Demographics

Presidential election exit polls showed that the economy was uppermost on the minds of most Americans. But when Baghdad-based Army Maj. Ian Howard cast his ballot, his top concern was whether this would be his last deployment to Iraq. So Howard, a lifelong Republican, threw his support to Barack Obama, who has advocated a swift withdrawal of U.S. forces. "I don't want to come back here for another tour," Howard said Wednesday.

The United States has reached a historic tipping point, with children born to Latino, Asian, African American and mixed-race parents now constituting a majority of all births, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. The long-expected demographic shift is considered a milestone for the nation, though one that California passed three decades ago when births to racial and ethnic minorities surpassed those to white parents. The new report shows that minorities accounted for about 2 million, or 50.4%, of U.S. births in the 12 months ending July 1 of last year.

For the first time since the 19th century, Latinos now account for a majority of births in California, a long-expected, yet still telling milestone in the state's demographics. Latinos make up about 30% of the state's population. But according to a new analysis of birth certificates by UCLA scholars, Latino babies accounted for more than half of all California births beginning in the third quarter of 2001, at 50.2%. In the fourth quarter of that year, the rate edged up to 50.6%.

A society based on the rule of law requires that people respect their courts; but that respect is subject to question when, from county to county and courtroom to courtroom, the judges are primarily of one race or ethnicity and the litigants and defendants are of another. The divide in California courtrooms is not quite that stark, but it is unmistakable. In a state in which about 40% of residents are non-Latino white, the Judicial Council reports that 72.3% of trial judges and appellate justices are white.

No. 2 is actually No. 1, and No. 1 is really No. 3. Move No. 3 to No. 4, take No. 4 off the Top 12, and bring up No. 5 to the No. 2 spot. Confused? Those are part of the maneuvers radio executives and advertisers go through every three months to determine the real meaning behind the Arbitron ratings.

In ABC's new thriller "Missing," a former CIA agent whose child has been kidnapped springs out of retirement with guns, martial-arts skills and primal parental passion blazing. If that sounds familiar, well, it was also the plot of the 2008 film "Taken," which had Liam Neeson tearing through Paris to extricate his daughter from the clutches of a sex-trafficking ring. In "Missing," the gender roles are reversed. When Michael (Nick Eversman), a student studying abroad in Rome, goes missing, his mother, Becca Winstone (Ashley Judd)

A brick wall separated Julio Perez's childhood home from Disneyland, where his father worked in the laundry room. On that side was the Anaheim that America knew, the quintessential Orange County suburb where expanses of orange groves gave way to rows of 1950s tract homes and a signature theme park. On his side was the neighborhood where Perez, 30, spent his 1980s childhood: a dense, vibrant, heavily Latino island where parks filled with soccer players and families grilled carne asada.

Re "An 'Irrelevant' Library Leaves City Unserved," Aug. 25: Attention, Santa Ana! Wake up and serve your population. A measly $12.51 in library spending per resident and a 10% stock of Spanish books in a overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking city is pathetic. City Councilman Jose Solorio's comments ("I would question whether it is the city's duty to provide materials that mirror the demographics of the city") make me cringe in disgust. I worked for a year in Japan and lived in a Tokyo suburb where the handful of international residents could choose from thousands of books and magazines in English, Chinese, Korean, French and German.

Although more than 50% of Alhambra public school students are Asian-American, less than one-fifth of the school district's staff is of Asian descent, a new study shows. A district report issued last week shows that about 18% of the 3,814 Alhambra Unified School District employees are Asian-American, compared to more than half of the system's 20,729 students. The Asian-American percentage populations of Alhambra and San Gabriel, where most of students live, are 37% and 31.9% respectively.

Researchers from UCLA and the Times analyzed state education data on student demographics, course-taking, SAT scores and dropout rates for high schools, grouping them according to ethnic makeup to determine how the schools differed. Among the findings: The number of schools with high numbers of blacks and Latinos is rising; dropout rates are down overall; students of all ethnic groups, especially blacks, are taking college prep courses in increasing numbers.

After scraping by on handyman jobs for a year, Bert Qintana figured he'd have to leave his wife and teenage son at their home near Taos, N.M., and find work elsewhere. Then Qintana got a call last month from Chevron Mining, which runs a mine 20 miles away. Would he be interested in hauling muck from the molybdenum mine for $17.05 an hour? He leaped at the offer. "Thank God," said Qintana, 45, a Latino who had worked as a general contractor. "I was able to hang in there and not have to move.

After a 30-year, record-shattering rise, U.S. obesity rates appear to be stabilizing. New statistics cited in two papers report only a slight uptick since 2005 - leaving public health experts tentatively optimistic that they may be gaining some ground in their efforts to slim down the nation. Many obesity specialists say the new data, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are a sign that efforts to address the obesity problem - such as placing nutritional information on food packaging and revising school lunch menus - are beginning to have an effect in a country where two-thirds of adults and one-third of children and teens are overweight or obese.

Doris Chang limits her three sons' intake of sweets and doesn't feed them any processed or frozen food. At their Manhattan Beach home, she monitors the boys' time in front of the television and keeps them busy with baseball, basketball and karate. About 20 miles to the northeast, Lorena Hernandez takes her 6-year-old daughter to McDonald's at least twice a week and frequently gives her Kool-Aid and soda. They go to the park often, but when they are in their Bell Gardens home, the television is usually on. The families' divergent attitudes toward food and exercise reflect just part of the challenge facing officials as they try to close a vast and costly gap in obesity rates across the region.

As founder, chairman and chief executive of National Research Group Inc. from 1978 to 2003, movie market researcher Joseph Farrell introduced the concept of market testing to Hollywood, originating now-standard industry practices such as audience tracking surveys, focus-group preview screenings and demographic analysis of moviegoers. Over the decades, NRG's confidential research reports were used by all of the major Hollywood studios to make decisions about release dates, tweak marketing campaigns and — sometimes to the unease of filmmakers — tinker with movies.

For a clue to why California is losing its allure as a place to settle down, just ask Jennifer McCluer, who moved out of California in 2007 after she obtained her license in skin care. Unable to afford Orange County's sky-high rents, she opted for Portland, Ore. "A big motivator was that I lived with roommate after roommate after roommate," said McCluer, 30. "Friends said you could probably live on your own up here. The rent was a huge deal for me. " McCluer would like to move back, but it's still too expensive.

Over a bottle of vodka and a traditional Russian salad of pickles, sausage and potatoes tossed in mayonnaise, a group of friends raised their glasses and wished Igor Irtenyev and his family a happy journey to Israel. Irtenyev, his wife and daughter insist they will just be away for six months, but the sadness in their eyes on this recent night said otherwise. A successful Russian poet, Irtenyev says he can no longer breathe freely in his homeland, because "with each passing year, and even with each passing day, there is less and less oxygen around.

A new research center that will provide demographic information for cities, the county and other public agencies opens its doors today. The center, at Cal State Fullerton, will provide the governments with population projections and other forms of data that had been tabulated by the county before its 1994 bankruptcy, which forced officials to close the office. Cal State Fullerton will provide the data for about $275,000, far less than the $800,000 it cost for the county to handle the service.

The Tustin Unified School District will consider Monday a proposal to hire a demographer to study student enrollment in the district. Tustin resident Joseph Herzig said a demographic study is necessary before the district decides whether to sell school properties identified as surplus. The board did not act when the proposal was first presented on Sept. 13, and then deadlocked 2 to 2, with one board member absent, when it was presented again on Sept. 27.

In 2003, Dana Gioia walked onto the battlefield that was the National Endowment for the Arts and brokered a peace. He chaired the NEA for six years, longer than the Civil War. The George W. Bush appointee increased the agency's budget and worked to broaden its mission and demographic reach. Gioia is a widely published poet and essayist, a Stanford MBA and a Southern Californian who's come home, as professor of poetry and public culture at USC, whence all of California is a stage. What's on your USC to-do list?

It took only a dozen years for humanity to add another billion people to the planet, reaching the milestone of 7 billion Monday — give or take a few months. Demographers at the United Nations Population Division set Oct. 31, 2011, as the "symbolic" date for hitting 7 billion, while acknowledging that it's impossible to know for sure the specific time or day. Using slightly different calculations, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates the 7-billion threshold will not be reached until March.