Woman: China police ask to ax White House petition

BEIJING (AP) — Upset about plans for a petrochemical plant near her hometown in China, a woman turned to a new method that Chinese are using to air their complaints: she posted a petition on the White House's website. Then, Chinese police asked her to remove it.

Last week's run-in with internal security agents turned into an unexpected lesson for the woman.

"I didn't think (the petition) was a big deal and didn't foresee the ensuing events," said the woman, who asked to be identified only by the initials she used on the petition, B.Y., for fear of further angering the police.

B.Y., who is in her late 20s and works in the finance industry in the central city of Chengdu, said the officers asked her last Friday to delete the petition from the White House open petition site.

Set up in 2011, the "We the People" site allows the public to directly petition the White House. But she said she discovered the site does not allow people to remove petitions so she was unable to comply.

The Chengdu police department declined comment and would not provide the unlisted number for its domestic security protection branch.

B.Y.'s petition problem, which was first reported by Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper, shows how prickly Chinese authorities are about Internet dissent, probably particularly when it involves the White House.

Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, has been on edge over plans to build a petrochemical plant 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of the city. The plant is expected to produce 10 million tons of oil and 800,000 tons of ethylene per year. Residents are concerned that the plant, operated by state-owned PetroChina, will aggravate air and water pollution, and question its safety because it is near a seismic fault where two deadly earthquakes have occurred in the past five years.

Authorities thwarted a planned demonstration over the plant on May 4 by filling the streets with police for a supposed earthquake drill, and have censored discussions of protest on the Internet.

Internet sites, particularly social media, are China's most unfettered forums for discussion, and many, especially younger Chinese, chafe at increasingly intrusive censorship.

At about the same time, Chinese discovered that the White House petition site was beyond the censors' reach. Discussions about an unsolved case involving the poisoning of a university student named Zhu Ling in Beijing 18 years ago were being deleted from Chinese sites, so someone turned to the White House site. In a few days, a petition calling for an investigation of a suspect living in the U.S. gathered 100,000 online signatures — the threshold for an official White House response — and kept the discussion alive in China.

B.Y. said she went to the White House site to sign the petition for Zhu Ling. Then, she saw she could start her own petition as well.

"So, I wrote about Chengdu," B.Y. said in an interview conducted by instant message. Her petition, posted in English on May 7, notes public concern about the project and urges the international community to evaluate the plan and monitor its environmental impact.

The next day, she received a call from the domestic security personnel. "I got a shock today," she wrote on her Sina Weibo microblog. Two days later, she met with the officers at a police station near her workplace.

"I will be out to have some tea," she wrote Friday. "If I should not return in two hours, please report me as missing." Having tea usually means someone has been called by the domestic security personnel for a talk.

"It was merely a chat," B.Y. said in the interview. "They wanted to know what the opposing views were and if there were other issues the public are worried about."

Asked whether the White House had provided any information to Chinese authorities to help them identify the petition writer, White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said it does not disclose users' information to any outside person or organization.

Unable to remove the White House petition, B.Y. attempted to comply with the police request by deleting a Sina Weibo post that had called attention to the petition. But she is also continuing to post Chengdu pollution levels on her microblog.

Quoting a well-known Chinese author, Hao Qun, who goes by the pen name Murong Xuecun and whose own microblog was recently censored, B.Y. said, "I am going to stay here until the stone blossoms."

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Under-fire White House releases Benghazi ‘talking points’ emails

President Barack Obama speaks at a Democratic Party fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, May 13, …Under heavy political pressure, the White House on Wednesday released 100 pages of internal Obama Administration emails in which senior officials debated what to tell Americans about the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Republicans have charged that the White House played down the role of suspected terrorists in the attack, which left four Americans dead including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. GOP lawmakers have said that President Barack Obama's reelection campaign did not want to undermine its message that al-Qaida was on the run. Obama has flatly denied any attempt to deceive the public, and on Monday he called the allegations a "sideshow" that dishonors the memories of those killed.

Some of the back-and-forth has centered on the email messages among top officials looking to craft "talking points" for members of Congress just a few days after the attack. The White House has accused Republicans of pushing "fabricated" messages to damage the administration.

On Wednesday, senior administration officials briefed reporters on the messages and provided binders of 100 pages of emails. The officials said the communications would show that the CIA led the changes to the talking points, including alterations that Republicans claim show a political motive. The officials went through the emails page by page.

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Under-fire White House releases Benghazi ‘talking points’ emails

President Barack Obama speaks at a Democratic Party fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, May 13, …Under heavy political pressure, the White House on Wednesday released 100 pages of internal Obama Administration emails in which senior officials debated what to tell Americans about the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Republicans have charged that the White House played down the role of suspected terrorists in the attack, which left four Americans dead including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. GOP lawmakers have said that President Barack Obama's reelection campaign did not want to undermine its message that al-Qaida was on the run. Obama has flatly denied any attempt to deceive the public, and on Monday he called the allegations a "sideshow" that dishonors the memories of those killed.

Some of the back-and-forth has centered on the email messages among top officials looking to craft "talking points" for members of Congress just a few days after the attack. The White House has accused Republicans of pushing "fabricated" messages to damage the administration.

On Wednesday, senior administration officials briefed reporters on the messages and provided binders of 100 pages of emails. The officials said the communications would show that the CIA led the changes to the talking points, including alterations that Republicans claim show a political motive. The officials went through the emails page by page.

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White House: Obama is no Nixon

President Barack Obama at a May 13 press conference. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)The Department of Justice seizing reporters' phone records? The IRS apologizing for targeting conservatives?

The Richard Nixon comparisons seem to write themselves—much to the joy of Republicans working to cement the association between President Barack Obama and the former scandal-plagued president.

But when asked at Tuesday's press briefing about the White House's reaction to the recent Nixon comparisons, press secretary Jay Carney suggested those who made them were wrong.

"People who make those kinds of comparisons need to check their history," he said.

He then pivoted to the Benghazi "scandal," chalking it up to politics. "What we have here," Carney said, referencing controversy over the administration's handling of the 2012 attack, "is so clearly—as we're learning—more and more a political sideshow, a deliberate effort to politicize a tragedy."

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White House rebuffs Boehner on Benghazi-related emails

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney during his daily news briefing at the White House on Friday, May, 10, 2013. …President Barack Obama's standoff with congressional Republicans over Benghazi escalated Friday as the White House rebuffed House Speaker John Boehner's demand that it turn over unclassified internal emails linked to the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 attack.

Press secretary Jay Carney rejected the request and again accused Republicans of trying to milk the tragedy for political gain.

“They’re asking for emails that they’ve already seen, that they were able to review and take extensive notes on, apparently provide verbatim information to folks,” Carney told reporters.

His comments came hours after ABC News reported that talking points crafted by the Administration to explain the attack to the public underwent extensive revisions at the State Department's request and with copious White House oversight.

"The fact that the very people who’ve reviewed this and probably leaked it – generally speaking, not specifically -- are asking for something they’ve already had access to I think demonstrates that this is what it was from the beginning in terms of Republican handling of it which is a highly political matter," the spokesman said.

Carney noted that key Republicans had been given access to internal emails in which officials discussed the drafting of the talking points. Lawmakers were able "to review them, take notes, spend as much with with them as they liked," Carney said.(But lawmakers were were not allowed to make copies or take the documents out, which is known as an "in camera" review. )

"There is a long precedent here for protecting internal deliberations. This is across administrations of both parties," he said. House Republicans have hinted they may try to subpoena the emails if the Administration does not cooperate.

"From the hours after the attack, beginning with the Republican nominee’s unfortunate press release, and then his statements the day after, there has been an effort to politicize a tragedy here, the deaths of four Americans," Carney said, referring to Mitt Romney's poorly received response to the attack.

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Census’ claim that black turnout surpassed white in 2012 may be flimsy

On Wednesday, the Census Bureau released its biannual study of voting patterns in federal elections, which included a remarkable finding: African-American voter turnout surpassed that of white, non-Hispanic voters in 2012 for the first time in recent memory, perhaps ever.

USA Today ran this news on the front page, and the report received write-ups in every other major national newspaper. There's only one problem: That landmark may have been passed four years ago. Or maybe not at all.

The uncertainty stems from the fact that the data the census used to create this report has what several experts consider a major hole in it: Data on whether people voted is collected every other November in a supplement to the Current Population Survey, a regular government survey of about 60,000 households. If respondents decline to say whether or not they voted, or if the interviewer does not ask, it is assumed that they did not vote.

According to detailed tables released yesterday, 61.8 percent of those surveyed said they voted, 25.4 percent said they did not, and 12.8 percent did not respond. The census figures combine the second two categories.

As a result, the data appears, at first glance, to generally agree with other methods of measuring voter turnout. The Federal Election Commission reports that 129,067,662 people voted for president in the last election, while the census estimates that 132.9 million people voted—the sort of modest 3 percent difference that one might expect from a survey. (There are, of course, reasons to suspect that the FEC figure is also not perfectly accurate.)

It is only by assuming that all people who did not answer the survey did not vote, however, that the census is able to produce estimates in line with ballot totals. Were it to omit nonresponses, as most surveys do, it would end up with figures that were drastically higher than what the FEC reports.

"They are literally cheating to make it look more accurate," says Jon Krosnick, a polling expert at Stanford who has worked with the Census Bureau. "They have been doing it for a long time."

It's not surprising that the census would otherwise find its data indicated inflated voter participation rates. Surveys of voting behavior, in which people are directly asked whether or not they went to the polls, consistently report significantly higher turnout rates than the actual number of ballots cast would suggest.

There are competing explanations for why this occurs. A study that Krosnick and others conducted for American National Election Studies, an academic survey of civic involvement, suggests that there is a bias in who choses to participate in these studies. As the researchers put it: "[P]eople who vote in elections (and thereby choose to express their political preferences) also appear to be unusually likely to participate in political surveys (and thereby choose to express their political preferences)."

Another, more insidious explanation is that people who are directly asked if they voted are tempted to lie and say they did. Academics know this as the "social desirability bias"—even when responding anonymously, people who did not vote may be tempted to say they did since voting is generally considered a good thing.

"This is a very common problem that post-election surveys have a large amount of over-report bias," says Michael McDonald, a professor at George Mason University who closely tracks studies voting data.

While McDonald is not as bluntly critical of the CPS survey as Krosnick is, he too is skeptical of how it conflates those who said they did not vote with those who didn't respond. When he recalculated the recent census figures for white and black turnout while simply omitting those who did not respond, he found that black voters surpassed white voters in turnout four years ago, by a rate of 78.9 to 75.5. As McDonald wrote yesterday in the Huffington Post:

These adjusted numbers may help resolve another incongruity in the CPS survey data. The Census Bureau reports that the overall number of voters increased from 131.1 million in 2008 to 132.9 million. This can't possibly be correct since my tabulations from official election results show the overall turnout declined from 132.7 million to 130.7 million.

McDonald's corrected figures may produce results more proportional to actual voting records, but the raw numbers are absurdly high.

The Census Bureau is well aware of these mitigating factors. At the end of yesterday's report, the author, Thom File, acknowledges that, "In previous years, the disparity in the estimates in presidential elections has varied between 3 percent and 12 percent of the total number of votes shown as cast in the official tallies." The report also notes that "the respondent's willingness and ability to provide correct and accurate answers" is a potential source of error.

"Our strategy is to be as transparent as we can," File said in an interview today. In the bureau's defense, several of the spreadsheets of data that accompanied yesterday's report included raw data on the number of people who did not complete the survey, allowing for the sort of analysis that McDonald conducts. File defended the observations in his report in spite of these issues.

Information on who turns out to vote in an election is critically important to both parties as they project current party identification forward to predict future elections. The past election very well may have been the first one in which African-American voters turned out in higher proportions than white voters, but yesterday's figures are largely incapable of answering that question.

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White House denies Obama ad-libbed Syria ‘red line’ on chemical weapons

President Barack Obama answering a question about Syria during a news conference in Costa Rica on May 3. (Pablo …Did President Barack Obama really shock senior aides in August 2012 when he warned Syria publicly that using chemical weapons would cross a "red line"? No, the White House said Monday, rejecting a New York Times report.

"The president's use of the term 'red line' was deliberate and was based on U.S. policy," press secretary Jay Carney told reporters at his daily briefing.

Carney also dismissed claims from a U.N. investigator that Syria's rebels, not President Bashar Assad's forces, used chemical weapons. "We find it incredible, not credible, that the opposition has used chemical weapons," he said. "We think that any use of chemical weapons in Syria is almost certain to have been done by the Assad regime."

His comments came after The New York Times, citing anonymous Obama advisers, had reported Saturday that the president's warning was "unscripted," and "went further than many aides realized he would." It also noted that advisers felt "surprise" and "wondered where the 'red line' came from." The daily cited one aide as saying that "Mr. Obama was thinking of a chemical attack that would cause mass fatalities, not relatively small-scale episodes like those now being investigated, except the 'nuance got completely dropped.'"

The Times report came with Obama under heavy fire for drawing a "red line"—Syrian strongman Assad's use of chemical weapons against rebels fighting to oust him—but seemingly not responding now that the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that the regime has likely done so.

"What the president made clear is that it was a red line, and that it was unacceptable, and that it would change his calculus," Carney said. "What he never did—and it is simplistic to do so—is to say that 'if X happens, Y will happen.' He has never said what reaction he would take."

Some Republicans have charged that that's precisely the problem, that drawing a "red line" without specific consequences dents America's credibility.

Obama is "looking at a range of options, and he is not removing any option from the table" if it is conclusively proven that Assad's regime used chemical weapons, Carney said.

The press secretary also defended Israel's weekend air strikes in Syrian territory, saying, "It is certainly within their right to take action to protect themselves." Israel reportedly struck arms depots amid concerns that Syria would try to ship some high-tech weapons to Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon who might use them to strike that U.S. ally.

Asked whether the violence in Syria, estimated to have claimed the lives at at least 70,000 people, amounted to genocide, Carney declined to use the term, saying that would be up to the United Nations and relevant courts.

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Not White Men Wearing Google Glass

by Jason Gilbert

The hot new tweetable Tumblr of the moment is "White Men Wearing Google Glass," which consists of, as its name implies, photos of white men wearing Google Glass.

Like any fashionable Tumblr, White Men Wearing Google Glass has been widely shared on social media; has been celebrated by technology celebrities and written up on all of the major news websites; and has spawned a dozen thoughtpieces about what its popularity "means" for Google (correct answer: nothing), with a few writers suggesting that the Tumblr will negatively shape public opinion on the stylishness of Glass and render it a dud at release.

Ignoring for a moment these doomsday predictions, there is a lingering strangeness about the success of White Men Wearing Google Glass. The site functions on two broad implications, one of which is dependent upon the second: The first implication is that only white men are wearing the early editions of Google Glass; the second is that this white male exclusivity makes the technology somehow different from or inconsistent with the other technologies. Both are wrong.

The first part is provably false, though it hardly feels worth proving. Below, I've collected a slideshow of photographs that could be called Not White Men Wearing Google Glass. It took me about 15 minutes of Google searching to compile. Whoever runs White Men Wearing Google Glass -- an as-yet unidentified author -- is more of an opinion columnist than an objective documentarian in the strict sense, intent on making Google Glass look as geeky as possible (though to my former Huffington Post colleague Mike Sacks -- looking good, my man).

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ABC News technology editor Joanna Stern wearing Google Glass

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Now, to be sure, that you can find unflattering photos of people using certain pieces of technology does not correlate with that product's success. Some people snap photos with their iPads and look like total chumps; some people (perhaps all people) appear ridiculous holding the Galaxy Note up to their tiny faces. Both devices have proven huge triumphs for their respective companies.

Mocking Tumblrs are fair, and often hilarious, game. Truth is, though, you could make this identical Tumblr for any new, highly-anticipated-by-the-technorati device in the world if you really wanted to. For example, any journalist who has ever covered a Launch Day event at an Apple store or -- God forbid -- surveyed the eager beavers who camp outside of Apple stores knows that the demographic heavily skews white and male. The next time Apple releases a product, you could make White Men Who Got The iPhone 6 Super Early just by executing a Getty Image query, I guarantee it.

So, no, it's not just White Men wearing Google Glass, nor is Google Glass the only product whose early purchasers are mostly white men. If anyone is indemnified here, rather, it is a familiar, more insidious target: the white male hegemony that largely dominates technology culture in America. The models of Google Glass you see everyone taking selfies in were made available only to those techies and journalists who attended Google I/O, the company's annual developers conference; this year it was held in California, which probably didn't help Google reach very many non-white non-males (that's a statistic: you can look at the under-representation of women in STEM jobs, or glance at any technology website's masthead for confirmation.)

If the makeup of Google I/O's attendance was similar to any other tech conference in the world in the last seven years or so, then it was mostly white and male, and thus it was mostly -- but not all -- white men who received early shipments of Glass. White men dominate technology in America; white men land on Tumblrs with the swag they received for attending conferences.

"Ha ha," we laugh, when we look at this Tumblr, "isn't it funny that a majority of the people who have early access to a potentially transformative technology are white men?"

And that's the way it would have been at any other tech conference, whether thrown by Apple or Google, by Netflix or TechCrunch, for a wearable face computer or a pocketable smartphone. You may still think that Google Glass looks stupid, but there is much more (and much deeper, more problematic) stupidity defining the device's early adopters.

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You can follow @YahooTech on Twitter.

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White House celebrates the sounds of Memphis soul

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is celebrating the history and sound of Memphis soul music.

Legendary artist and younger acts, ranging from Sam Moore and Mavis Staples to Ben Harper and Justin Timberlake, were rehearsing at the White House on Tuesday to help President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama highlight that style of music at an evening concert.

Students from around the country participated in a workshop with some of the artists.

The event is the 10th installment in the "In Performance at the White House" series. It is scheduled for broadcast April 16 on PBS stations.

Starting in February 2009, the series has celebrated the music of Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Hispanic music, music from the civil-rights era, Motown and the blues, Broadway and country music.

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Senate confirms Mary Jo White as SEC Chairman

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate on Monday confirmed former federal prosecutor Mary Jo White as the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency tasked with policing Wall Street and writing new rules of the road for financial markets.

White received wide bipartisan support in the Senate thanks to her reputation as a tough former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where she went after mobsters and terrorists.

White was nominated in January by President Barack Obama, roughly a month after SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro stepped down from the post.

She sailed through her March 12 confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, and received little opposition on March 19 when the panel voted 21-1 to send her confirmation to the full Senate.

White will be taking over the helm of the SEC at a critical time. The agency still has much work remaining as it seeks to finalize rules required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, particularly in the areas of over-the-counter derivatives and credit-rating agencies.

The agency is also behind on completing capital-raising rules required by more recent legislation, the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, which relaxes certain securities regulations to help small businesses raise funds and go public.

The SEC has been stuck in a rut since Schapiro left in December, leaving the five-member panel divided between two Democrats and two Republicans.

Since then, the SEC has done little in the way of rulemaking.

What little criticism White has received so far has mostly been about her ties to Wall Street.

After working as a prosecutor, she became a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton where she represented high-profile clients including JPMorgan, former Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, UBS and accounting giant Deloitte & Touche LLP.

Some, including Ohio Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown, have raised concerns that this "Wall Street bias" could harm the SEC, an agency that has been accused by some of striking weak settlements with Wall Street banks over their behavior during the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

Little is also known thus far about White's views on securities regulatory policy and how she will direct critical rule-makings including a controversial plan to reform the $2.6 trillion money market fund industry.

The Senate's vote on Monday only allows for White to fill out the remainder of Schapiro's term, which expires in June 2014.

Obama had nominated White to both fill out Schapiro's term and also to serve a full, five-year term at the helm of the SEC.

It is unclear exactly when the Senate will take a vote on the longer-term nomination, though some aides have said it will possibly come up later after Obama nominates two new commissioners to replace Elisse Walter and Troy Paredes.

Walter, a Democrat who is serving as SEC chairman until White takes over, is working past her expired term and can only stay until the end of the year.

Paredes, a Republican, is facing the end of his term this coming June.

(Reporting by Rachelle Younglai and Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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Eyeing Syria, White House woos regional rulers

WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Barack Obama meets over the next month with leaders from Mideast and other regional nations, he will have a timely opportunity to try to rally the Syrian opposition's main backers around a unified strategy to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Jordan, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — whose Sunni Muslim leaders will meet separately with Obama starting April 16— are all believed to be arming or training rebel forces seeking to overthrow Assad's regime. But disparate political, geographic and religious considerations have led to conflicting approaches to which rebel factions to back and what kind of support to provide.

Infighting among mostly Sunni opposition groups and their failure to agree on a power structure to take over if Assad falls has been an important factor aiding the Alawite president as he clings to power two years into a civil war that has left at least 70,000 dead. Alawites are an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and the civil war has largely broken down along sectarian lines.

As resolute as Obama and most U.S. allies are that Assad must go, officials are increasingly worried about what Syria will look like if the regime falls before opposition groups can agree on a governing structure. That has resulted in extra U.S. pressure on regional allies to convince the opposition to unite.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the high-level visits by leaders from the four nations reflect Obama's "deep personal interest" in the region and his commitment to the policies the U.S. is advocating.

"He will use these opportunities to discuss the complex developments in the broader Middle East," Carney said. "Not just Syria, but including Syria."

He pointed to other developments related to the Arab Spring and Obama's visit in March to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories as other topics the president would likely discuss with the Arab leaders. Secretary of State John Kerry also is returning to the Middle East on Saturday for meetings on Syria and Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Additionally, senior Obama administration leaders at the White House, State Department and Pentagon held a high-level meeting Friday that focused on Syria among its top national security priorities, according to two officials familiar with the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the talks to the media. Senior U.S. officials have been meeting regularly to discuss a range of options on U.S. involvement in Syria, including whether to arm the rebels.

The global community's response to Syria will also be high on the agenda next Thursday, when Obama meets with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in the Oval Office. Washington has resisted arming the rebels, in part for fear that some weapons could fall into the hands of jihadi groups that are designated as terrorist fronts linked to al-Qaida.

But the U.S. has helped train some of the opposition fighters — mostly former Syrian regime soldiers who have defected — in Jordan and tacitly endorsed shipments of arms to the opposition from Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Additionally, Kerry said last month that the U.S. will not stop Western nations seeking to open the possibility of arming the rebels, including Great Britain and France.

But the bulk of the aid to rebels has come from Sunni-led governments in Turkey and the Mideast — as several Shiite leaders in the regions have spirited weapons, fighters and aid to Assad's forces.

Turkey and Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia, are widely believed to have been providing rebels with tanks and surface-to-air missiles to fight regime soldiers. Salman Shaikh, a Mideast expert who specializes in Gulf politics, said those countries have strongly backed the opposition Syrian National Council and its allied fighters — which include elements of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists, as well as secular groups.

The United Arab Emirates, by contrast, has been unenthusiastic about aiding Islamist elements of the opposition. Shaikh said the Emirates is believed to be sending limited weapons, like small firearms and ammunition, to secular fighters but mostly have focused on supplying the opposition with humanitarian aid.

Syria's protracted civil war has been particularly taxing for Jordan, a close U.S. ally that shared its northern border with Syria and has absorbed more than 460,000 refugees fleeing the conflict — the equivalent of 10 percent of Jordan's population. It's been just a few weeks since a meeting between Obama and Jordan's ruler, King Abdullah II, in which Syria topped the agenda.

"We are extremely concerned of the risk of prolonged sectarian conflict that, if it continues as we're seeing, leads to the fragmentation of Syria," Abdullah said then, standing alongside Obama in Amman.

Jordan mostly has been helping train and arm rebel fighters who defected from Assad's forces and has done so with U.S. help. It also has served as a way station for rebels' weapons flow into Syria, and this week drew a harsh warning from Assad about "playing with fire" amid Jordanian fears that its larger neighbor might try to retaliate.

The two leaders will meet in Washington on April 26 in what one U.S. diplomat predicted will be Abdullah's attempt to ensure that he has full U.S. backing as Jordan's campaign to help the rebels continues. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the talks more candidly.

"Regional players will find it difficult to always be singing off the same sheet," said Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center think tank in Doha. "The U.S. hanging back and outsourcing a regional role is never going to achieve the goal of a unified opposition (to the regime) or even the military on the ground."

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Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

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Follow Lara Jakes on Twitter: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP

Follow Josh Lederman on Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshledermanAP

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Students help Michelle Obama plant White House vegetable garden

By Roberta Rampton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - First Lady Michelle Obama shared what has become a rite of spring in Washington with a small group of fifth-grade students on Thursday, planting vegetables in the White House garden.

On a day that began with record-cold temperatures that have pushed back the blooming season for the city's famous cherry trees, Obama welcomed about 30 students to help her plant the garden, a project she has championed as a model for children and their parents to emulate as a way to reduce childhood obesity.

"Where are your jackets? I'm going to be the mother," Obama joked with the group of earnest, polite kids, most wearing t-shirts bearing the names of their schools in Florida, Massachusetts, Tennessee and Vermont.

Obama has helped push for changes in school lunch rules to require more vegetables and fruit. The schools were chosen because they have implemented the new rules in creative ways and started their own gardens.

Harvard-educated Obama, who was more popular in polls during the 2012 election campaign than any of the candidates, started the garden on the White House south lawn in 2009, the first time vegetables had been grown there since Eleanor Roosevelt's "victory garden" during World War Two.

Obama, sporting sneakers without socks, put aside a pair of lime green gardening gloves as she crouched between two raised garden boxes, carefully placing tiny wheat kernels into freshly turned soil.

From Somerville, Massachusetts, 11-year-old Ariana Docanto chatted with Obama as she helped plant the wheat, which the White House hopes to harvest and use for bread and risotto.

Docanto described the experience in a single word: "Amazing!"

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Todd Eastham)

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