OTTAWA

LOS ANGELES — Nine parents who were deported as the Trump administration separated thousands of migrant families landed back into the U.S. late Wednesday to reunite with children they had not seen in a year and a half.

The group arrived at Los Angeles International Airport from Guatemala City in a trip arranged under the order of a federal judge who found the U.S. government had unlawfully prevented them from seeking asylum. An asylum advocate confirmed the nine parents were all aboard the flight.

Some of the children were at the airport to greet them, including David Xol’s 9-year-old son Byron.

David fell to one knee and tearfully embraced Byron for about three minutes, patting the back of his son’s head.

"He was small," David said after rising to his feet. He looked at his attorney — who accompanied him on the flight — raised his hand about chest-high and said, "He grew a lot."

David, Byron and his attorney, Ricardo de Anda, then embraced in a three-way hug and exchanged words in their huddle. Byron was all smiles. Father, son, attorney and family sponsor eagerly left the airport for their hotel.

The reunion was a powerful reminder of the lasting effects of Trump’s separation policy, even as attention and outrage has faded amid impeachment proceedings and tensions with Iran. But it also underscored that hundreds, potentially thousands, of other parents and children are still apart nearly two years after the zero-tolerance policy on unauthorized border crossings took effect.

"They all kind of hit the lottery," said Linda Grimm, an attorney who represents one of the parents returning to the U.S. "There are so many people out there who have been traumatized by the family separation policy whose pain is not going to be redressed."

More than 4,000 children are known to have been separated from their parents before and during the official start of zero tolerance in spring 2018. Under the policy, border agents charged parents en masse with illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, then placed their children in government facilities, including some "tender-age shelters" set up for infants.

The U.S. has acknowledged that agents separated families long before they enforced zero tolerance across the entire southern border, its agencies did not properly record separations, and some detention centres were overcrowded and undersupplied, with families denied food, water or medical care.

In June 2018, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw ordered the government to stop separating families and reunite parents and children.

At least 470 parents were deported without their children. Some of the kids were held in U.S. government facilities and ultimately placed with sponsors. Others were deported to their home countries.

Accounts emerged of many parents being told to sign paperwork they couldn’t read or understand or being denied a chance to request asylum in ways that violated federal law.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security referred a request for comment to the Justice Department, which did not respond.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the original family separation lawsuit before Sabraw, asked the judge to order the return of a small group of parents whose children remained in the U.S. In September, Sabraw required the U.S. to allow 11 parents to come back and denied relief to seven others.

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said Sabraw made clear he would only order the return of people "who were misled or coerced into giving up their asylum rights." That will leave other parents who fled violence, poverty and persecution to decide whether to have their children return to their home countries or remain in the U.S. without them.

"Many are going to make the decision that generations of immigrant parents have made — to leave their child in the U.S. and endure the hardship of separation, but to do it for their child’s own safety," Gelernt said.

Xol said that after he and his then-7-year-old son, Byron, crossed the border, they were taken to a U.S. Border Patrol processing centre in South Texas. Xol was charged with illegal entry on May 19, 2018.

Two days later, Xol said an officer told him to sign a document that would allow him and Byron to be deported together. If he didn’t sign, Byron would be given up for adoption and Xol would be detained for at least two years.

Xol signed the document, only to have Byron taken away and then get deported to Guatemala. Byron was placed in government facilities for 11 months.

The family’s attorney, Ricardo de Anda, persuaded a federal court to force the U.S. to let a Texas family take in Byron. Since May 2019, Byron has lived with Holly and Matthew Sewell and their two children, with regular video calls to his family.

Holly Sewell brought Byron, now 9, to meet his father at the airport. They planned to go back to Texas to pack and prepare for Byron to move in with his father once Xol is settled in California. Before the reunion, Byron kept asking Sewell, his caretaker, when his father would clear immigration authorities.

"They’re almost here, you’re doing great," she said. "Count to 1,000."

"999," Byron responded.

She said she was thrilled Byron could see his dad again but sharply criticized the U.S. government’s treatment of asylum-seekers.

Esvin Fernando Arredondo was expected to be on the plane. The father from Guatemala was separated from one of his daughters, Andrea Arredondo — then 12 years old and now 13, after they turned themselves in on May 16, 2018, at a Texas crossing and sought asylum legally, according to Grimm, his lawyer. He failed an initial screening and agreed to go back to Guatemala.

According to Sabraw’s ruling, the government deported Arredondo even after the judge had ordered families reunited and subsequently prohibited U.S. officials from removing any parent separated from their child. He’s now being given a second chance at asylum under the court order.

Andrea was separated from all family for about a month, living in a shelter as the government struggled to connect children with their parents because they lacked adequate tracking systems. She was finally reunited with her mother, who had turned herself in at the Texas crossing with the other two daughters four days earlier than her husband, on May 12, 2018.

She and her two daughters passed the initial screening interview for asylum, unlike her husband, even though they were fleeing for the same reason. Their son Marco, 17, was shot and killed by suspected gang members in Guatemala City.

Arredondo’s wife, Cleivi Jerez, 41, arrived at LAX less than an hour before the flight landed with their three daughters in tow, ages 17, 13 and 7.

"Lots of nerves, last night I couldn’t sleep," she said in Spanish in an interview after the flight landed.

Jerez said she planned to stay up late catching up with her husband. She planned to rest at their Los Angeles home tomorrow as well, catching up on their 17 months apart before he has to report to an ICE office Friday in San Diego. Alison Arredondo, 7, said she missed going to the park with her father and she wanted to go to one with him in LA.

While the U.S. has stopped the large-scale separations, it has implemented policies to prevent many asylum-seekers from entering the country. Under its "Remain in Mexico" policy, more than 50,000 people have been told to wait there for weeks or months for U.S. court dates. The Trump administration also is ramping up deportations of Central Americans to other countries in the region to seek asylum there.

"People want to make this a heartwarming story, but it’s not. It’s devastating," Sewell said. "There is just no good reason why we had to do this to this child and this family. And he symbolizes thousands of others who have been put in this exact same position."

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Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat contributed to this report. Merchant reported from Houston.

Nomaan Merchant, The Associated Press

BOSTON — U.N. human rights experts are asking Washington to investigate a suspected Saudi hack that may have siphoned data from the personal smartphone of Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post. But the forensic evidence they cite comes from an incomplete study of Bezos’s phone, raising multiple questions.

Here’s a quick guide to what’s known, and what remains unknown, about their findings.

WHAT HAPPENED TO BEZOS’ PHONE?

According to a cybersecurity firm run by a former Obama administration official, e vidence on the phone suggests it was infected by spyware in May 2018 via a WhatsApp message from the account of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. That message included a video file that the firm’s investigators say likely contained malware.

Bezos’ personal security adviser had been advised in February 2019 to have the phone examined by an intelligence official who has not been named. Bezos went public with the suspected hack shortly thereafter, saying the National Enquirer tabloid had threatened to publish his private messages and photos.

ARE THE FORENSIC FINDINGS CONCLUSIVE?

Not at all. Outside security researchers highlighted several issues with the forensics report by FTI Consulting, run by former Obama administration National Security Council cybersecurity official Anthony Ferrante.

For instance, the FTI report, dated November and obtained Wednesday by the Vice News site Motherboard, said researchers didn’t find any malware on the phone, nor any evidence that Bezos’ phone had surreptitiously communicated with known spyware command servers.

Further, an examination of the crucial root file system — where top-flight hackers often hide their malware — was still pending when the report was written. iPhone security expert Will Strafach, CEO of Guardian Firewall, said that if the FTI investigators didn’t look at the root file system, they didn’t do a thorough forensic exam.

"I think the U.N. intentions are good but the details really matter here and the public reporting falls short of any real firm smoking gun," said Strafach.

Other security experts questioned the FTI team’s forensic chops, wondering on Twitter and in blog posts why it was unable to decrypt the software that would have delivered the malware payload along with the video file.

Alex Stamos of Stanford University tweeted: "The funny thing is that it looks like FTI potentially has the murder weapon sitting right there, they just haven’t figured out how to test it."

Ferrante of FTI did not respond to emails and text messages seeking comment.

COULD HACKERS HAVE ERASED ALL EVIDENCE OF INTRUSION?

Absolutely, said Strafach. Elite hackers plant malware that erases itself after surreptitiously sending sensitive data to command servers.

"It scoops up everything they want and removes itself so there’s no trace, no evidence," he said. "Anyone who knows what they are doing are going to cover up their tracks."

Sophisticated mobile spyware — such as a package called Pegasus, made by the Israeli hacker-for-hire company NSO Group — is designed to bypass detection and mask its activity. Saudi Arabia i s reported to have used Pegasus against dissidents and human rights activists within weeks of the suspected Bezos hack.

On Wednesday, NSO Group "unequivocally" denied that its technology was used in the Bezos hack.

WHY IS THE UNITED NATIONS INVOLVED?

One of the two U.N. officials seeking answers in the case, Agnes Callamard. focuses on extrajudicial killings and has already investigated the Saudi government’s role in the October 2018 murder in Turkey of Saudi critic and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

The other, David Kaye, is the U.N. point person on free expression. He focuses on the growing and lawless use of malicious spyware to monitor and intimidate human-rights defenders and journalists.

Both are independent experts in the U.N.’s human rights arm, not employees of the international organization.

ARE OTHER PUBLIC FIGURES AT RISK?

It’s difficult to say at the moment. Prince Mohammed has attended gatherings with numerous U.S. entertainers, technology executives and sports-team owners. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, said Jared Kushner, a White House aide and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, has communicated with the crown prince via WhatsApp.

WHY ISN’T THE U.S. GOVERNMENT MORE INVOLVED?

A top U.S. Justice Department official, Adam S. Hickey, would not say whether federal investigators were looking into the allegations. Trump has been reluctant to condemn the Saudi prince over the Khashoggi killing and often expresses satisfaction with his government’s purchases of U.S. weapons.

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Associated Press writer Jonathan Lemire contributed from New York.

Frank Bajak, The Associated Press

VANCOUVER — Many years ago when Ryan McNaught was an IT professional he got an email from his manager who wanted to have a meeting about the number of meetings they were having.

"I knew right then that I wanted to do something different," McNaught said in an interview Wednesday.

Around that time McNaught met people who worked for Lego and began to collaborate on a few projects. The company had recently started its certified professional program and they suggested he put together a business proposal and apply to it.

A little over a decade ago he became a Lego certified professional and is one of only 14 in the world.

Over the past few days, McNaught and a team of Lego builders moved into the Telus World of Science in Vancouver where they have made 20 models of skyscrapers from Canada, the United States, Australia, Asia and the United Arab Emirates. The structures include the Wilshire Grand Center in Los Angeles, Chicago’s Willis Tower, the Shanghai Tower and the Burj Khalifa from Dubai.

Co-curator Jesse Brydle said the featured buildings were chosen because the exhibition is showcasing all aspects of architecture and city planning.

The group used more than 500,000 Lego bricks and took over 2,400 hours to build the structures featured in the Towers of Tomorrow exhibition, which begins Friday.

All the buildings are on a scale of 1:200, McNaught said.

"This allows you to compare from buildings around the world," he added. So a person can sit the Empire State Building next to the CN Tower and compare the two for size and shape, he said.

Of the buildings featured at the exhibition, McNaught said the Shanghai Tower was the hardest to build.

"It’s shaped like a guitar pick or a rounded triangle, which twists as it goes up so it was really difficult to build out of Lego bricks."

It is those limitations with Lego that make it appeal to McNaught’s "nerdy tech brain," he said.

His favourite subjects in school were math and computer science, he said, and building a Lego model is "like being a real architect just with Lego bricks."

McNaught and his team do research, look at photos, video and even satellite images of the buildings they are going to make.

"Then we do a paper sketch — pen and paper — work out the calculations … a lot of math is involved. Then we start building from there."

His first Lego set was a blue boat given to him when he was three years old by his grandma Hazel.

McNaught said the one thing that has remained constant from the time he started playing with Lego are the bricks, which haven’t changed at all. His favourite brick is the two by four — two studs wide by four studs long, he said.

"It’s a very plain brick but we use a lot of them."

McNaught said he’s "very fortunate" to be doing what he does because it’s an "aspirational career."

"I was in senior IT management. I would put on a suit and go to work, very different day compared to now," he said.

"I haven’t worn a tie for years."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 23, 2020.

Hina Alam, The Canadian Press

BERLIN — No joke: Switzerland has minted a gold coin so small you’d need to look very closely to see Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue at you.

State-owned Swissmint said Thursday that the 2.96-millimeter (0.12-inches) gold coin is the smallest in the world.

It weighs 0.063 grams (1/500th of an ounce) and has a nominal value of 1/4 Swiss francs ($0.26).

Swissmint said the coin, of which just 999 have been made, will be sold for 199 francs with a special magnifying glass so owners can see the famous physicist on its face.

The Associated Press

JAKARTA, Indonesia — A boat carrying 20 Indonesian migrant workers sank two days ago on its way to Malaysia, and rescuers have found 10 survivors and were searching Thursday for 10 still missing.

The boat began leaking and sank about an hour after leaving Rupat island in the Bengkalis regency late Tuesday, Pekanbaru rescue spokesperson Kukuh Widodo said.

The 10 survivors, mostly from North Sumatra, were rescued with life jackets, Kukuh said.

Rescuers including the Indonesia navy and local water police were using an inflatable boat to search the area where the boat sank.

Bengkalis Local Police Chief Sigit Adiwuryanto said the survivors told the police the trip was illegal and the workers were undocumented.

Boats and ferries are popular means of transportation in the archipelago nation with more than 17,000 islands. Accidents caused by overcrowding and poor safety standards are common.

In 2016, an overcrowded boat carrying 101 Indonesian migrant workers and their families home from Malaysia capsized in stormy weather off Batam island, near Singapore, killing at least 60 people.

One of the worst ferry sinking occurred off Sulawesi island in 2009, killing more than 330 people.

Edna Tarigan, The Associated Press

BERLIN — Germany’s top security official has announced a ban on the neo-Nazi group Combat 18 Deutschland.

A spokesman for Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said police were conducting raids early Thursday in six German states.

The spokesman, Steve Alter, said police operations were being carried out in Brandenburg, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Thuringia.

The group Combat 18 was founded in Britain in the early 1990s as a militant wing of the British National Party. It has since spawned chapters in several European countries. The number 18 stands for the first and eighth letters of the alphabet, AH, which are the initials of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The Associated Press

BANGKOK — An elementary school headmaster said Thursday he planned a gold shop robbery in Thailand due to personal and financial problems and apologized to the families of the three people who were killed.

A 2-year-old boy was among the victims of the shooting earlier this month that caused public outrage and increased pressure for a swift arrest.

Police arrested Prasitthichai Khaokaew, 38, early Wednesday and said he confessed to his crimes during interrogation.

During a news conference held at the national police headquarters in Bangkok, Prasitthichai was allowed to talk to reporters through a phone call from where he is being detained.

"I am so sorry, and I apologize to the victims and their families, especially to little brother Triton," Prasitthichai told reporters, addressing the 2-year-old victim by his first name. He denied that he deliberately shot the toddler and other victims, and said he opened fired to intimidate shoppers and security guards to let him flee easily.

Prasitthichai said he planned the robbery a few days before he executed it and that personal and financial problems were his motives.

Police General Suwat Chaengyodsuk, the chief investigator, said the suspect has been charged with three counts of murder, robbery and illegal gun possession. Police asked the Bangkok criminal court to allow them to detain Prasitthichai for further investigation.

Security footage of the Jan. 9 robbery in Lopburi province, about 145 kilometres (90 miles) north of Bangkok, showed a man dressed in full-face balaclava and camouflage trousers approached the store in a mall, carrying a pistol with a long silencer.

He opened fire, spraying shots at staff and passers-by. The toddler was hit as he walked by with his mother. A security guard and a shop assistant were also killed, and four people were wounded. The robber grabbed a number of gold necklaces before fleeing.

Busaba Sivasomboon, The Associated Press

NEW YORK — The first night of arguments in favour of President Donald Trump’s impeachment before the U.S. Senate was judged not ready for prime time by many of the nation’s television executives.

ABC, CBS and NBC all stuck with regularly scheduled programs like "Chicago Med," "Criminal Minds" and "Modern Family" Wednesday evening instead of showing the House managers’ evening session at the impeachment trial. That lasted about two hours, 15 minutes.

CNN and MSNBC carried the trial in full. Fox News Channel, after showing Rep. Adam Schiff speak for about a half hour, interrupted for a story about a child support case involving former Vice-President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, and never returned.

Even two PBS stations in the New York area showed science programming and "Antiques Roadshow" instead of the trial Wednesday evening. PBS said it gave its local stations the option to show the trial or not.

The calls Wednesday night are significant because if the top networks decided not to pre-empt programming on the first full night the case against Trump was laid out, chances are they won’t reverse course later unless the unexpected happens.

Daytime was an intriguing contrast, since the top three broadcasters and cable news outlets all carried Schiff’s initial stand at the podium, which lasted more than two hours.

It was rare for anyone in today’s media world to command full television attention to that extent. The Senate’s rules for the trial, which required using a single camera on the speaker and didn’t allow reaction shots of senators, only served to accentuate Schiff’s message.

Meanwhile, Trump was setting a record for sending out the most tweets in a single day since he’s been president.

For the television networks, however, prime time is a different animal altogether, with more viewers and advertising revenue available.

After pulling away from House managers Wednesday evening, Fox News personalities spent much of their time ridiculing the proceedings. Fox mostly kept a postage stamp-size picture of the speaker soundlessly mouthing words in a corner of the screen, with an invitation for viewers to go online if they wanted to hear the arguments.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson ran clips of TV commentators on other network personalities who praised Schiff’s afternoon speech, calling the comments "pornographic." He said Trump wasn’t the only victim of the impeachment trial — suggesting viewers were, too. He brought on a former Republican congressman to talk about alleged crimes in the Obama administration and Texas Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe to assess the trial.

"Today was really boring and the president’s defence team is very happy," Ratcliffe said.

Carlson also interviewed Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, with the host saying Hawley had "stepped out of the trial" to talk on television and criticize House managers.

Similarly, Fox’s Sean Hannity labeled the impeachment trial the "Schumer Schiff Sham Show" and attacked Schiff for his afternoon speech.

"He is a lunatic," Hannity said. "If you watched him talk he was totally unhinged. He looked like a lunatic who has lost his mind."

Wrapping up his evening argument a half-hour later, Schiff also used the word "sham," but in a much different context, as a description for Trump’s attempts to get the Ukraine to investigate the activities of Hunter Biden.

It wasn’t heard on Fox, however. At the time Hannity was interviewing lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a member of Trump’s impeachment defence team.

David Bauder, The Associated Press

SAO PAULO — A few days before Christmas, renowned pianist João Carlos Martins summoned his friends to a Sao Paulo bar so he could show off the best gift he’d received in decades: a new pair of bionic gloves that are letting the 79-year-old play with both hands in more than two decades.

Considered one of the great interpreters of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, the Brazilian classical pianist and conductor had retired last March after 24 surgeries trying to stop pains from a degenerative disease and a series of accidents. His limitations had forced him to work mostly as a conductor since the early 2000s.

But since the closing days of 2019, friends have been returning to Martins’ downtown penthouse to hear him bring Frédéric Chopin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his favourite Bach back to life at his Petrof piano.

Before the gloves, which were especially developed for him, the pianist could only play songs slowly with his thumbs and, sometimes, his index fingers.

"After I lost my tools, my hands, and couldn’t play the piano, it was if there was a corpse inside my chest," Martins told The Associated Press.

Martins’ health problems date back to 1965. He famously rebounded after every setback — nerve damage in his arm inflicted during a soccer match in New York, a mugger hitting him over the head with a metal pipe while he toured in Bulgaria, and more. But even friends expected the latest surgery, on his left hand, to mark the end of his days on the piano bench.

That might have been his fate, were it not for a designer who believed the pianist’s retirement had come too early. Ubiratã Bizarro Costa created neoprene-covered bionic gloves that bump Martins’ fingers upward after they depress the keys, and which are held together by a carbon fiber board.

"I did the first models based on images of his hands, but those were far from ideal," Costa said. "I approached the maestro at the end of a concert in my city of Sumaré, in the Sao Paulo countryside. He quickly noticed they wouldn’t work, but then he invited me to his house to develop the project."

Costa and Martins spent the subsequent months testing several prototypes. The perfect match came in December, and cost only about 500 Brazilians reals ($125) to build. Now Martins never takes off his new gloves, even when going to bed.

"I might not recover the speed of the past. I don’t know what result I will get. I’m starting over as though I were an 8-year-old learning," he said, joined by his poodle Sebastian. His dog’s name, of course, is a tribute to Bach.

The pianist’s return was first reported by the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. Reporter Ricardo Kotscho said Martins hurried to the bar near his home before Christmas "like a boy who got a new toy."

Martins said he has received more than 100 gadgets in the last 50 years as miraculous solutions to his hand problems. None worked well or long enough.

"But these gloves do. I can even tune them accordingly," he said, showing how he can rearrange the glove’s internal pads to play at a faster or slower tempo. "That doesn’t mean it’s all sorted. The muscle atrophy plays a role. Sometimes I try to play a speedy one and get depressed because it just doesn’t happen yet."

The "extender gloves," as their inventor calls them, gave Martins a goal: Play the piano again at New York’s Carnegie Hall in October, when he is scheduled to conduct a concert celebrating the 60th anniversary of his first appearance there.

Martins, meantime, is practicing early in the morning and late at night, to the delight of his neighbours, until he can interpret an entire Bach concert perfectly.

"It could take one, two years. I will keep pushing until that happens," he said. "I won’t give up."

Mauricio Savarese, The Associated Press

TOKYO — Shelters made of cardboard start popping up in the basement of Tokyo’s Shinjuku train station right before the shutters come down at 11 p.m., in corridors where "salarymen" rushing home and couples on late-night dates have just passed by.

Dozens of homeless people sleeping rough in such spots worry that with Japan’s image at stake authorities will force them to move ahead of the Olympics. Already, security officials have warned them they will likely have to find less visible locations by the end of March.

The former labourers, clerical workers and others sleeping in cardboard boxes are a not-quite-invisible glimpse of a more pervasive but largely hidden underclass of poor in Japan, a wealthy nation seen as orderly and middle class.

Efforts to clean up what some see as urban blight have preceded every recent Olympics, including those in Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro.

Tokyo city officials deny they are moving to force the homeless out specially for the Olympics. They say trying to get them into shelters is part of an overall welfare effort to get them off the streets and find them jobs and housing.

"There is nothing more than the programs we already have in place to help the homeless," said Emi Yaginuma, a Tokyo city official in charge of such programs.

"We keep trying by making the rounds and talking to them, but all we can do is to try to persuade them."

In theory, overnight sleeping at train stations is trespassing. In practice, the homeless have long slept in Shinjuku station and other spots. JR East, a major train company servicing Tokyo, doesn’t have regulations on the homeless and employees handle situations as they come up, such as passenger complaints.

Just as the homeless arrive for the night, a public speaker overhead is warning that sleeping in the station isn’t allowed.

As preparations for the Olympics began years ago, homeless people camping in a park in Tokyo’s Shibuya were forced out to make way for development and a soup kitchen program there was moved to another, less visible park nearby. Advocates for the homeless fear that was just the start.

Homeless people were evicted in 2016 from a park near where the New National Stadium was built, the main arena for the Olympics.

Like the U.S., Japan has a relatively high poverty rate for a wealthy nation. It also is less generous with social welfare than countries in Europe, and lacks the sorts of private charities prevalent in the U.S.

Nearly 16% of Japanese fall below the poverty rate, with annual income below the cutoff of 1.2 million yen ($11,000), according to 2017 Japanese government data. The poverty rate for single-adult households with children is way higher, at 51%.

The unraveling of extended family support networks and job insecurity have left many in Japan vulnerable to setbacks that can lead to homelessness. Japan’s culture of conformity leaves many, including families, ashamed to seek help.

Most of the homeless sleeping underground in Shinjuku, a glitzy shopping area fringed by red-light districts, high-rise offices and parks, are older men.

Shigeyoshi Tozawa has a lacquer begging bowl with a few coins, three tiny, solar-powered toy figures with bobbing heads bought at a 100-yen ($1) store, and various bags filled with blankets, clothes and other items, including his poems.

"Last night/ dream of a future trip/ it is dark," goes one poem. Passersby sometimes give him money for the poems, he says.

"This is my community. We all help each other," Tozawa said. "There are no dirty homeless here. We are all ‘trendy.’"

In what’s clearly a routine, he and the others quietly prepare for the night, picking their favourite spots, neatly folding blankets. Some change into sleepwear and wipe their feet clean with wet towels, daintily placing their shoes beside their lopsided cardboard shelters.

Tozawa and the others are relatively well-dressed, in handout down jackets, baseball caps and camouflage sweatpants. Some have cellphones and other gadgets. Many have some money in the bank. They get by making the rounds of downtown soup kitchens run by church and volunteer charities, and other spots where they can get free rice balls or sandwiches.

Many of those sleeping rough are "working poor," said Daisaku Seto, who works for a non-profit for refugees and a consumers’ food co-operative called Palsystem. He says some suffer psychological trauma and need training to get better-paying jobs. Once they drop into poverty, they rarely find their way back out.

"We need to come up with ways to help that empower them," said Seto, who is a leader in a one of the leaders of a grassroots group called the Anti-Poverty Network.

Yukio Takazawa, executive director of a support group for the poor in Yokohama’s Kotobukicho, an area of flophouses where homeless people also tend to congregate, worries the worst is to come.

The construction boom from the Olympics will be winding down, reducing chances for odd jobs for day labourers. The younger poor, who now spend nights in Internet cafes, likely will eventually end up on the streets, said Takazawa, who has been working with the poor for 30 years.

Finding affordable housing in Tokyo is tough. Rents are high and landlords tend to be finicky. Just getting a rental contract can require six months of rent or more up front.

Those unable or unwilling to get apartments camp along river banks, in parks and train stations. Welfare offices try to get people to move into shelters but many, like former construction worker Masanori Ito, resist. "They have rules," he said, munching on sandwiches he got from a volunteer.

If he has to move, Ito said he plans to find some other warm outdoor spot.

"I don’t know where we will all move next," he said.

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Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter atyurikageyama

Yuri Kageyama, The Associated Press