Oil prices dropped from over $100 a barrel in 2014 to just about $35 a barrel today. That's about the same amount it costs to produce a barrel, meaning right now oil producers are making nothing. Natural gas prices are down to their lowest levels in 16 years.

Thanks to new technologies, mostly fracking, which allows producers to extract gas and oil from rocks thousands of feet below the surface of the earth with a mix of high-pressured water and chemicals, production of oil skyrocketed from about 5,000 barrels a day in 2008 to 8,700 in 2014.

On New Year's Eve a Bahamian tanker called the "Theo T" cruised out of Corpus Christi, Texas with the first batch of crude oil to leave US shores in four decades, thanks to the budget bill that enabled it.

The short answer: politics. Without throwing a bone to oil-backed Congresspeople, the budget bill last month would have likely been blocked.

The other problem is leakage: Natural gas has been touted by Obama as a "bridge fuel" to get the world off of coal and other dirtier fuels. But it's only better than coal if the vast majority of it doesn't leak into the atmosphere before being burned.

negate any of its climate benefits,

But it's slightly more clear what oil exports will do: one analysis found exports will allow for 3.3 million more barrels a day of oil to be produced in the US between 2015 and 2035.

"We're already on the frontlines of oil and gas production," Raleigh Hoke, an activist with the Gulf Restoration Network, which works with communities affected by oil and gas in Louisiana, told VICE over the phone. "There are already 28 export facilities being constructed along the coast, so that means countless new pipelines through people's backyards, new trains carrying oil which are dangerous, and it hinders our efforts to restore our wetlands."

"Frankly we just have to wait until November," Athan Manuel, an organizer at the Sierra Club, told VICE. "And then hope we have an anti-fossil fuel Senate and an anti-fossil fuel President."

Under Abbott's plan, Congress would be unable to regulate any activity that only happens in one state, and will also be required to balance its own budget.

States would also have the power to sue the federal government in federal court, and would be granted additional, unnamed powers in an effort to "restore the balance of power."

"We are succumbing to the caprice of man that our founders fought to escape," he said in his speech Friday. "The cure to these problems will not come from Washington D.C. They must come from the states."

. American officials have since been trying to get Cuba to return the laser-guided missile, which did not contain explosives

More than 70 small earthquakes rattling Oklahoma in the past week have raised concerns fracking is making the problem worse.

waste water.

An Islamic State militant has carried out a public execution of his mother because she asked him to leave the group, say the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Police found traces of explosives, three handmade belts and a fingerprint of fugitive Salah Abdeslam, a French national

Anti-North Korea messages and K-Pop music were broadcast from loudspeakers at 11 sites along the border.—

The Palestinian death toll since the beginning of the unrest late last year increased to 149, and at least 20 Israelis have also died

The company's one-wheeled boards were seized after a US rival filed a patent infringement claim.

Ben Carson asked a bunch of fifth-graders to point out the worst student in their class, before telling the boy to "start reading."

was planning to build a $9 million mansion inspired by Tony Stark.

"This is absolutely one of the scariest things I've ever seen," Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross Jr., who took the reins this week, said after watching a video of the shooting. "This guy tried to execute the police officer. The police officer had no idea he was coming. It's amazing he's alive."

The secretary and I could only shout to panicked parents through the mail slot, "No one is allowed on campus or off campus until further notice."

After several hours, when we'd been given the all clear, I read each child's name aloud and released five and six-year-olds to their sobbing parents.

I loved the kids, and the parents, but risking my life to go to work just didn't seem worth it. I can't imagine how the teachers at Sandy Hook or Columbine managed to return to work after those horrific massacres.

As in -- we feel empathy and outrage when the San Bernardino or Oregon shooting rampages happen but won't actually take action until it is in our neighborhood, at our local school.

And, yet, one of my best friend's parents were brutally murdered during an armed robbery at their store in Detroit when we were 14. Another friend accidentally shot his brother in his own backyard with his father's gun.

Can we not run errands anymore without risking driving through a war zone?

What is our country coming to? Children and teachers in classrooms across the country huddling together, shaking in fear, sheltering in place, locked down on a regular basis? How are our children's right to safety of less value than the right to own a gun? Just within the last ten years, a staggering 280,024 Americans were killed by guns. Not overseas, fighting a war, but struggling to survive on the streets of U.S. cities and while studying or teaching in our schools.

Let's take back our schools, our streets and our sense of safety with stricter gun laws, background checks and more modern technology like the fingerprint unlocking device that is standard on cell phones now.

That percentage was up to 37 by 2003. Today, half of America's homeless are over 50.

In fact, people born in the second half of the baby boom (1955-1964) have had an elevated risk of homelessness compared to other age groups throughout their lives.

funded by the National Institute on Aging, has been asking 350 participants in a study we've been conducting since July 2013 in Oakland, California.

In the United States, more than 30 percent of renters and 23 percent of homeowners aged 50 and older spend more than half of their household income on rent.

California has the highest housing costs of any large state, and they are rising faster than elsewhere. It is not surprising that Oakland has a large homeless population.

common perception of homelessness is that it is a problem that afflicts only those with mental health and substance use problems.

They are also disproportionately people of color: Oakland's population is 28 percent African American, but 80 percent of our study participants are.

One of our participants spoke of the shock of losing his job after 27 years:

As research shows, homeless people in their 50's and 60's have similar or worse health problems than people in the general population who are in their 70's and 80's.

The point our study highlights is that the systems set up in the 1980s were not designed to serve an aging population.

An individual who has spent 30 years rotating between institutional care and the streets requires different services than a 54-year-old man who has become homeless for the first time after a period of extended unemployment.

"I think there is a question," McCain explained in the interview. "I'm not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it's worth looking into. I don't think it's illegitimate to look into."

Cruz says he anticipates Rubio will get an endorsement from McCain, which is why McCain brought up his birthplace as a potential stumbling block.

"Their foreign policies are almost identical. Their immigration policies are identical," Cruz continued. "So it's no surprise that people who are supporting other candidates in this race are going to jump on the silly attacks that occur as we get closer and closer to this election."

"It was a very wise move that Ted Cruz renounced his Canadian citizenship,"

"No, it's not going to happen," Cruz said. "I won't be taking legal advice anytime soon from Donald Trump.

"This is the silly season of politics," Cruz said. "Three weeks ago every Republican was talking about Donald Trump. Today, just about every Republican in the field is attacking me."

joking that members of the press will be "checking themselves into therapy" after he becomes president.

"With all due respect to our friends in the news media, elections are not won in newsrooms in Manhattan and D.C.," Cruz said to dozens of assembled media outlets on Thursday afternoon. "They are won talking to voters one on one. Answering their questions, their hard questions, not through a whole army of press surrogates who protect a candidate."

For years, this segregation was taking place among conservatives, whose rightward lurch was fueled by a 24-7 infotainment complex driven by conspiracies, xenophobia and paranoia.

As former professor, I tend to agree to an extent with Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's assessment that the intellectual coddling of students has discouraged critical thinking and being able to see other perspectives (which should actually be the goal of any humanities-based education).

It seems as if ideologically, religiously, and culturally, many Americans are beginning to retreat into comfort zones, either out of fear of the Other or fear of offending the Other.

Simply put, some of the prominent racial, social and economic justice movements over the past five years have floundered because they don't have cohesive goals, fail to incorporate pragmatism as part of long-term growth, and stifle the possibility for internal discussion.

Efforts to condemn police brutality have come under fire for lacking the vision, discipline and willingness to dialogue to effect meaningful change.

Even the marriage equality movement of the late 2000s, after a setback in California in 2008, worked in a way to get more people across generations and ideological lines to accept the idea -- and reality -- of same-sex marriage.

Whether in Germany, the United Kingdom, India or Israel, these debates are also being accompanied by polarization and ideological segregation. Of course, in countries such as Bangladesh, free speech rights have become a matter of life and death, particularly for secular bloggers who are coming under increasing attack.

. However, we don't need another Charlie Hebdo-type tragedy to remind us that these entrenched silos we have clustered ourselves into are undermining the very basis of our democracy: the free exchange of ideas, and the enrichment of our society through dialogue and collective action. More:

How will you and the CDC help ensure a well-executed program?

Right, and one of the things that will help tuberculosis control is the test and treat approach, and increasing the proportion of HIV-positive people that are treated. The majority of TB cases currently occur before people are started on anti-HIV medicines.

Partly it's the characteristic of the bacteria: You require long-term treatment for many months, we don't have a vaccine as we do with measles or polio, but partly it's the nature of the control program.

Fundamentally, what happens with tuberculosis will depend on two things. First, how well we implement what we know today, and second, how quickly we get better tools to stop tuberculosis.

If we could figure out which of them are going to develop active TB and provide shorter, more effective treatments for them, then we might really be able to knock down tuberculosis cases.

Some companies provide paid leave anyway. In the last year, high-profile employers like Facebook and Goldman Sachs introduced or expanded paid leave for their employees.

But Clinton’s proposal differs from the bill in one crucial way. In order to finance the replacement wages that workers would get, the Gillibrand-DeLauro bill would impose a small payroll tax, of 0.4 percent, that employers and employees would split evenly.

Clinton has criticized that approach repeatedly because it would mean higher taxes on lower- and middle-income workers.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the only Republican presidential candidate to address the issue formally, has said he’d offer small tax breaks to companies that offer paid leave -- an approach unlikely to have much impact, except perhaps to help well-off workers.

“The benefit of being one of the last countries in the world to adopt paid maternity leave is that we have been able to learn from other countries' experiences and the results are clear,” Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist and former adviser to President Barack Obama, told the Huffington Post on Thursday.

To advocates like Heather Boushey, chief economist and executive director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, that’s a welcome sign that American politics is finally talking about the challenges of parents who also have jobs.

no better time to put a spotlight on all the innovations in the world of sleep health. Technology has given us an unprecedented ability to learn more about ourselve

, 43 percent of those polled said they've tracked their exercise workouts and 41 percent have tracked their diet.

Sleep + Wellness has already kicked off with a range of perspectives on sleep and how it can improve our lives.

any truth

When Nepal hasn't been under the blanket of armed insurgencies, it's been in the grip of corrupt political leaders. People in Nepal seem to be looking for a leader that can carry them out of developmental paralysis, no matter the cost.

Obama, who is kicking off his last year in office, has emphasized that this problem could last beyond his presidency, and is working to outline the next steps that need to be taken.