Foreign Populations

TOKYO -- A district court Monday ordered a private bathhouse on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido to pay a total of $25,000 to three foreign-born men who were refused entry on the basis of race. The decision by the Sapporo District Court received widespread notice in a homogeneous nation where less than 1.5% of the population is non-Japanese. "This is a significant ruling for Japanese society," said Akira Fujimoto, associate professor of law at Kwassui Women's College.

Children adopted from abroad often have difficulties adjusting to their new families and to life in this country, exhibiting poor social skills, problems bonding with new family members and reticence in dealing with strangers. Those difficulties are generally traced back to emotional deprivation in large orphanages, where infants often outnumber staff by 40 to 1, and caregivers do little more than feed and change the infants.

Abel Garrido has just struck oil and he's not happy about it. Using a tree branch, the weathered farmer probed the edge of a pond that his cattle use for drinking water and soon turned up the smelly black sludge that he says has killed much of his livestock and sickened his family. "I've lost 30 cows," Garrido said. "I cut them open and their insides are black." Paying the medical bills to treat his three children for skin cancer has cost him his meager savings.

In the Afghan capital, Westerners buy caviar from the supermarket while Afghans struggle to buy bread. Foreign women suntan in Chanel swimming suits while their Afghan counterparts are afraid to take off their burkas. Alcohol is banned under the new constitution, yet beer and wine parties are in full swing. But the good times enjoyed by thousands of aid workers, security contractors, consultants and even a few liberal-minded Afghans may be coming to an end.

The Justice Department's effort to interview some 7,600 foreigners in the United States after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was conducted haphazardly, leading to incomplete, inconclusive results, congressional investigators say.

China is imposing new restrictions on foreign adoptions, barring applicants who are unmarried, obese, older than 50 or who take antidepressants, U.S. adoption agencies said. The new rules are meant to limit adoptions to "only the most qualified families," says the website of one agency, Harrah's Adoption International Mission in Spring, Texas. The agency said China had pledged to try to make more children available to those who qualified.

Muoi Tran was showing distinct signs of improvement in her second encounter with the automobile. Her first lesson on the residential streets of Monterey Park had ended in failure. The flustered 44-year-old Vietnamese immigrant was unable to drive straight. She clawed at the steering wheel, but her car kept veering toward traffic in the opposite lane and then drifting back in the other direction, inches from cars parked along the curb.

Homer knows no borders. No, not the Homer who wrote "The Odyssey." At the entrance to the town of Springfield, New Zealand, there's a 12-foot-tall sculpture of a pink glazed doughnut. Voters in a congressional election in Argentina cast ballots for a candidate named Homer Simpson from the Donuts and Beer Party. When Brits were asked in an online survey to name their most admired Americans, Homer outranked Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

Elena Rezneac's lavender eye shadow shimmered in the sun outside a crowded Internet cafe in Yemen's capital city. The 21-year-old Moldovan student giggled as she pushed her sunglasses up above her blond ponytail. "If you read about Yemen in the news lately, you think there are terrorists running around and bombs in all the streets," she said. "But when you are here, it's calm. I have to go online to remember there's a war going on." Others among the thousands of foreign aid workers and students of Arabic who live in this impoverished nation expressed a similar view.

The most heated controversy over the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down parts of the nation's campaign-funding laws has focused on whether the decision frees foreign corporations to pour money into American elections. President Obama raised this specter Wednesday in his State of the Union address, saying the ruling would "open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections." A day later, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.