Foreign Labor

Nicole Oswell was a straight-A student passionately interested since first grade in following in her mother's footsteps as a registered nurse. But she had to wait two years to get into Los Angeles Trade Tech's nursing program, she said, her frustration mounting as national nursing shortages worsened. Lizbeth Gutierrez got lucky. Her wait was only six months.

Kohl's Corp. removed some styles of its Daisy Fuentes clothing line after learning of allegations that the Guatemalan factory where the clothes are made is a sweatshop, where workers are humiliated and forced to work unpaid overtime. The National Labor Committee, a New York-based workers rights group, issued a report after learning of complaints by employees at the Fribo factory in rural Santa Maria Cauque de Sacatepequez. Kohl's, based in Menomonee Falls, Wis.

While Gap Inc.'s stores have been disappointing shoppers and investors, the factories making the retailer's clothes have been treating workers better, according to the company's latest assessment of its labor practices. The update released Thursday marked the third time the owner of the Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic chains had publicly critiqued the conditions in overseas factories often derided as "sweatshops" because of abuses inflicted on employees.

The U.S. Embassy on Tuesday banned diplomats and other civilian government employees indefinitely from traveling by land outside the heavily protected Green Zone as American and Iraqi officials debated the legal status of foreign security contractors after a weekend shooting incident here in which eight civilians were reported killed.

Edwin Maher was having a "Broadcast News" moment, feeling a flicker of self-doubt, an attack of the sweats waiting to happen beneath the white-hot studio lights. The veteran Australian TV reporter and weatherman was starting a new job abroad as a prime-time news anchor. But decades of on-camera presence couldn't prepare him for this gig, mouthing the party line for an imposing state-run TV network with armed soldiers posted at the entrance gates. He was reading the news in communist China.

Behind frosted glass in rooms off-limits to anyone not cleared for access, analysts at research firm Copal Partners calculate company valuations, compile industry data and write case studies of past mergers. Their specialty is pitch books, the reports that investment banks use to win M&A deals. The Copal team is working in an office building in the New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon; its clients are Wall Street banks halfway across the globe.

Angelica Tellez and her family migrated to central Texas from northern Mexico in 1983, seeking a better life. Today she owns her own business, Angie's Bazaar, selling bridal gowns and \o7quinceanera\f7 dolls to Waco's burgeoning Latino community. Hers is a classic immigrant entrepreneur success story, the kind President Bush likes to cite as he tries to attract more Latinos into the Republican fold.

From the small town of Toowoomba near Australia's Gold Coast, Dennis Davey is trolling the world for people to work in his 200-person engineering company. He has snared 15 workers from South Africa and 15 more from China. Some of the South Africans have already been poached away by the town's mining companies, so if the latest batch of Chinese works out, Davey says, he will bring over at least 50 more. "We have no choice," he said in a telephone interview. "We can't find any more people."

A deep split within the Republican Party over immigration policy is now reaching into the highest levels of the GOP machinery, as members of the Republican National Committee, which typically operates in lock step with the White House, are poised to vote today on a resolution repudiating President Bush's call for a guest-worker program.

Despite deep divisions within its ranks, the Republican Party formally endorsed a guest-worker program Friday that would permit more workers from abroad to work legally and temporarily in the United States. The vote by the Republican National Committee averted a potentially embarrassing setback for President Bush, who has called for a guest-worker program. The vote preempted an Arizona activist's resolution that argued that permitting guest workers would fuel more illegal immigration.