Envy Apartment

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 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 ...

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 ...