Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.

Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year's heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, analyzed the 2012 elections for the AP using census data on eligible voters and turnout, along with November's exit polling. He estimated total votes for Obama and Romney under a scenario where 2012 turnout rates for all racial groups matched those in 2004. Overall, 2012 voter turnout was roughly 58 percent, down from 62 percent in 2008 and 60 percent in 2004.

The analysis also used population projections to estimate the shares of eligible voters by race group through 2030. The numbers are supplemented with material from the Pew Research Center and George Mason University associate professor Michael McDonald, a leader in the field of voter turnout who separately reviewed aggregate turnout levels across states, as well as AP interviews with the Census Bureau and other experts. The bureau is scheduled to release data on voter turnout in May.

Overall, the findings represent a tipping point for blacks, who for much of America's history were disenfranchised and then effectively barred from voting until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

But the numbers also offer a cautionary note to both Democrats and Republicans after Obama won in November with a historically low percentage of white supporters. While Latinos are now the biggest driver of U.S. population growth, they still trail whites and blacks in turnout and electoral share, because many of the Hispanics in the country are children or noncitizens.

In recent weeks, Republican leaders have urged a "year-round effort" to engage black and other minority voters, describing a grim future if their party does not expand its core support beyond white males.

The 2012 data suggest Romney was a particularly weak GOP candidate, unable to motivate white voters let alone attract significant black or Latino support. Obama's personal appeal and the slowly improving economy helped overcome doubts and spur record levels of minority voters in a way that may not be easily replicated for Democrats soon.

Romney would have erased Obama's nearly 5 million-vote victory margin and narrowly won the popular vote if voters had turned out as they did in 2004, according to Frey's analysis. Then, white turnout was slightly higher and black voting lower.

More significantly, the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same.

"The 2012 turnout is a milestone for blacks and a huge potential turning point," said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University who has written extensively on black politicians. "What it suggests is that there is an 'Obama effect' where people were motivated to support Barack Obama. But it also means that black turnout may not always be higher, if future races aren't as salient."

Whit Ayres, a GOP consultant who is advising GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a possible 2016 presidential contender, says the last election reaffirmed that the Republican Party needs "a new message, a new messenger and a new tone." Change within the party need not be "lock, stock and barrel," Ayres said, but policy shifts such as GOP support for broad immigration legislation will be important to woo minority voters over the longer term.

"It remains to be seen how successful Democrats are if you don't have Barack Obama at the top of the ticket," he said.

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In Ohio, a battleground state where the share of eligible black voters is more than triple that of other minorities, 27-year-old Lauren Howie of Cleveland didn't start out thrilled with Obama in 2012. She felt he didn't deliver on promises to help students reduce college debt, promote women's rights and address climate change, she said. But she became determined to support Obama as she compared him with Romney.

"I got the feeling Mitt Romney couldn't care less about me and my fellow African-Americans," said Howie, an administrative assistant at Case Western Reserve University's medical school who is paying off college debt.

Howie said she saw some Romney comments as insensitive to the needs of the poor. "A white Mormon swimming in money with offshore accounts buying up companies and laying off their employees just doesn't quite fit my idea of a president," she said. "Bottom line, Romney was not someone I was willing to trust with my future."

The numbers show how population growth will translate into changes in who votes over the coming decade:

The gap between non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black turnout in 2008 was the smallest on record, with voter turnout at 66.1 percent and 65.2 percent, respectively; turnout for Latinos and non-Hispanic Asians trailed at 50 percent and 47 percent. Rough calculations suggest that in 2012, 2 million to 5 million fewer whites voted compared with 2008, even though the pool of eligible white voters had increased.

Unlike other minority groups, the rise in voting for the slow-growing black population is due to higher turnout. While blacks make up 12 percent of the share of eligible voters, they represented 13 percent of total 2012 votes cast, according to exit polling. That was a repeat of 2008, when blacks "outperformed" their eligible voter share for the first time on record.

White voters also outperformed their eligible vote share, but not at the levels seen in years past. In 2012, whites represented 72 percent of total votes cast, compared to their 71.1 percent eligible vote share. As recently as 2004, whites typically outperformed their eligible vote share by at least 2 percentage points. McDonald notes that in 2012, states with significant black populations did not experience as much of a turnout decline as other states. That would indicate a lower turnout for whites last November since overall voter turnout declined.

Latinos now make up 17 percent of the population but 11 percent of eligible voters, due to a younger median age and lower rates of citizenship and voter registration. Because of lower turnout, they represented just 10 percent of total 2012 votes cast. Despite their fast growth, Latinos aren't projected to surpass the share of eligible black voters until 2024, when each group will be roughly 13 percent. By then, 1 in 3 eligible voters will be nonwhite.

In 2026, the total Latino share of voters could jump to as high as 16 percent, if nearly 11 million immigrants here illegally become eligible for U.S. citizenship. Under a proposed bill in the Senate, those immigrants would have a 13-year path to citizenship. The share of eligible white voters could shrink to less than 64 percent in that scenario. An estimated 80 percent of immigrants here illegally, or 8.8 million, are Latino, although not all will meet the additional requirements to become citizens.

"The 2008 election was the first year when the minority vote was important to electing a U.S. president. By 2024, their vote will be essential to victory," Frey said. "Democrats will be looking at a landslide going into 2028 if the new Hispanic voters continue to favor Democrats."

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Even with demographics seeming to favor Democrats in the long term, it's unclear whether Obama's coalition will hold if blacks or younger voters become less motivated to vote or decide to switch parties.

Minority turnout tends to drop in midterm congressional elections, contributing to larger GOP victories as happened in 2010, when House control flipped to Republicans.

The economy and policy matter. Exit polling shows that even with Obama's re-election, voter support for a government that does more to solve problems declined from 51 percent in 2008 to 43 percent last year, bolstering the view among Republicans that their core principles of reducing government are sound.

The party's "Growth and Opportunity Project" report released last month by national leaders suggests that Latinos and Asians could become more receptive to GOP policies once comprehensive immigration legislation is passed.

Whether the economy continues its slow recovery also will shape voter opinion, including among blacks, who have the highest rate of unemployment.

Since the election, optimism among nonwhites about the direction of the country and the economy has waned, although support for Obama has held steady. In an October AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of nonwhites said the nation was heading in the right direction; that's dropped to 52 percent in a new AP-GfK poll. Among non-Hispanic whites, however, the numbers are about the same as in October, at 28 percent.

Democrats in Congress merit far lower approval ratings among nonwhites than does the president, with 49 percent approving of congressional Democrats and 74 percent approving of Obama.

William Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, says that in previous elections where an enduring majority of voters came to support one party, the president winning re-election William McKinley in 1900, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 attracted a larger turnout over his original election and also received a higher vote total and a higher share of the popular vote. None of those occurred for Obama in 2012.

Only once in the last 60 years has a political party been successful in holding the presidency more than eight years Republicans from 1980-1992.

"This doesn't prove that Obama's presidency won't turn out to be the harbinger of a new political order," Galston says. "But it does warrant some analytical caution."

Early polling suggests that Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton could come close in 2016 to generating the level of support among nonwhites as Obama did in November, when he won 80 percent of their vote. In a Fox News poll in February, 75 percent of nonwhites said they thought Clinton would make a good president, outpacing the 58 percent who said that about Vice President Joe Biden.

Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the NAACP, predicts closely fought elections in the near term and worries that GOP-controlled state legislatures will step up efforts to pass voter ID and other restrictions to deter blacks and other minorities from voting. In 2012, courts blocked or delayed several of those voter ID laws and African-Americans were able to turn out in large numbers only after a very determined get-out-the-vote effort by the Obama campaign and black groups, he said.

Jealous says the 2014 midterm election will be the real bellwether for black turnout. "Black turnout set records this year despite record attempts to suppress the black vote," he said.

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AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

EDITOR'S NOTE _ "America at the Tipping Point: The Changing Face of a Nation" is an occasional series examining the cultural mosaic of the U.S. and its historic shift to a majority-minority nation.

Since then, searches with a plane and boats have found no trace of the pilot, 54-year-old missionary Jerry Krause, or the twin-engine Beechcraft 1900C that he was flying from South Africa to Mali.

Krause's family in Mali, where he has lived for 16 years, and in Waseca, Minnesota, believes he is alive and could have landed in hostile territory.

"After much research and digging, there is a 50 percent chance that Jerry's plane crashed," says a message posted Wednesday to their website www.findjerry.com .

"That other 50 percent is the probability that he was captured and forced to fly for some drug lords or guerrilla members. There is evidence now to support both scenarios."

Family members reached by email would not elaborate on any possible evidence, and the suggestion could not be immediately backed.

The posting said that a missing person's report has been filed in the U.S., so the country's National Transportation Safety Board can start an investigation into Krause's disappearance.

The Krauses have launched a multifaceted campaign to "find Jerry." Family members are lobbying officials, posting messages on social media and using the Internet to encourage a relay of prayers for his safe return.

Krause's last contact was apparently with the control tower at Sao Tome island, a couple of kilometers north of the equator and 150 miles (240 kilometers) from the coast of Gabon.

"We have no idea what happened to him," Januario Barreto, the control tower chief, told The Associated Press by telephone Wednesday.

He said Krause called in to say he was 9 miles (14 kilometers) from the island when lightning struck the tower and knocked out the power. That was just before 4 p.m. local time (1600 GMT), still in daylight, on Sunday, April 7.When generators kicked in, soon afterward, Krause could no longer be reached, Barreto said.

He said air traffic controllers immediately contacted the nearest control towers on the African mainland at Libreville, Gabon and Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, to see whether they had heard from Krause. They had not.

Navy and Coast Guard vessels are still looking for any trace of Krause's plane, Barreto said.

The family's website said they have sent a Portuguese-speaking envoy to Sao Tome, at the family's expense, to "get the official documentation as to what actually took place there from Jerry radioing in to land to their responses and follow-up.

"Their stories haven't been confirmed and haven't been consistent," the message complained.

Krause's employer, Eric van der Gragt, said the control tower did not inform others that there was a missing pilot and plane until almost 24 hours after the disappearance.

"The tower just didn't inform people that he had disappeared," van der Gragt, owner of Bamako, Mali-based Sahel Aviation Service, said in a telephone interview.

He said he sent a plane to search for Krause for two days that week, after the Sao Tome Coast Guard had found nothing on the Monday and Tuesday following his disappearance. The Sahel plane searched around the twin-island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, he said.

Van der Gragt said the turboprop Beechcraft that Krause was flying did not belong to his company but, he believed, to a company based in Senegal.

Krause's family is heartened that searchers have found nothing in the Gulf of Guinea, saying that an absence of wreckage or emergency locator transmitter signals are hopeful signs.

The oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, where Krause disappeared, has been increasingly targeted by armed pirates who hijack ships' cargoes, including a British ship in February.

At their Web site and on Facebook, the Krause family details how they lobbied officials of the French cellular service Orange, to which the pilot was subscribed, in an effort to get them to try to track his iPhone and discover his last position. At first the company resisted, then said it was unable to help because his subscription was based in Mali, according to the Web site. Orange was able to turn off the iPhone from afar, to conserve its battery.

Krause's family last heard from him when he called his wife Gina from South Africa to let her know he was on his way home to Bamako. The two have lived as missionaries in Africa for 25 years, the last 16 of them in Mali, a mainly Muslim country. Krause had served as a missionary pilot for the Nampa, Idaho-based Mission Aviation Fellowship until 2009 when the air service pulled out of Mali.

Jerry and Gina Krause stayed on. Many foreign companies and charities have left Mali since jihadist fighters swarmed over the north last year. France and several African nations sent troops this year when the Islamic fighters, allied with al-Qaeda, started to advance on Bamako, the capital.

"God knows where Jerry is," Gina Krause says, expressing certainty and her faith in a posting at the findjerry Web site. "I know I serve a God who can do the IMPOSSIBLE."

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AP writer Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal contributed to this report.

https://www.facebook.com/HelpFindJerry

Kano police chief Musa Daura said Tuesday that at least 65 others were injured in the attack that hit the city of Kano on Monday evening. He said two people drove an explosive-laden car into a station in a Christian enclave in the predominantly Muslim commercial center.

No group claimed responsibility for the attack but suspicion has fallen on the radical Islamic network Boko Haram.

The explosion came hours after another attack blamed on Boko Haram killed a teacher and injured three students in Maiduguri, the group's spiritual home. A local military spokesman said three sect members were killed in a counterattack.

The company is requiring all employees who participate in a work-provided health plan to undergo an annual health exam, and then share the results with the company. Workers are being asked to submit to tests for blood sugar, blood pressure, body mass, and weight, among others.

Employees have until May 1, 2014, to schedule a checkup. Should they decline to do so, they'll be assessed a hefty $600 annual surcharge, in the form of a recurring $50 monthly fee, on top of their coverage's regular cost.

CVS defended the policy as a way to nudge employees toward healthier lifestyles, the ultimate goal being to drive down the company's health care costs.

"Our benefits program is evolving to help our colleagues take more responsibility for improving their health and managing health-associated costs," a CVS spokesman

The company claimed such policies were standard practice for businesses. As evidence, CVS pointed to a recent National Business Group Health report that found three-fourths of employers who offered health assessments also tied some sort of incentive to those tests.

Indeed, health incentive programs are becoming increasingly popular. The programs have existed for decades, butafter a 2006 change to health-care laws that clarified what incentives were and were not legal.

The percentage of employers offering such programs rose from 49 percent in 2010 to 54 percent in 2012,And with the Affordable Care Act set to give employers more authority to establish incentives or fines under such programs, their popularity is

However, critics say CVS' policy is not one of incentives, but of coercion that makes compliance practically mandatory. While other policies typically offer rewards like lower rates or deductibles for healthy behavior, CVS plans to levy fees not on unhealthy lifestyles, but on noncompliance.

"This is an incredibly coercive and invasive thing to ask employees to do," Patient Privacy Rights founder Dr. Deborah Peelwhich first reported the story. "How is it voluntary if you are a low- or medium-wage person?" she added.

Peel also said the program posed troubling privacy questions, since employees would have to share sensitive personal information with CVS. CVS has said it will never see the results of the wellness tests.

In the past, others have tried to challenge the legality of such programs, though not to much success. In 2011, a Florida man, Brad Seff, sued Broward County for slapping him with a $40 fee for refusing a health screening. Seffwith the court ruling that employers could levy such penalties.

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The lovers none so subtly named Adam (Jim Sturgess) and Eden (Kirsten Dunst) first meet as children who manage to forge a spiritual connection even if they're literally upside down from each other. Unfortunately, contact between the inhabitants of the two worlds is strictly forbidden by the dominant one, Up Top, which exploits the resources of its neighbor planet, Down Below. Connecting the two worlds is a massive tower owned by an exploitative megacorporation named what else? -- TransWorld.

Ten years after their initial encounter, which ended with Eden apparently falling to her death, Adam is a lowly scientist working at TransWorld who has managed to invent an anti-aging cream made from the pollen of pink bees (really). He suddenly comes across the now grown-up Eden, who has no recollection of him thanks to a case of amnesia from her fall.

So he sets out to woo her all over again, a task made more complicated by the fact that the only way he can enter her world is to don gravity-defying anti-matter that inconveniently bursts into flame after a short time.

If you've managed to follow all of this so far, then you indeed might enjoy the undeniably clever otherworldly setup for what otherwise is a fairly pedestrian love story. The writer-director produces many impressively striking images, many of them without the benefit of CGI effects, to render his fantastical setting. Particularly impressive is a virtuoso set piece involving a flaming Adam desperately propelling himself into an upside down body of water.

But despite their dual-worlds environment, the central characters ultimately are too one-dimensional to sustain our interest. Sturgess overplays the puppy-dog charm, while Dunst wears her natural radiance like a comfortable overcoat.

The film does manage to spring to life with every appearance by Timothy Spall as Adam's friendly but ill-fated co-worker. The veteran British actor delivers a wonderfully ebullient and moving turn that lends a genuine humanity to the otherwise overly contrived and mechanistic proceedings.

"Upside Down," a Millennium Entertainment release, is rated PG-13 for some violence. 100 minutes.

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Motion Picture Association of America rating definition for PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/hollywoods-25-powerful-stylists-427684

www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/the-voice-american-idol-428126

(Reuters) - Google Inc said it will shut Google Reader on July 1, citing declining usage for the application that compiles content served by web feeds, as it forges ahead with its strategy to focus on fewer products that have more impact.

Google Reader aggregates feeds in RSS (rich site summary) -- a format for creating streams from changing Web content -- and makes it easy for people to discover websites of interest and keep tabs on them.

But the service has become less compelling in recent years with the growing popularity of Twitter.

Google said there were "two simple reasons" for closing the service, which was launched in 2005. "Usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we are pouring all of our energy into fewer products," the company said on its official blog on Wednesday.(http://r.reuters.com/nur66t)

Google declined to comment beyond the blog post.

"These moves support our general thesis that management is disciplined in its capital allocation efforts," Morningstar analyst Rick Summer said, adding that none of these closures will affect his forecast or fair value estimate on Google's stock.

Google has not disclosed the number of Google Reader users, but irate users of the doomed app took to Twitter on Thursday to vent about the closing of the service, making "Google Reader" one of the top trending topics on the microblogging site.

"Shutdown of Google Reader because of a 'lack of consumer appeal?' No way. The simple reason: RSS can't be controlled and monetized easily," one Twitter user wrote.

"The killing Of Google Reader highlights the risk of relying on a single provider," another Tweet said.

Dan Lewis, a New York lawyer, started a campaign on petition website Change.org to save Google Reader that garnered about 54,000 supporters in about 16 hours.(http://r.reuters.com/kyr66t)

Change.org, a for-profit platform funded through non-profit advertising, is paid by human and animal rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Humane Society to host their petitions. It has 20 million users.

Demonstrating the site's effectiveness, PepsiCo Inc recently removed a controversial chemical from its Gatorade drinks following concerns from consumers and an online petition on Change.org started by a Mississippi teenager.

Some Google Reader users pointed out alternative readers such as Feedly (http://r.reuters.com/sur66t), RSSowl and NewsBlur, and Feedly was quick to capitalize on Google's announcement by offering tips to Reader users for moving their data to its website.

NewsBlur said in a Tweet that its site had slowed because of the heavy traffic caused by users fleeing Google Reader.

Google said users and developers interested in alternatives to Reader can export their data, including subscriptions, with the Google Takeout service over the next four months.

Google Takeout allows users take their data out of multiple Google products and collate it in portable and open formats, making it easy to export to other services.

The company said it would retire seven other products and services over the next few months, including its voice app for BlackBerry.

In a blogpost titled "A second spring of cleaning", Google said the latest closures meant it has now pulled the plug on 70 features or services since it started streamlining its product base in 2011.

(Additional reporting by Sakthi Prasad and Supantha Mukherjee; Editing by Greg Mahlich and Ted Kerr)