewing the Act were Republican men, including rising GOP star, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (R).

Republicans had threatened to obstruct VAWA, which is renewed every five years, over new provisions that would enshrine protections for LGBT people, immigrants and women on Native American reservations into the law. House Republicans proposed their own, watered down version of the legislation in 2012, but the House and Senate, unable to reconcile their versions of the legislation, allowed the VAWA to expire for the first time since its inception.

The VAWA was first passed in 1994 to address violence against women through stiffer sentences for violent perpetrators, guaranteeing women access to civil proceedings should prosecutors decline to press charges in a domestic violence case and by otherwise buttressing protections for women within the law. It was renewed without controversy in 2000 and 2005, but came up against Republican resistance this year.

Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and John Cornyn (R-TX) each attempted to tack amendments on to the Act that would annul the protections for undocumented immigrants, Native Americans […]

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Solar power plants could everywhere if two things were to fall precipitously: the cost of making solar cells and the price to install them. The first is actually falling fast (about 6% annually since 1998), but remains higher than equivalent fossil fuel energy in most places. The second is also distressingly high for those who want to see solar power rout coal and gas in today’s energy markets. So to make solar boosters’ dream come true, tomorrow’s solar panels must be printed on cheap, durable materials that can be installed anywhere sunlight is bound to strike them.

New research from around the world is driving us ever closer to that goal, says Silvija Gradecak, a materials science and engineering professor at MIT. And her lab, among others, is now releasing the bendy, peel-and-stick solar panels to prove it.

‘There was a significant effort to develop these type of devices [in the last few years], and the slope of this improvement is very high,’ says Gradecak. ‘In just a couple of years, power conversion efficiency [of new flexible solar cells] has gone from less than 0.1 percent to 5% to 7%. And it’s just a couple of years of work. We’re learning […]

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For two days, I’ve slept in my own wing of an echoing estate on a billionaire’s private island and been rendered helpless by a butler attending to my every need. I’ve gobbled three-course lunches, guzzled rum cocktails and champagne, worked out solo in a fully equipped gym, bathed in a bathtub the size of a boat, and had a gleaming yacht at my disposal. I’ve taken sunset dips in the Caribbean-my footsteps quite literally the only ones in the sand. Suddenly, it’s hard to imagine not vacationing like this all the time. Dare I say, I’m starting to feel entitled.

I’m in the Caribbean on Calivigny Island, just off the south coast of Grenada, where for $165,000 a night, you and up to 59 of your closest friends can inhabit the personal vacation paradise of a French businessman and his wife, including the 19,000-square-foot main house, two pools, five outdoor hot tubs, four boats, and a 30-person permanent staff.

Though the price may seem a little astonishing, there are quite a few ultra-affluent travelers who can afford it-and their ranks are growing. Last year, more than 2,000 people on earth were worth $1 billion or more, 185 more than in 2011, according […]

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A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption.

The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party’s anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.

Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, is not just an historical account of activities in a bygone era. As senior author, Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine, writes:

‘Nonprofit organizations associated […]

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Already strained by water scarcity and political tensions, the arid Middle East along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is losing critical water reserves at a rapid pace, from Turkey upstream to Syria, Iran and Iraq below.

Unable to conduct measurements on the ground in the politically unstable region, UC Irvine scientists and colleagues used data from space to uncover the extent of the problem. They took measurements from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, and found that between 2003 and 2010, the four nations lost 144 cubic kilometers (117 million acre feet) of water – nearly equivalent to all the water in the Dead Sea. The depletion was especially striking after a drought struck the area in 2007. Researchers attribute the bulk of it – about 60 percent – to pumping of water from underground reservoirs.

They concluded that the Tigris-Euphrates watershed is drying up at a pace second only to that in India. ‘This rate is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents,

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