Relocation Of People

Like a lot of people, Gerald Harris loves L.A. Even the jolt of being out of work, out of money and out on the streets makes him no more eager to return to his native New York City. "I'm going to stick it out," said Harris, 40, a graphic arts director who became homeless shortly after arriving in Los Angeles four months ago. "There's no point in going back." Social service workers have discovered that a lot of homeless people share Harris' view.

Authorities on Wednesday removed a dozen homeless people from an encampment on a stretch of Los Angeles County land near the Hollywood Bowl after residents complained that the homeless had been using their swimming pools and starting fires. Mandy Zari, who has lived in a gated community next to the encampment for six years, said the homeless use a path that connects the community to the Hollywood Bowl to enter the neighborhood. The path is accessible from the hills where the encampment is located.

The court-appointed manager of a bankrupt Reseda nursing home that abruptly evicted its 63 residents Friday night had failed in last-minute negotiations to sell the facility and contends that there was not enough cash to run it even one more day, authorities said Saturday. Two other nursing homes owned by the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Phoenix Health Group, in Alta Loma and Long Beach, could face closures this week, depending on the outcome of a Monday morning hearing in U.S.

Relief organizations on Saturday began to move Haitians from tent camps that are in danger of flooding to new camps on the perimeter of the city, part of a larger plan to decentralize the population after January's devastating earthquake. After a heavy rain the night before, buses carried 62 people from a bedraggled camp on a defunct golf course to a barren field 10 miles northwest of the city. Aid workers helped Romaine Vincent Donal, 44, load her belongings in wheelbarrows.

For Hong Kong residents desperate to flee before China takes over in 1997, the Federal Republic of Corterra sounded perfect. The tiny Pacific island nation was described as lying between Tahiti and Hawaii, with 80,000 citizens who enjoy democratic government, a British-style legal system and no income tax. Best of all, a newspaper ad here boasted, passports are bargain-priced at only $16,000. Three local businessmen quickly paid the $5,000 application fee. Then they discovered the catch.

When U.N. Security Council members emerged hours late from a closed-door meeting this week, the press corps was hungry for fresh news of Kosovo's refugees. "What took so long?" one reporter demanded of the first diplomat to emerge. "We had a very thorough briefing on Angola," he responded a trifle testily. "This is not a second-class problem compared to Kosovo, you know." But experts and humanitarian workers say the truth is that the 1.

For years, Johnson Community Day School has been the second, third or last chance for students kicked out of other middle and high schools. And many have thrived in a setting with small classes, counseling and close supervision to overcome truancy, drug use or brushes with the law. But now Johnson itself is being booted. Next month, the school must vacate its longtime South Los Angeles campus, pushing students already on the edge of failure into a cross-town commute.

Determined to make Downtown Los Angeles friendlier to business, the Riordan Administration has launched a plan to shuttle homeless people to an urban campground on a fenced lot in the city's core industrial area. The mayor's proposal, which has come under heated attack by some homeless advocates, calls for turning a vacant city block in the eastern part of Downtown into a homeless drop-in center, where up to 800 people could take showers and sleep on a lawn.

The neon "Open" sign that blazed at party time has come down from the second-floor balcony. Newport Beach's most boisterous celebrity resident, the one with the multiple body piercing, multiple tattoos and multiple hair colors, is leaving town. Dennis Rodman -- who bought his pinkish-brown, two-story Seashore Drive home in 1996 for $825,000 -- put it on the market for $3.8 million and sold it for cash to an Arizona developer in two days, said Christopher Parr, his real estate agent.

The California Supreme Court on Thursday shifted the balance in fights between divorced parents with a ruling that eases the way for a parent with custody -- usually the mother -- to move away over her former mate's objections. Anthony Yana, a divorced father from San Luis Obispo County, tried to prevent his ex-wife from moving to Nevada with their 12-year-old son, Cameron. The ex-wife, Nicole Brown, who had full custody of the child, had remarried and her new husband had a job in Las Vegas.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department has scrapped a plan to use a fire station in Malibu as a temporary location to house inmate firefighters displaced by the massive Station fire. Faced with opposition from residents, Los Angeles County Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman informed the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in a letter that his staff would be looking elsewhere. Freeman did not specify why fire officials backed away from the proposal. But Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said that transforming the fire camp, now a workplace for 30 firefighters and staff, into housing for inmates did not make sense near a residential area.

The United States and Colombia are poised to sign an agreement to transfer anti-drug flight operations from Ecuador to at least three Colombian air bases, a move that has drawn criticism here that it will leave the country even more dependent on Washington. Although the deal is not yet nailed down, Colombia's defense, interior and foreign ministers held a public forum in Bogota, the capital, on Wednesday to discuss details of the plan.

Wearing a dirty striped T-shirt, scuffed loafers and dusty cargo pants, Liu Xiuyi arrived in Urumqi last week after a 56-hour train ride that took him from the east coast to the farthest reaches of China's northwest. Like the young Americans who in the 19th century followed Horace Greeley's imperative to "Go west, young man," the 26-year-old Liu left home in search of a job, space and opportunity.

Sipping guava juice under cover from a steamy tropical downpour, Tommy Remengesau Jr. says he's always considered his Pacific island home a refuge from the troubles of the outside world. "While the rest of the planet was in conflict, waging its wars, we remained a little piece of paradise," the former Palauan president said as his pet fruit bat swayed upside down in a nearby cage. "Now, the world's headaches have come home to roost in Palau."

If you won't take them, why should we? That question has ricocheted across Europe as the Obama administration tries to fulfill its promise to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Though Europeans laud that goal, many countries in the region remain skeptical about taking in former inmates, especially as the United States appears increasingly unwilling to allow any within its borders. That unwillingness is apparent as the U.S.

At Chopsticks, a restaurant one block from the beach on the island of Bermuda, waitress Kelly Simmons said diners were talking about one thing on Thursday. Uighurs. And, Simmons said, the customers were not happy. "They're saying, 'The government doesn't help us, but they're helping these strangers.' " Simmons, 20, said she wished Bermuda residents had been given a say in their government's decision to accept four Chinese Muslim detainees from the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

George Raney is a mix of pride and chagrin as he talks about his four grown children here in his cluttered office at the local university. Smart kids, one and all, they did everything a parent could ask: Earned good grades, graduated from college, found careers that make them happy. They also broke their father's heart. The crime? Putting Fresno in the rearview mirror at the earliest possible moment and never looking back.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday that it would accelerate efforts to get victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita out of government-supplied trailers after tests showed that the temporary residences contain unhealthy levels of toxic formaldehyde. Tests in a statistically sampled selection of 519 trailers showed that formaldehyde levels averaged five times higher than levels in new housing, and in some cases much higher than that.

The Obama administration is preparing to admit into the United States as many as seven Chinese Muslims who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in the first release of any of the detainees into this country, according to current and former U.S. officials. Their release is seen as a crucial step to plans, announced by President Obama during his first week in office, to close the prison and relocate the detainees.

Los Angeles County supervisors unanimously approved a plan Tuesday to relocate the few remaining residents of the blighted Ujima Village subsidized housing complex in Willowbrook within 90 days, but they turned down housing officials' appeal for eviction powers. Citing contamination concerns, county housing officials had urged supervisors to give them the authority to evict those reluctant to leave.