Bush steps into race quota row

US President George Bush, has stepped into the most politically-charged positive discrimination case in a generation, declaring that a programme of racial preferences for minority applicants at the University of Michigan was ”divisive, unfair and impossible to square with the Constitution”.

Democrats and civil rights leaders swiftly attacked Bush’s position in a Supreme Court case that could overturn a 1978 affirmative action ruling and jeopardise 25 years of race-based programmes.