Envy Apartment

The following story appeared in the St. Petersburg Times on October 26, 2006, the day after Danny Rolling was put to death. Also included are photos covering the period from the time of the murders to the day of Rolling execution . Rolling Executed By Chris Tisch, Tamara Lush and Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler Times Staff Writers STARKE – The drab brown curtain between killer and survivors opened at 5:59 p.m. Wednesday. Danny Rolling lay on a gurney. A prison official asked Florida 's most notorious serial killer since Ted Bundy if he had a last statement. Rolling responded with a twangy hymn, apparently self-penned. "He who flung the stars into heavens above, created the oceans, mountains, eagles and doves," he sang. "None greater than thee, Oh Lord, none greater than thee." Family members of his eight victims - five in Florida and three he was linked to in Louisiana - clutched each other, rolled their eyes or shook their heads. One family member later ...

Just a couple of miles from the Mexican border, where approximately 200, 000 immigrants illegally cross every year, 14-year-old Guatemalan Byron Raxcaco came face-to-face with reality of life on this nearly 2,000 mile border. A local drug lord demanded that Raxcaco and his chaperone pay $800 for safe passage across the border, where criminal gangs ferry humans and drugs across daily, and where police presence is almost non-existent, he said in an interview with AL.com. Poor and desperate to reach the U.S., Raxcaco was detained in a hotel in the Mexican region of Senora for a day until his aunt in Semmes, Alabama, gathered the money for the drug lord. After paying up, Raxcaco was released and free to start a new life in the United States.  He approached a border patrol post , told them he was an unaccompanied minor and asked for political asylum. In the four years since crossing the border, he has moved in with his aunt, enrolled in school, learned English, and got himself a girlfri...

The iconic London landmark uses its public spaces to counterpoint the unbridled growth of London’s luxury private structures I recently found myself staring into a stranger’s living room, waiting for something beautiful to happen. I was standing on the 10th- floor viewing terrace of the Tate Modern’s new wing, a twisting ziggurat of perforated brick and mortar that rises above the museum’s home in the old Bankside Power Station . The terrace allows for 360-degree views of the building frenzy that has consumed much of London’s skyline. Cranes dip and dive in every direction; to the east, the Shard, an overwhelming ice pick of a skyscraper, dwarfs the Victorian roofs of the surrounding neighbourhood; to the west, the pregnant monolith of One Blackfriars, a 50-storey mixed-used building, looms over the Thames like an alien mothership. As is the case all over the city, many of its £4 million (Dh19 million) apartments will be scooped up as investments, only to stand empty. Idle butlers ...