Squatters

Los Angeles police have discovered that the shuttered Channel 13 studios on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood had become a haven for squatters. Officers found squalid conditions inside the landmark building, including discarded hypodermic needles, piles of trash, makeshift bedding in office cubicles and human filth on the floors and walls. "I was disgusted.

I'M dialing my family home in west Baghdad. The phone rings, but no one picks up. I know that someone is living in our house. But it's not my family. Last summer, my mother went to Jordan to escape the violence in Iraq. In September, my father followed. I stayed behind. Although I am educated as an architect, I work as an interpreter for The Times.

Protesters from across northern Europe flocked to the Danish capital Saturday to join riots sparked Thursday by the eviction of squatters from an abandoned building that had been a center for young leftists and punk rockers. More than 500 people, scores of them foreigners, have been arrested in the riots. Authorities said more than 200 were arrested early Saturday after overnight clashes in which demonstrators pelted police with cobblestones and set fire to cars.

Hundreds of Israeli police in riot gear dragged squatters from the ruins of a Jewish settlement, ending a three-day showdown between the government and people trying to resettle the spot. The confrontation took place in the former Homesh settlement, dismantled in the summer of 2005 as part of Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip and parts of the northern West Bank. About 2,500 protesters marched to Homesh on Monday, pledging to rebuild it. About 500 were still there when riot police moved in.

Standing amid discarded bottles, plastic chairs and thick brush, Harry Hallowes defies the image of a posh Hampstead resident. While his neighbors lounge in multimillion-dollar estates, he sleeps on a cot, cooks food over an open fire and showers in hot water once a week, miles away from the shack he calls home. But the land on which Hallowes has long resided is a prized plot on the edge of Hampstead Heath in upscale North London.

For more than 20 years, a retired judge and his lawyer wife trespassed on a vacant lot next door to their home. They planted a garden there and stacked their firewood. They say they held parties there and walked the land so often they wore a path in the grass. Last year, Richard McLean and Edith Stevens claimed the land as their own under Colorado's adverse possession law, once known as squatters' rights.

To reach the secret place they call the Cave, its denizens must climb a ladder toward a small, hard-to-notice opening in the tall concrete slab that helps hold up the 10 Freeway. They must squeeze beneath a rusty metal grating, balance on a ledge and descend a second ladder into thick, dead air and darkness. This is home, a vast, vault-like netherworld, strewn with garbage and syringes. Richard Dafoe likes it here, even with 3-foot cobwebs and the constant thrum of freeway traffic overhead.

After a second deadly fire in a week at Paris apartment houses for immigrants, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy ordered all squatter buildings shut "because these are human beings housed in unacceptable conditions." Police said they would begin evacuating the city's "most dangerous" buildings in coming days. The latest fire Monday killed seven African immigrants, including four children, firefighters said.

Only Kenny Bethel may know with certainty when he first set foot on the grounds of Palmetto Golf Course. It may have been 40 years ago. Or, perhaps, a decade ago, after a hurricane pounded many residential neighborhoods south of Miami to splinters. What is undisputed is that for years, the greens and fairways of Bermuda grass have been home to the Miami native.

In some ways, Nasser Lafta is a lucky man. He lives rent-free in a palatial house with a four-car garage and a swimming pool. But his good fortune has its limits: The windows of his home have no glass, the pool is empty, chickens wander inside to scratch for food, and he shares the home with 23 relatives. Lafta, 48, a former taxi driver, is one of several thousand squatters in Baghdad who have moved into properties owned either by the Iraqi government or the country's former elite.