Ethnic Groups

Jimmy Smits, the actor who plays the dashing Det. Bobby Simone on the popular TV drama "NYPD Blue," doesn't mince words. "The representation of Latinos in the media today is abysmal," said Smits, a half-Puerto Rican actor who is active in the Latino entertainment community. But that's not what he wants to talk about. After all, the disproportionately negative images on TV of Latinos and other minority groups has been common knowledge for years now.

Nebih Dervishi's three-story house went up in flames the other day, engulfing his sister's bridal gown, a room full of gifts and nearly everything else the ethnic Albanian family owned. The wedding is going ahead, but Dervishi is going to war.

Parts of India's troubled Jammu and Kashmir state were under indefinite curfew and roads were blocked by police after 25 members of a Hindu wedding party were massacred. The curfew was imposed in towns including Kishtwar and Bhaderwah in a Muslim-majority area near the site of the killing Friday, police said.

Three Serbian policemen were killed in fighting and four policemen are being held by militants of Kosovo Albanians' separatist army, Serbian and Albanian sources said. The Kosovo Information Center, close to the ethnic Albanians' political leaders, said the three policemen were killed in fighting in the Decani area of western Kosovo province bordering Albania.

Once the virtual province of old-line Protestant churches, Southern California has emerged in recent years as the most religiously diverse metropolitan area in the world. From immigrant Pentecostal churches and suburban mega-churches overflowing with believers to the largest Buddhist temple in the Western Hemisphere, 600 distinct religious traditions have been identified in the region.

In cafes and on street corners, anywhere people meet to talk politics in this hardscrabble capital, a consensus is taking shape: Albanians will do anything for their beleaguered "brothers" in the neighboring Yugoslav province of Kosovo--anything, that is, except fight for them. Just over the border, an estimated 250 people have died since February in Kosovo, which is part of Serbia but is 90% ethnic Albanian.

Not everyone in Karen Hernandez's family speaks English, so the UCLA senior plans to skip the regular commencement and take her family to an alternative, ethnic one--just the sort of graduation ceremony that had some University of California regents fuming this week. The Hernandez clan plans to attend the Raza Graduation on Sunday, where every word will be translated into Spanish.

The guerrilla war racking Serbia's Kosovo province has exploded into a new phase after a fierce government offensive killed or wounded dozens of ethnic Albanian separatists, sent thousands of refugees over international borders and confounded an alarmed West.

Driving past charred homes and devastated villages, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke traveled into the heart of the Kosovo conflict Wednesday to talk with rifle-toting ethnic Albanian militants, bringing the separatist fighters into international efforts to stop an all-out war. Against a backdrop of explosions and gunfire, Holbrooke declared that it is time for Serbian security forces to "get out of here."

Ever since their past was swallowed up by war in 1993, the members of Azerbaijan's Karabakh soccer team have lived the shiftless lives of refugees, carrying on with their sport even though they have not set eyes on their homeland of Nagorno-Karabakh since its Armenian majority drove the men out of the disputed enclave in a vicious ethnic war. The dispossessed soccer stars slowly reassembled in this filthy industrial town 300 miles east of the sparkling, but now deadly, hills of their birth.