Envy Apartment

Expect the worst and be ready. After an intoxicating stench of acetone prevailed for four days, Houston (Texas) fire crews were called to the Summer Vale apartment complex to uncover an apparent synthetic drug lab , hidden in plain sight. No one was home inside the apartment-turned- alleged drug mill . Instead, empty canisters of chemicals, little packets labeled “potpourri bubble gum” and breathing masks remained . “They had a clandestine drug lab up there,” Senior Capt. Dwayne Jernigan, of Houston Fire Department , said early Friday. “They were making Kush. [They] had all the equipment for it.” Most people paid no attention to the stench, with some saying they thought maintenance was re-doing an apartment. When the smell didn’t go away, a resident felt light -headed and queasy, prompting a call to 911. Families in 12 units were ordered to vacate their apartments, but some have since been allowed to return.

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Arson investigators and the FBI are both looking into why a Midtown man had mercury in his apartment. The spill forced a floor-wide evacuation and big clean up Monday afternoon at Mid Main Lofts . Some residents arrived home to find fire trucks and hazmat teams surrounding their apartments. "All I know is mercury is involved," Anna Nguyen said. According to firefighters, a male resident had two pounds of mercury in a Crown Royal bottle in his apartment. A female friend picked up the bottle to make a drink and dropped it, spilling the mercury. HFD said the man tried and failed to clean the spill up with a medicine dropper, so he threw the dropper down the trash chute and contaminated that as well. The fifth floor was found to have unacceptable levels of mercury, and it remains closed. "If you've ever tried to pick mercury up, it's particularly difficult. I can't imagine what they're going to do, particularly if there are wood ...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...