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...

Travelers have clocked 369 million international trips so far this year, an incredible sum equal to nearly 1. 6 million trips per day. Year to date, it’s 21 million more passport stamps than were achieved in early 2016. And s ome of the most popular destinations simply can’t handle the volume. Look no further than Venice. As the floating city deals with the threat of rising tides, it’s also being flooded by cruise ships and mass tourism, turning a romantic paradise into a mashup between Disney World and Times Square. Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Dubrovnik are also feeling the crunch. This year they have all taken steps to curb tourism, seeing it as a burden on locals rather than a bastion of economic opportunity. “A large part of these overcrowding issues is directly correlated to cruising,” said Melissa Biggs Bradley , founder and chief executive of the travel membership club Indagare . “In Dubrovnik, when there are two cruise ships in port and you have 3,000 extra people in the old...

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 ...