US whites to be minority sooner

The projection could be offset by factors such as immigration

(BBC NEWS) – White people are projected to no longer be in the majority in the United States by the year 2042 – eight years sooner than previous projections.

The US Census Bureau’s latest figures – based on birth, death and immigration rates – suggest that minorities will soon make up 55% of the population.

Hispanics who now make up about 15% will, it says, account for 30% by 2050.

It is projected that black people will make up 15%, a small increase, while Asians will grow from 4% to 9%.

White non-Hispanics currently make up about two-thirds of the population, but only 55% of those are aged under five.

‘Aging baby boomers’

It has long been said that the US is a nation of immigrants but in the past the influx has mainly come from white Europeans, the BBC’s Jonathan Beale reports from Washington.

By the middle of this century, that group will be in the minority for the first time, he notes.

It is likely that the demographic changes will be experienced right across the country – and no longer confined to urban areas as in the past.

Overall, the US population is expected to rise from 305 million people to 439 million by the year 2050.

The white population will also be ageing. The number of people over 85 years old will triple in the next 40 years.

“The white population is older and very much centred around the aging baby boomers who are well past their high fertility years,” William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution think tank, told the Associated Press.

“The future of America is epitomised by the young people today. They are basically the melting pot we are going to see in the future.”

The Census Bureau points out that its projections are subject to big revisions, depending on immigration policy, cultural changes and natural or manmade disasters.

World trade talks end in collapse

Marathon talks in Geneva aimed at liberalising global trade have collapsed, the head of the World Trade Organisation has said.

Pascal Lamy confirmed the failure, which officials have blamed on China, India and the US failing to agree on import rules.

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said the result was “heartbreaking”.

The talks were launched in 2001 in Doha and were seen as providing a cornerstone for future global trade.

The main stumbling block was farm import rules, which allow countries to protect poor farmers by imposing a tariff on certain goods in the event of a drop in prices or a surge in imports.

India, China and the US could not agree on the tariff threshold for such an event.

Washington said that the “safeguard clause” protecting developing nations from unrestricted imports had been set too low.

Possible solution?

The negotiations floundered as trade officials gathered for a ninth day.

“There’s no use beating around the bush, this meeting has collapsed,” Mr Lamy said.

“Members have simply not been able to bridge their differences.”

He added that time was needed to determine “if and how” WTO members could end the stalemate.

This is a better outcome for the world’s poorest people than the bad deal on the table World Development Movement

The Doha development round of trade talks initially started in 2001 with the aim of remedying inequality so that the developing world could benefit more from freer trade.

However, the talks have repeatedly collapsed as developed countries failed to agree with developing nations on terms of access to each others’ markets.

The US and the European Union want greater access to provide services to fast-growing emerging countries, including China and India.

Meanwhile, developing countries want greater access for their agricultural products in Europe and the US.

Recent complications

Analysts have said that the collapse of the Doha talks could symbolise an end to multilateral trade agreements.

America’s top trade negotiator Susan Schwab on the talks

Instead, nations may pursue dual agreements with partner nations, preferring to focus on their own requirements rather than a more common negotiating goal.

The talks in Geneva were complicated by recent increases in the price of food and fuel.

Higher prices have prompted protests in both developed and developing nations, making it harder for negotiators to reach a compromise on opening up their markets to greater competition, analysts said.

Mr Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, blamed the collapse on a “collective failure” but warned that the “consequences would not be equal”, predicting that it would be countries that most needed help that would be hit hardest.

“They [the consequences] will fall disproportionately on those who are most vulnerable in the global economy, those who needed the chances, the opportunities most from a successful trade round.” he said.

‘Protecting livelihoods’

Trade officials had struck an optimistic tone on Friday, but this evaporated over the weekend amid acrimonious exchanges with the US accusing India and China of blocking progress.

The US said they were being overly protective towards their own farmers and are failing to do enough to open their markets, with US trade representative Susan Schwab calling the stance “blatant protectionism”.

“In the face of the global food price crisis, it is ironic that the debate came down to how much and how fast could nations raise their barriers to imports of food,” she said.

But India’s trade minister, Kamal Nath, who had been criticised by a number of countries for his intransigence said the US demands were unreasonable.

“It’s unfortunate in a development round we couldn’t run the last mile because of an issue concerning livelihood security,” Mr Nath said.

Army criticizes itself in Iraq invasion report

Iraqis watch as a statue of Saddam Hussein is toppled in Baghdad in 2003.

(CNN) — The U.S. Army’s official history of the Iraq war shows military chiefs made mistake after mistake in the early months of the conflict.

Failures to recognize the chaos engulfing the country and to send in enough troops to restore order after the 2003 invasion have long been highlighted by critics, but a new report shows the Army assessing itself.

Frank opinions from officers serving in the 18 months from the start of war to Iraqi elections in January 2005 reveal there were concerns at the time, not just about assumptions made by planners but at decisions taken once U.S.-led coalition forces had control of Iraq.

“I flipped,” Gen. Jack Keane, then the Army’s deputy chief of staff, told the historians of his reaction to a June 2003 decision to transfer control of all coalition troops away from the land forces command that had been preparing for the mission.

He recounted a conversation with Gen. John Abizaid, who succeeded the invasion’s architect, Gen. Tommy Franks. “I said, ‘Jesus Christ, John, this is a recipe for disaster. We invested in that headquarters. We have the experience and judgment in that headquarters.”

Keane said it took the U.S. command between six and eight months to get the new headquarters up and running. During that time, troops in the field saw the mood of ordinary Iraqis turn against Americans and watched the insurgency take root.

“By the time we got a plan together to resource everything, the insurgents had closed that window of opportunity quickly,” Col. David Perkins, a brigade commander in the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, told the historians. “What we started doing in September was probably a good idea to have done in April 2003.”

Franks, who would soon retire and be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, said he ordered the transition to force the Pentagon to get leaders into the field to work with civilian occupation officials.

“That is a task that John Abizaid and I very simply laid on Washington and said, ‘Figure it out. Do it fast. Get me a joint headquarters in here. We have a lot of work to do and [civilian administrator of Iraq] Jerry Bremer has a lot of responsibility and he needs help,’ ” he recalled.

The 720-page report compiled by the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, details the effects of having too few coalition troops on the ground when the reality after the fall of Baghdad was “severely out of line” with the anticipated conditions.

Previous experience “should have indicated that many more troops would be needed for the post-Saddam era in Iraq,” historians wrote in the report, “On Point II: Transition to a New Campaign.”

“The coalition’s inability to prevent looting, to secure Iraq’s borders and to guard the vast number of munitions dumps in the early months after Saddam’s overthrow are indicative of the shortage,” the study found.

About 150,000 U.S. and allied troops were in Iraq after the invasion, at a time when war planners were assuming that Iraq’s government would remain functional after Hussein’s ouster and that there would be no mass insurgency.

“These factors were in line with prewar planning for a quick turnover of power to Iraqis and a quick withdrawal of U.S. forces, leaving Iraqis to determine their own political future — options that proved impossible to execute,” the historians wrote in the report released over the weekend.

“We had the wrong assumptions, and therefore, we had the wrong plan to put into play,” Gen. William Wallace, who commanded the Army’s V Corps during the invasion, told the authors.

But some of the most critical decisions were made between May and August 2003, which some participants called a “window of opportunity that could have been exploited to produce the conditions for the quick creation of a new Iraq.”

Among those decisions were the frequently criticized dissolution of the Iraqi army and the order that barred former members of Hussein‘s Baath Party from public life as well as the change in plan over the joint headquarters.

US welcomes N Korea nuclear move

US delegates carried boxes detailing Pyongyang’s plutonium programme

The US has described the handing over of documents by North Korea detailing the country’s nuclear programme as an “important first step”.

A US envoy crossed into South Korea on Saturday with documents about North Korea’s nuclear activities, as part of efforts to disarm the state.

The State Department said the 18,000 pages covered some three reprocessing campaigns by the North Koreans.

The pages will contribute towards a declaration on past nuclear activities.

“The United States and the other parties continue to press [North Korea] to fulfil its declaration commitment,” said the State Department statement.

Yongbyon reactor

Sung Kim, director of the State Department’s Korea office, and three other delegates returned to South Korea by land after a three-day visit to North Korea.

North Korea closed down the Yongbyon reactor last year

The delegation carried with them seven cardboard boxes with details of North Korea’s plutonium programme, which are due to be taken to Washington for examination.

The documents log activities at North Korea’s plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, which is thought to have produced the material for a nuclear test in 2006.

The communist state shut down the reactor last year, but failed to meet a deadline to give a full account of its nuclear activities.

Pyongyang had agreed in February 2007 to give up its nuclear weapons programme in return for large-scale aid and the lifting of sanctions.

The deal was agreed following six-party talks between China, the US, Japan, Russia and North and South Korea.

Sceptics

The BBC’s John Sudworth reports from South Korea that the Yongbyon documents will provide an important glimpse into North Korea’s bomb-making past, though some will question just how much new information they will contain.

Doubts over North Korea’s other nuclear activities remain, in particular its alleged secret uranium enrichment programme and the transfer of nuclear technology to Syria, he says.

Those are the issues that have been holding up progress on last year’s agreement.

North Korea has reportedly agreed to a compromise solution under which it will merely acknowledge US concerns.

Guide: Indiana primary could be ‘tiebreaker’

Sen. Hillary Clinton shares a Dairy Queen blizzard with Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana Sunday.

(CNN) — Sen. Barack Obama has called Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Indiana a potential “tiebreaker” that could end his protracted fight with Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Polls will open at 6 a.m. ET in the eastern portion of the state and 7 a.m. ET in the western half, which is in the Central Time Zone. The last polls in the state will close at 7 p.m. ET.

Seventy-two delegates will be at stake.

The race in Indiana is tight. The CNN poll of polls for the Indiana race on Monday has Clinton leading Obama 48 percent to 44 percent with 8 percent unsure. The CNN poll of polls conducted last week had both candidates at 47 percent.

The latest CNN poll of polls is an average of three surveys conducted April 30 to May 4 by Suffolk University, Zogby and American Research Group. A sampling error for the poll of polls can not be calculated.

The primary will be a key test of the two Democratic presidential candidates’ support among blue collar voters.

Obama’s loss to Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary two weeks ago raised questions about his ability to draw the support of working-class voters. Clinton was able to secure a 10-point win in Pennsylvania by capturing the support of white, blue-collar workers.

Since the Pennsylvania primary, Obama has been dogged by charges of elitism and by the controversy surrounding his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Both factors could undermine Obama’s support from the white, blue-collar voters that could determine the Indiana contest.

In a fight that could also influence working-class voters, Obama and Clinton have sparred over Clinton’s proposal to suspend the federal gas tax during the summer.

Clinton says she backs the tax holiday despite the “elite opinion” of economists who have widely called the tax holiday an ineffective method to lower record gas prices.

“I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” Clinton told George Stephanopolous on ABC’s ‘This Week’ on Sunday after he asked her to name a single economist supporting her plan. “If we actually did it right, if we had a president who used all the tools of the presidency, we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively.”

Obama has rejected the idea of a gas tax holiday, calling it a “classic Washington gimmick” that would save drivers only 30 cents a day, or about $30 by the end of the summer.

He also said Clinton’s embrace of the idea — which is also backed by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain — amounted to “pandering.”

“I understand how badly people are hurting. If we’re serious about helping them, let’s provide them some relief, but let’s not pretend that we’re doing something by suggesting a gas tax holiday that will not be paid for and frankly, it is very unlikely that you’d see President George Bush sign,” Obama told CNN Monday.

Despite the state’s working class demographics and the fact that Clinton won neighboring Ohio, the senator from Illinois has some factors favoring him in Indiana.

The northwest corner of the state is within the media market for Chicago, Obama’s hometown.

And the primary is open, meaning that independents are allowed to vote in the Democratic primary. Independents have tended to support Obama in previous primaries.

Obama and Clinton gird for new super Tuesday

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton faced a new day of destiny Tuesday with Democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, as the climax approached in their gripping White House race.

Opinion polls pointed to another messy draw on the biggest single day of voting left in the epic battle for the Democratic nomination, with Obama tipped to win in North Carolina and Clinton ahead in Indiana.

The rivals raced through a frenetic dawn-to-midnight campaign swing in the two states Monday but both signaled the contest would drag on through the bitter end of the primary calendar, on June 3 in Montana and South Dakota.

“We hope to do as well as we can, we started out pretty far behind,” Clinton told reporters on a late-night flight across Indiana.

“I try to do as best as I can, I don’t make predictions,” she said, just ahead of her last rally in the state.

The former first lady also took another swing at OPEC, after oil prices busted the symbolic 120 dollars-a-barrel barrier.

“They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world,” Clinton said, sparking cheers in a fire station in Indiana’s Chicago suburbs.

Clinton’s camp admits she cannot overtake the Illinois senator in the count of pledged delegates who will formally anoint the nominee at the Democratic convention in August.

So she is pinning her hopes on persuading nearly 800 superdelegates, who look set to have the deciding vote, that he cannot beat Republican presidential candidate John McCain in November.

But Obama dismissed Clinton’s claims he may be a general election liability, after a punishing month in April which sucked some of the euphoria out of his candidacy.

“Once you’re the front-runner, then it is, I think, the obligation of the candidates who are behind to try to whack you over the head, and the press is happy to oblige,” Obama said.

“So there was a kitchen-sink strategy employed that was throwing a whole bunch of stuff at me.

“But if you think about it … the fact that we’re still standing here and still moving forward towards the nomination, I think, indicates the degree to which the core message of this campaign is the right one.”

Clinton was due to spend election night in Indiana, while Obama was heading back to North Carolina.

Analysts say Clinton, 60, needs to take the rustbelt state of Indiana to at least halt a flow of Democratic “superdelegates” to Obama and stay in the race.

Tuesday’s voting was likely to shed light on whether Obama, who is vying to become America’s first black president, has been damaged by the fallout from racially tinged remarks by his former pastor Jeremiah Wright.

On the final stretch of campaigning, the two rivals fought a vicious television advertising war.

“What’s happened to Barack Obama?” asked a Clinton ad, focusing on his dismissal of her plan for a temporary moratorium in gasoline taxes, but also highlighting his recent troubles.

In Indiana, a rolling average of polls by RealClearPolitics.com gave Clinton a five-point lead over Obama — about 49 percent to 44. In North Carolina, which has a large black population, Obama was ahead 50 to 43 percent.

Combined, the two states were electing 187 pledged delegates on Tuesday — 115 in North Carolina and 72 in Indiana. After Tuesday, 217 elected delegates will be up for grabs in the remaining six contests.

The day’s voting was to begin in parts of Indiana at 6:00 am (1000 GMT) and close in North Carolina at 8:30 pm (0030 GMT).

RealClearPolitics gives Obama 1,491 pledged delegates from all the races so far to Clinton’s 1,337. Neither can reach the winning line of 2,025 without backing from the superdelegates, party officials free to vote either way.