India, UK armies to hold joint exercise in April

BANGALORE: A company of the British Army will come down to India in April to conduct a joint exercise with the Indian Army, Philip Dunne, minister for defence equipment, support and technology, Great Britain, said on Thursday. He was speaking on the sidelines of Aero India 2013.

"We plan to increase joint exercises between the two countries in the near future," said the 54-year-old Conservative Party politician.

The Indian Army, for the first time since Independence, carried out joint exercises with their British counterparts on British soil in 2008, when Mechanized Infantry troops received training at the British Army's prestigious Land Warfare Centre in Warminster.

The minister also said that talks are currently under way between British companies and the state governments of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra on internal security, border security and port security.

He said that science and technology collaboration between DRDO and its British equivalent DSLT, which agreed on three projects, also saw an agreement of a new fourth project last week.

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Asteroid to Make Closest Flyby in History

Talk about too close for comfort. In a rare cosmic encounter, an asteroid will barnstorm Earth next week, missing our planet by a mere 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers).

Designated 2012 DA14, the space rock is approximately 150 feet (45 meters) across, and astronomers are certain it will zip harmlessly past our planet on February 15—but not before making history. It will pass within the orbits of many communications satellites, making it the closest flyby on record. (Read about one of the largest asteroids to fly by Earth.)

"This is indeed a remarkably close approach for an asteroid this size," said Paul Chodas, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Earth Object (NEO) program office in Pasadena, California.

"We estimate that an asteroid of this size passes this close to the Earth only once every few decades."

The giant rock—half a football field wide—was first spotted by observers at the La Sagra Observatory in southern Spain a year ago, soon after it had just finished making a much more distant pass of the Earth at 2.6 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away.

This time around however, on February15 at 2:24 pm EST, the asteroid will be passing uncomfortably close—ten times closer than the orbit of the moon—flying over the eastern Indian Ocean near Sumatra (map). (Watch: "Moon 101.")

Future Impact?

Chodas and his team have been keeping a close eye on the cosmic intruder, and orbital calculations of its trajectory show that there is no chance for impact.

But the researchers have not yet ruled out future chances of a collision. This is because asteroids of this size are too faint to be detected until they come quite close to the Earth, said Chodas.

"There is still a tiny chance that it might hit us on some future passage by the Earth; for example there is [a] 1-in-200,000 chance that it could hit us in the year 2080," he said.

"But even that tiny chance will probably go away within the week, as the asteroid's orbit gets tracked with greater and greater accuracy and we can eliminate that possibility."

Earth collision with an object of this size is expected to occur every 1,200 years on average, said Donald Yeomans, NEO program manager, at a NASA news conference this week.

DA14 has been getting closer and closer to Earth for quite a while—but this is the asteroid's closest approach in the past hundred years. And it probably won't get this close again for at least another century, added Yeomans.

While no Earth impact is possible next week, DA14 will pass 5,000 miles inside the ring of orbiting geosynchronous weather and communications satellites; so all eyes are watching the space rock's exact trajectory. (Learn about the history of satellites.)

"It's highly unlikely they will be threatened, but NASA is working with satellite providers, making them aware of the asteroid's pass," said Yeomans.

Packing a Punch

Experts say an impact from an object this size would have the explosive power of a few megatons of TNT, causing localized destruction—similar to what occurred in Siberia in 1908.

In what's known as the "Tunguska event," an asteroid is thought to have created an airburst explosion which flattened about 750 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of a remote forested region in what is now northern Russia (map).

In comparison, an impact from an asteroid with a diameter of about half a mile (one kilometer) could temporarily change global climate and kill millions of people if it hit a populated area.

Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that while small objects like DA14 could hit Earth once a millennia or so, the largest and most destructive impacts have already been catalogued.

"Objects of the size that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs have all been discovered," said Spahr. (Learn about what really happened to the dinosaurs.)

A survey of nearly 9,500 near-Earth objects half a mile (one kilometer) in diameter is nearly complete. Asteroid hunters expect to complete nearly half of a survey of asteroids several hundred feet in diameter in the coming years.

"With the existing assets we have, discovering asteroids rapidly and routinely, I continue to expect the world to be safe from impacts in the future," added Spahr.

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Alleged Cop-Killer Has Calif. Region on Edge

The truck owned and driven by suspected cop killer Christopher Dorner during his alleged rampage through the Los Angeles area was found deserted and in flames on the side of Bear Mountain, Calif., this afternoon.

Heavily armed SWAT team members descended onto Bear Mountain from a helicopter manned with snipers today to investigate the fire. The San Bernadino Sheriff's Department confirmed the car was Dorner's.

Dorner, a former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, is believed to have killed one police officer and injured two others early this morning in Riverside, Calif. He is also accused of killing two civilians on Sunday after releasing a scathing "manifesto" alleging grievances committed by the police department while he worked for it and warning of coming violence toward cops.

Read More About Chris Dorner's Allegations Against the LAPD

Heavily armed officers spent much of Thursday searching for signs of Dorner, investigating multiple false leads into his whereabouts and broadcasting his license plate and vehicle description across the California Highway System.

Around 3:45 p.m. ET, police responded to Bear Mountain, where two fires were reported, and set up a staging area in the parking lot of a ski resort. They did not immediately investigate the fires, but sent a small team of heavily armed officers up in the helicopter to descend down the mountain toward the fire.

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The officers, carrying machine guns and searching the mountain for any sign of Dorner, eventually made it to the vehicle and identified it as belonging to Dorner. They have not yet found Dorner.

Late this afternoon, CNN announced that Dorner had sent a package containing his manifesto and a DVD to its offices.

PHOTOS: Former LAPD Officer Suspected in Shootings

Police officers across Southern California were on the defensive today, scaling back their public exposure, no longer responding to "barking-dog calls" and donning tactical gear outdoors.

Police departments have stationed officers in tactical gear outside police departments, stopped answering low-level calls and pulled motorcycle patrols off the road in order to protect officers who might be targets of Dorner's alleged rampage.

"We've made certain modifications of our deployments, our deviations today, and I want to leave it at that, and also to our responses," said Chief Sergio Diaz of the police department in Riverside, Calif., where the officers were shot. "We are concentrating on calls for service that are of a high priority, threats to public safety, we're not going to go on barking dog calls today."

Sgt. Rudy Lopez of the Los Angeles Police Department said Dorner is "believed to be armed and extremely dangerous."

Early Thursday morning, before they believe he shot at any police officers, Dorner allegedly went to a yacht club near San Diego, where police say he attempted to steal a boat and flee to Mexico.

He aborted the attempted theft when the boat's propeller became entangled in a rope, law enforcement officials said. It was then that he is believed to have headed to Riverside, where he allegedly shot two police officers.

"He pointed a handgun at the victim [at the yacht club] and demanded the boat," said Lt. David Rohowits of the San Diego Police Department.

Police say the rifle marksman shot at four officers in two incidents overnight, hitting three of them: one in Corona, Calif., and the two in Riverside, Calif.

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Lobbying down, but advocacy up

Is the lobbying business shrinking or just changing? It’s hard to say.

Disclosure reports filed with Congress show that the amount of money spent on lobbying fell for the second year in a row in 2012, according to a tally from the Center for Responsive Politics. Companies and lobbying firms spent $3.3 billion on the influence game last year, down about 1 percent from 2011 — which was itself down 6 percent from the $3.5 billion record set in 2010.

That small shrinkage is notable because it marks the end of what had been more than a decade of steady growth. Many top Washington firms reported shrinking revenue in 2012, including giants Akin Gump, Ogilvy Government Relations and Cassidy & Associates, which all reported double-digit drops in lobbying revenue last year.

The most common reasons cited for the decrease are political gridlock and the distraction of a major election. Those are important reasons, but there could be several other factors at work as well.

For one, there’s now a strong disincentive for lobbyists to report their work following the Obama administration’s tough new ethics rules targeting lobbyists. The number of registered lobbyists has fallen 19 percent from a high of 14,852 in 2007, according to the center.

Major corporations also have reported smaller dollar figures in recent years, but that doesn’t mean they are cutting back on their Washington footprint. Lobbyists are spending an increasing amount of time talking to the bureaucrats who are turning big legislative accomplishments from President Obama’s first term into regulations. Only high-level contacts with executive branch agencies are reported as “lobbying” under the law, however.

There is also a less-cited but perhaps much bigger trend at work: The business of lobbying is changing in response to an evolving political culture and advances in communications technology, in particular fractured mass media and online social networks.

The ease of grass-roots mobilization and the importance of shaping public discussions have made time spent away from Capitol Hill a more important part of the Washington influencer’s tool box.

“It used to be that Washington only had an army,” said Kevin O’Neill, deputy director of public policy at Patton Boggs. “Now we’ve got a navy, a coast guard and an air force.”

The change can be seen in a rash of mergers between traditional lobbying shops and public relations firms in recent years, such as the 2011 merger of Dutko Worldwide and Grayling, a public relations company.

Official reports of “lobbying” only capture time spent in direct contact with lawmakers, but employment in firms specializing in the broad category of public relations — which includes lobbying — actually increased in Washington in 2011, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The National Law Journal surveys top firms to get a broader look at their revenue from advocacy, and in many cases, the results contradict the figures reported to Congress. For example, Holland and Knight reported a 10 percent drop in lobbying revenue to Congress in 2011, down to $18.7 million, but under the broader definition of advocacy — which the journal said included “all activities intended to shape laws or regulations on behalf of a client” — revenue increased to $62.9 million.

“There is an evolution in the advocacy profession,” said Rich Gold, head of the public policy group at Holland and Knight. “Back in the old days, lobbying was more of a physical contact activity where the relationships you had made you a player in town.”

These days, both the Obama administration and tea party lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are highly attuned to their respective constituencies, meaning that often the best way to influence means spending time with the base.

Obama’s reelection campaign recently announced that it was rebooting as an issues advocacy group pushing his agenda from gun control to immigration. It will likely spend big money and become a powerful force guiding Washington policy. But not a penny of that spending will be disclosed to Congress as “lobbying.”

For previous Influence Industry columns, go to washingtonpost.com/fedpage.

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Qantas chief backs troubled Dreamliner

SYDNEY: Qantas chief Alan Joyce has thrown his support behind Boeing and its troubled 787 Dreamliner, reinforcing his commitment to introducing the planes to the Australian flag-carrier's fleet.

The next generation plane suffered a series of glitches last month, prompting a global alert from the US Federal Aviation Administration that led to the worldwide grounding of all 50 operational 787s.

Qantas has 14 of the planes on order, with delivery due this year, and has retained options and purchase rights for 50 B787s of either -8 or -9 variants available for delivery from 2016.

Joyce said nothing had changed to alter the plans.

"We believe that Boeing are a great airline manufacturing company, they're a great engineering company and they will fix this problem eventually," broadcaster ABC quoted him as saying on its website on Thursday.

"They're still producing the aircraft, so the production line hasn't stopped. They have stopped delivering aircraft to customers.

"Our aircraft are due to arrive, the first one in August. We haven't been advised of any delay at this stage."

On Wednesday, the US National Transportation Safety Board said the results of its Dreamliner probe will likely not be known for weeks.

"We're probably weeks away from being able to tell people what happened and what needs to be changed," NTSB chief Deborah Hersman said in Washington.

Hersman said investigators were "proceeding with a lot of care" in investigating the cause of a January 7 lithium-ion battery fire on a Japan Airlines (JAL) 787 that occurred as the unoccupied plane sat on the tarmac at Boston's Logan airport.

The most concerning issues uncovered so far were short circuits and thermal runaway, a chemical reaction that produces uncontrollably rising temperatures, she said.

The battery problem, and another battery incident on an All Nippon Airways 787 on January 16, led to the global grounding of all Dreamliners in service until the issue is fixed.

- AFP/xq

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Harish Rawat asks Uttarakhand CM for CBI probe into 2010 Mahakumbh scam

DEHRADUN: Union minister for water resources Harish Rawat on Wednesday asked chief minister of Uttarakhand Vijay Bahuguna to recommend a CBI probe into the alleged misappropriation of Rs.500 crores released by the previous BJP state government for preparations of the 2010 Mahakumbh in Haridwar.

Talking to reporters in Haridwar, Rawat said an impartial probe by CBI will help bring the culprits to light.

Rawat also accused senior office-bearers of VHP of reviving the Ayodhya temple issue for political mileage in view of upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

"But as voters are fully aware of such political tricks, they no longer can not be misled," Rawat said.

He also asked Bahuguna to ensure Roorkee and Udham Singh Nagar civic bodies are upgraded from municipal board to municipal corporations at the earliest.

Rawat said timely upgradation of these civic bodies will help boost industrial and other development activities considerably in the two tarai districts.

"It is always good for a chief minister to announce sops for development but these announcements should be implemented in a right spirits," Rawat said.

Referring to Bahuguna's announcement to convert Piran Kaliyar in Roorkee into a tourist destination, Rawat asked him to ensure that an order is issued at the earliest. Rawat said once an order is issued, development activities will pick up.

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Humans Swap DNA More Readily Than They Swap Stories

Jane J. Lee

Once upon a time, someone in 14th-century Europe told a tale of two girls—a kind one who was rewarded for her manners and willingness to work hard, and an unkind girl who was punished for her greed and selfishness.

This version was part of a long line of variations that eventually spread throughout Europe, finding their way into the Brothers Grimm fairytales as Frau Holle, and even into Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. (Watch a video of the Frau Holle fairytale.)

In a new study, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson is using the popular tale of the kind and unkind girls to study how human culture differs within and between groups, and how easily the story moved from one group to another.

Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and his co-authors employed tools normally used to study genetic variation within a species, such as people, to look at variations in this folktale throughout Europe.

The researchers found that there were significant differences in the folktale between ethnolinguistic groups—or groups bound together by language and ethnicity. From this, the scientists concluded that it's much harder for cultural information to move between groups than it is for genes.

The study, published February 5 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that about 9 percent of the variation in the tale of the two girls occurred between ethnolinguistic groups. Previous studies looking at the genetic diversity across groups in Europe found levels of variation less than one percent.

For example, there's a part of the story in which the girls meet a witch who asks them to perform some chores. In different renditions of the tale, the meeting took place by a river, at the bottom of a well, or in a cave. Other versions had the girls meeting with three old men or the Virgin Mary, said Atkinson.

Conformity

Researchers have viewed human culture through the lens of genetics for decades, said Atkinson. "It's a fair comparison in the sense that it's just variation across human groups."

But unlike genes, which move into a population relatively easily and can propagate randomly, it's harder for new ideas to take hold in a group, he said. Even if a tale can bridge the "ethnolinguistic boundary," there are still forces that might work against a new cultural variation that wouldn't necessarily affect genes.

"Humans don't copy the ideas they hear randomly," Atkinson said. "We don't just choose ... the first story we hear and pass it on.

"We show what's called a conformist bias—we'll tend to aggregate across what we think everyone else in the population is doing," he explained. If someone comes along and tells a story a little differently, most likely, people will ignore those differences and tell the story like everyone else is telling it.

"That makes it more difficult for new ideas to come in," Atkinson said.

Cultural Boundaries

Atkinson and his colleagues found that if two versions of the folktale were found only six miles (ten kilometers) away from each other but came from different ethnolinguistic groups, such as the French and the Germans, then those versions were as different from each other as two versions taken from within the same group—say just the Germans—located 62 miles (100 kilometers) away from each other.

"To me, the take-home message is that cultural groups strongly constrain the flow of information, and this enables them to develop highly local cultural traditions and norms," said Mark Pagel, of the University of Reading in the U.K., who wasn't involved in the new study.

Pagel, who studies the evolution of human behavior, said by email that he views cultural groups almost like biological species. But these groups, which he calls "cultural survival vehicles," are more powerful in some ways than our genes.

That's because when immigrants from a particular cultural group move into a new one, they bring genetic diversity that, if the immigrants have children, get mixed around, changing the new population's gene pool. But the new population's culture doesn't necessarily change.

Atkinson plans to keep using the tools of the population-genetics trade to see if the patterns he found in the variations of the kind and unkind girls hold true for other folktale variants in Europe and around the world.

Humans do a lot of interesting things, Atkinson said. "[And] the most interesting things aren't coded in our DNA."

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NTSB to Challenge 787 Battery Tests

The National Transportation Safety Board will publicly question at a news conference planned for Thursday morning in Washington whether the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing adequately tested the lithium batteries that have caught fire on Dreamliners in the U.S. and Japan, ABC News has learned exclusively from a government source.

The NTSB will say its investigation into the fire on the 787 at Boston's Logan Field showed gaps between what happened with the battery in testing and what happened with the battery confiscated by the NTSB in Boston, a source told ABC News.

The NTSB investigation followed the mid-January announcement that the FAA ordered the grounding of all Boeing 787 Dreamliner jets until their U.S. operator proved that batteries on the planes are safe.

The pre-certification test results were found to be different than what happened during NTSB investigation, the source said. The agency, charged with investigating civil aviation accidents in the U.S., is expected to question whether the Boeing tests certified by the FAA were "robust enough."

The NTSB told ABC News that its investigation is looking at the battery failure and what caused it, as well as the certification processes, emphasizing that the FAA has been "very cooperative in allowing our investigators access to the certification review that they are undertaking on their own."

Akio Kon/Bloomberg/Getty Images

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Both the airplane maker and the FAA are responsible for the testing, the government source said.

This morning, the chairwoman of the NTSB, Deborah Hersman, told reporters at a breakfast briefing that the initial investigation into the batteries found "multiple cells where we saw uncontrolled chemical chain reaction," including short circuiting and thermal runaway, "and those features are not what we would have expected to see in a brand new battery, in a brand new airplane.

"We're evaluating assessments that were made, whether or not those assessments were accurate, whether they were complied with and whether more needs to be done," Hersman said. "We want to make sure the design is robust, that the oversight, the manufacturing process, that those are all adequate -- and so that will be a part of our continuing investigation to determine the failure modes, what may have caused it and what can mitigate against that in the future."

The lithium batteries, one power source for the 787, have never before been used in commercial airliners and were a source of concern from the beginning because of they operate at high temperature.

"I would not want to categorically say that these batteries are not safe," Hersman said. "Any new technology, any new design, there are going to be some inherent risks. ... I would say that, in the past, the NTSB have expressed concerns about the risks and recommended mitigation measures."

Hersman added that the fire seen on board the JAL Dreamliner in Boston in "shows us some risks that were not addressed."

In a statement to ABC News, Boeing said: "Lithium ion batteries were selected after a careful review of available alternatives because they best met the performance and design objectives of the 787. We've used them successfully in other applications, such as satellites, for nearly a decade, and they are used on other aircraft, spacecraft and naval vessels.

"With that said," Boeing added, "we constantly challenge our assumptions and decisions across all of our products when new information becomes available. Nothing we learned during the design of the 787 or since has led us to change our fundamental assessment of the technology. It merits emphasis that the 787 has extensive protections in place to ensure the ability for safe flight to continue even in the presence of a battery failure."

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Strengthening security at the nation’s airports

Most people think of airport security as their walk through the metal detector and the eyeballing by transportation security officers (TSOs). Dan Liddell, whose job it is to protect the flying public at seven airports in central New York, instead sees 17 zones of worker responsibility and hundreds of different tasks.

In pursuit of safeguarding the public, Liddell, a federal security director based in Syracuse, has written a book that is now used to train TSOs. It’s called the “National Standardization Guide to Improving Security Effectiveness.” Tasks at each duty area have been inventoried and cataloged, and the “knowledge, values and skills” associated with the airport security jobs have been identified under what Liddell describes as a systems approach to training.

As important as it is to use X-ray machines and explosive trace-detection equipment and to have the correct rules and procedures in place, Liddell said transportation security relies on the skills of the people responsible for it.

“People performance is the cornerstone,” he said. “When I set out to improve things, I look at the people. I look at their proficiency, their skill in doing something and how well they’re doing that job.”

Even when people have the skills to do their jobs, they don’t necessarily do them well each time, especially when conditions can vary with each day and every passenger. To keep performance high, TSOs are tested covertly at unexpected times. A banned item will be sent through a checkpoint and the reaction and activities that take place are monitored.

Whether or not TSOs spot contraband, everyone at that checkpoint during the test participates in an “after-action” review. “It’s the learning experience that’s relevant,” Liddell said. “We’re doing a review of actual performance and you can always improve.”

Liddell is sensitive to the pressure that airport security personnel face. TSOs have the tough of performing multiple tasks under constant camera surveillance and public scrutiny, often interacting with tired or irritated travelers. The testing and training helps them continually up their game.

Thirty airports around the country that helped test the training system and now use a version of it. Paul Armes, federal security director at Nashville International Airport, was interested in creating such a system with a colleague when they both worked in Arizona, but it “never got traction.”

When he learned about what Liddell was doing, he was eager to participate. “Typical of Dan, he built it himself and practiced it so he had hard metric results, and then he started reaching out to some of us, working with his counterparts around the country to get a good representative sample,” Armes said. “He sees things others don’t see sometimes and he has the capability to drill down into the details.”

Liddell began the “pretty long process” of analyzing how people were performing at checkpoints in 2009. He sat down with subject-matter experts to produce the task inventory he now uses. In 2010, he improved the review and reporting process that occurs after covert tests events and instituted the security practices he refined at the other New York airports he oversees, including Greater Binghamton, Ithaca and four others. “I love breaking it down,” he said. “I’ve got a quest for improvement.”

In a less sneaky version of the television show, “Undercover Boss,” Liddell went through the new-hire training program for his employees to understand as much as he could about the jobs and the training provided for them, he said.

If pursuing knowledge is in Liddell’s genes, it may be because his parents were both in education. His father was a high school principal and his mother was a fifth-grade teacher. His teaching manifested itself instead in the training realm, where he strives to educate security employees as effectively as possible, inside the classroom and out.

“It’s always a challenge to meet that right balance of really great effectiveness and really great efficiency,” he said. “There are always challenges. It’s what gets me up in the morning, trying to improve.”

This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/fedpage/players/ to read about other federal workers who are making a difference.

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Passion in US lower house immigration debate

WASHINGTON: US lawmakers debated plans on Tuesday to build a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants who remade their lives in America but found themselves at the heart of a fierce debate.

President Barack Obama and a group of Republican and Democratic senators have submitted plans for reform, but as the House of Representatives took up the issue, there were signs the bipartisan facade is coming under strain.

While from the Democratic side of the aisle, a rising Hispanic-American political star made an impassioned plea to fix a broken system, more senior Republicans warned against pushing too fast for change.

"Immigration is more than a political issue. It's who we are," said Julian Castro, the charismatic young mayor of San Antonio, Texas who had a star turn last year on the stage of the Democratic National Convention.

"Immigrants have made ours the greatest country in the world," he told a packed House Judiciary Committee hearing. "Doing nothing is not an option."

But Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the committee, warned against a "rush to judgment" -- despite concerns among his Republican colleagues that they have lost the support of a generation of Hispanic and Asian voters.

"I think we can all agree that our nation's immigration system is in desperate need of repair and it is not working as efficiently and fairly as it should be," he told the first of several hearings on the issue.

Goodlatte warned his panel "needs to take the time to learn from the past so our efforts to reform our immigration laws do not repeat the same mistakes."

The burst of activity on Capitol Hill marks the best chance in years to craft legislation to tighten border security, improve employment verification and bring some 11 million illegal immigrants out of limbo.

A 2007 effort spearheaded by then-president George W. Bush failed.

Obama and top Republicans are for once in agreement that political and demographic trends have suddenly shifted to offer the best chance for serious reform in a generation.

November's election saw Obama re-elected with 70 percent backing from Hispanic American voters -- many of whom have friends or relatives seeking papers.

It shook Republicans into realizing that their tough stance on immigration had driven Hispanics away from the party, and party luminaries like Senator Marco Rubio have come out strongly in favor of immigration reform.

But differences remain, particularly in the contentious issue of how to accommodate the millions who entered the country without permission, or who came in legally but overstayed their visas.

The issue bubbled over in the hearing room when about eight protesters stood up with fists raised, and chanted "undocumented and unafraid!" for about 30 seconds before walking out.

Castro said a pathway to citizenship, similar to the one proposed by the bipartisan group of senators last month, was crucial in order to bring 11 million undocumented immigrants "out of the shadows and into the full light of the American dream."

Republican Goodlatte pushed back, seeking to carve a possible compromise option short of full citizenship for those who entered illegally or stayed beyond their visa.

"Are there options that we should consider between the extremes of mass deportation and a pathway to citizenship for those not lawfully present in the United States?" Goodlatte asked.

Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a former immigration lawyer from California, conceded the system was dysfunctional, but that "partial legalization, as some are suggesting, is a dangerous path."

She argued that merely providing undocumented workers with legal status but no way to work towards full citizenship could create a "permanent underclass," while kicking the undocumented out en masse would trigger economic chaos.

With up to 90 percent of the estimated two million migrant farm workers in the country illegally, "you could do e-verify and find out they're not properly here and American agriculture would collapse."

Obama addressed the immigration issue Tuesday as well, hosting meetings with more than two dozen progressive leaders and business executives.

Steve Case, co-founder of America Online, said he was encouraged by the discussion at the White House.

"The president and his team listened to numerous proposals, outlined many of their own and expressed a desire to build a bipartisan consensus regarding comprehensive immigration reform," Case said.

-AFP/ac

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