WASHINGTON – The White House went a little bit country Tuesday.
"Now, I know folks think I'm a city boy, but I do appreciate listening to country music," President Barack Obama said to guests gathered in the East Room for a performance by country musicians Alison Krauss and Union Station.
Brad Paisley and country music legend Charley Pride also entertained the audience, which included first lady Michelle Obama, Cabinet secretaries and lawmakers.
The president, whose hometown is Chicago, said the genre has helped to make Americans more hopeful. "It's captured our restlessness and resilience, and told so much of our story in the process," he said.
The performance, along with a morning workshop for students, was the second in a music series that Mrs. Obama launched last month to encourage arts and arts education. The first session was devoted to jazz. A classical music workshop is planned for the fall.
Earlier, Paisley, Krauss and Union Station taught 120 middle and high school music students from Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia about music and song writing.
Paisley and Krauss started their careers early. Krauss, who plays the fiddle, signed a record deal at 14; the guitar-playing Paisley was just 13 when he appeared on a country music show.
Krauss said she would listen to music all day but "I didn't think I would ... end up doing it as a career."
Paisley's grandfather, a country music lover, gave his grandson a guitar for Christmas when Paisley was 8. And the rest is country music history. "I've really not been good at much else," Paisley said. "Thankfully I was able to do this for a living because, as I said, I did not have anything to fall back on, that's for sure."
Paisley and Krauss sat on stools in the State Dining Room in front of a large portrait of a pensive-looking President Abraham Lincoln. Krauss played one piece on her fiddle, and sang another. Paisley also sang. Both answered questions from the students.
One of the participants, Sal La Rosa, of Nashville, Tenn., who just finished the fourth grade, also performed a song he wrote as part of a music education program sponsored by the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Paisley and Krauss talked about the family support they've enjoyed along the way to country music stardom.
"Music is like being up at bat," Paisley told the students. "It's really very much like stepping up to the plate. And you can have all the support in the world but it's up to you guys to really get where you want to go."
___
Associated Press writer Ann Sanner contributed to this report.

NEW YORK – A New York City judge has restored a fraud claim he previously dismissed from Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS Corp. over a story about former President George W. Bush.
Rather's lawyer Martin Gold said Tuesday the fraud stems from CBS' failure to keep promises it made to Rather before firing him over problems with the story about Bush's Vietnam-era military service.
Judicial Hearing Officer Ira Gammerman dismissed the claim last year because of technical legal errors but ruled Rather could refile it.
CBS lawyer James Quinn says that ruling was on technical grounds and he will move right away to have the complaint dismissed.
Quinn and Gold are also waiting for the state Supreme Court's Appellate Division to decide whether to dismiss Rather's lawsuit.

Does a sandwich on Mars taste
different?

The answer could be no, according to
new research that found long-term spaceflight
exposure doesn't change later generations of wheat seeds.

Molecular biologist Robert Ferl of the University of Florida and colleagues studied wheat
seeds descended from plants that flew on the Russian Mir space station. The
progenitor plants
were in space for 167 days in 1991. When they were brought back to Earth,
the plants gave rise to viable offspring seeds.

After four generations of plants
were grown from the seeds, the researchers analyzed gene expression in the
descendant wheat plants as a sensitive measure of potential lasting effects of
spaceflight. They looked at thousands of genes and found no significant changes
in how those genes were expressed between their test plants and a control group
of plants whose forebears were never in space.

Still wheat

"We can find no difference
between plants with spaceflight in their heritage or not," Ferl said. "This says you can send plants up and bring them back down and they can be the same."

Ferl said the findings offered promising
evidence that growing plants
on other worlds might not be that hard. People should be able to pack up a
bunch of seeds for their favorite foods, and after an extended microgravity
journey, land on another planet and grow the seeds without ill consequence.

Previous research found that the weightless
environment of spaceflight isn't a serious impediment to plant growth,
though plants do often grow differently in microgravity - sometimes even
taller, without gravity to pull them down.

"Plants, while they are in
orbit, do exhibit changes in gene expression because that is a different
environment," Ferl said.

But no one had yet tested whether
any changes occurring in the plants during their spaceflight experience were
passed on to future generations. This new study, published in the May 2009
edition of the journal Astrobiology, found this does not seem to be the case.

"We can still expect wheat
plants to be wheat plants once they get to Mars," Ferl
said.

New challenges

That doesn't mean there aren't other
challenges to transporting and growing plants on other planets.

For one, while plants are in space
and on other planets, they could be exposed to strong radiation from the sun
and cosmic rays. On Earth, we are blocked from the worst of this radiation by
our protective atmosphere and magnetic field. 

The average journey to Mars would
take six months (180 days), and then the plant seeds would be exposed to higher
levels of radiation while on Mars due to the red planet's thinner atmosphere.

"I do think accumulated
radiation damage over time could become an issue," Ferl
said.

Dealing with radiation danger is a
top priority for scientists planning future space exploration missions, because
humans as well as plants are vulnerable to damage from energetic radiation.
Engineers must design strong shielding for both space ships and planet
habitats.

Another difficulty may be what kind
of soil to grow the plants in.

While some necessary minerals may
already exist on other planets that can be used
for agriculture, other vital plant nutrients might have to be carried over
from Earth. Because shipping heavy materials via rocket is expensive, as many
materials as possible must be mined or created in the new environment.

Mars soil is rich in sulfur, and it
is unknown at this time if seeds from Earth would prosper or fail in the alien
red soil. Plants on Earth also rely on a rich microbial diversity within the
soil to carry out many functions. Mars, as far as we know, has no such
organisms in its soil, so the plant-friendly soil microbes would probably need
to be transported to Mars along with the seeds.

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Alien Plants
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NEW YORK – Immigration agents raiding homes for suspected illegal immigrants violated the U.S. Constitution by entering without proper consent and may have used racial profiling, a report analyzing arrest records found.
Latinos made up a disproportionate number of the people arrested who were not the stated targets of the raids, and many of their arrest reports gave no basis for why they were initially seized, said the report, which was based on data from raids in New York and New Jersey.
The Immigration Justice Clinic at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law analyzed home raid arrest records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in Long Island and throughout New Jersey. The clinic, founded last year, represents indigent immigrants facing deportation.
Its report, released Wednesday, said that since ICE agents use administrative warrants — instead of judicial warrants, which give law enforcement unfettered access — they must have a resident's consent to enter a home or else violate the constitutional right to protection against unreasonable searches.
On Long Island, 86 percent of arrest records from 100 raids between January 2006 and April 2008 showed no record of consent being given, the report found. In northern and central New Jersey, no record of consent being given was found for 24 percent of about 600 arrests in 2006 and 2007, it found.
Peter Markowitz, director of the clinic and one of the authors of the report, said raids often are carried out with great force, with immigration officials pushing their way into homes in pre-dawn or late-night hours.
The raids are ostensibly aimed at targeted individuals who present threats either to national security or community safety, but arrests of illegal immigrants nearby, known as collateral arrests, are also made.
While the report only analyzed data from two states, it said the pattern suggested the problem was nationwide. It listed examples from California, Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, Georgia and other places.
A federal judge in Connecticut last month ruled that federal agents violated the constitutional rights of four illegal immigrants in a 2007 raid under similar issues. The judge ruled the immigration agents went into the immigrants' homes without warrants, probable cause or their consent, and he put a stop to deportation proceedings against the four defendants.
"The widespread illegality by a law enforcement agency should be kind of shocking to anybody," Markowitz said.
In a statement, ICE said its agents uphold the country's laws.
"We do so professionally, humanely and with an acute awareness regarding the impact enforcement has on the individuals we encounter," it said.
The agency said it also had a mandate to pursue all illegal immigrants, whether targeted or not. A spokesman for the agency declined to comment further.
The agency has about 100 Fugitive Operations Teams around the country; in fiscal year 2008, the teams made more than 34,000 arrests.
The report also found that Latinos were a disproportionate number of collateral arrests. In both New Jersey and on Long Island, two-thirds of the targeted detainees were Latino. But 87 percent of collateral arrests in New Jersey were Latino, as were 94 percent of the collateral arrests in Long Island.
Collateral arrest records can indicate why the person was seized and questioned. But the report found that almost all of the records that didn't contain that information were for Latinos taken into custody. The report said that supported community complaints that Latinos were targeted for arrest simply because of how they looked or how well they spoke English.
The report makes several recommendations, including limiting the use of home raids to a last resort for targets who pose a serious risk to national security or have violent criminal records; the use of judicial rather than administrative warrants, and the videotaping of all home raids.
It also calls for the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General to conduct an investigation.

"These are violations that go to the very heart of the Constitutional expectation of privacy in this country," Markowitz said.