Houston Tx

Amid the perennial topics of geopolitics, production challenges and supply and demand, the world's energy leaders have descended on this oil town for a weeklong conference with a surprising new focus: using less oil. Exxon Mobil Corp. Chief Executive Rex Tillerson acknowledged the dangers of global warming but sounded skeptical about alternative fuels. Chevron Corp.

Anyone who lives here has had to deal with them: 2-inch-long, Texas-size cockroaches, equal opportunity home invaders that know no demographic or income boundaries. Now the Houston Museum of Natural Science has issued a casting call for the ever-present pests. As it stocks a new insect exhibit, the museum has offered to buy up to 1,000 American cockroaches for a quarter apiece from residents who bring them in.

HOUSTON -- After six years of planning and negotiations, and a controversy reverberating through the scientific community, the world's most famous fossil made her debut Tuesday. Lucy, a 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis, was unveiled during a media preview at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where she will be the centerpiece of an exhibit opening Friday.

Lan Nguyen had dreamed of owning a house since she immigrated to Southern California from Vietnam 11 years ago. But she and her husband could never scrounge up enough money for a down payment, spending most of their paychecks on rent for a cramped Garden Grove apartment. Now, Nguyen has moved to a suburb of this Gulf Coast city, where the 28-year-old owns a new four-bedroom house with a spacious game room and access to a pool with a water slide -- all for $200,000.

For the middle-age Houstonians digging through bargain bins of T-shirts, two-foot-long Texas-size combs and other park souvenirs, it was a chance to reminisce, and even get a little misty about the passing of an era -- when Houston changed from a cow town to Space City, the Astrodome was the last word in modern engineering and AstroWorld was the definition of groovy summertime fun.

The two women never met but probably crossed paths in an abandoned supermarket -- now a disaster recovery center -- on the south side of town where railroad tracks crisscross the terrain. Monique Moses and Pauline Gallien spend lots of time at the center, on opposite sides of the partition. Moses is a Hurricane Katrina evacuee from New Orleans. She is looking for a job. Gallien is a longtime Houstonian whose job is to find jobs for people like Moses. Right now, neither is having much success.

Behind a wood-frame house in a neighborhood north of downtown, five horses are stabled whose regular riding trails are the grassy medians that cut through the city's major roadways. Cars fly by on either side. But these horses, like many others in the city, are so accustomed to urban living that traffic noise is simply part of the landscape.

Eight gang members who moved here from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina have been arrested as suspects in 11 slayings, police said Friday. The arrests follow a recent surge in violence in the Houston area, which police attribute partly to Katrina evacuees. A gang unit formed two weeks ago to investigate the crime wave has linked the killings to rival New Orleans gang members trying to get a foothold in Houston.

The gleaming metal "E" that once marked the entrance to Enron Corp.'s downtown headquarters. The unfinished mansion commissioned by former Chief Financial Officer Andrew S. Fastow. The secondhand store that Linda Lay, wife of company founder Kenneth L. Lay, had opened to hawk her pricey castoffs. For $30, these and other sights tied to the rise and fall of Enron can be viewed from the comfort of an air-conditioned bus on the "Lifestyles of Houston's Rich & Infamous" Enron tour.

Like thousands of teenage immigrants who cross the border into the U.S. each year, Noe Choxom worked a day job to help his family pay for rent and groceries. "I didn't have time for school," said Choxom, who reached the eighth grade back in his village in Guatemala. That changed when he saw a Spanish-language television report last year about a Houston high school that accommodated the work schedules of young immigrants.