Folk music legend Pete Seeger has won a prize and he might just sing a song to celebrate.

The 92-year-old troubadour is receiving a "Distinguished Service" award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. According to academy executive director Virginia Dajani, Seeger might perform at the May 16 ceremony, where playwright Tony Kushner will present Seeger a certificate and a check for $1,000. In an acceptance letter sent to the academy, and shared with The Associated Press, Seeger wrote that his father, Charles Louis Seeger, Jr., would have been "especially pleased." The elder Seeger was a composer, conductor and pioneer of "ethnomusicology."

"I am glad we are all realizing that the arts, in a broad sense, may save the world, save the human race," Pete Seeger wrote to the academy.

Also Wednesday, the academy announced that a pair of Pulitzer Prize winners and academy members will receive gold medals for lifetime achievement: David McCullough for biography and Steven Reich for music. Because academy members are eligible for the medals, no cash prize is awarded.

The arts academy is an honorary society founded in 1898. It has a core membership of 250 writers, artists and musicians, including McCullough, Reich, Toni Morrison, Jasper Johns and Ornette Coleman

Federal prosecutors brought the first criminal charges Tuesday in the Gulf oil spill, accusing a former BP engineer of deleting more than 300 text messages that indicated the blown-out well was spewing far more crude than the company was telling the public at the time.

Two years and four days after the drilling-rig explosion that set off the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, Kurt Mix, 50, of Katy, Texas, was arrested and charged with two counts of obstruction of justice for allegedly destroying evidence.

His attorney, Joan McPhee, issued a statement Tuesday evening describing the charges as misguided and that she is confident Mix will be exonerated.

"The government says he intentionally deleted text messages from his phone, but the content of those messages still resides in thousands of emails, text messages and other documents that he saved," she said. "Indeed, the emails that Kurt preserved include the very ones highlighted by the government."

The U.S. Justice Department made it clear that the investigation is still going on and suggested that more people could be arrested. In a statement, Attorney General Eric Holder said prosecutors "will hold accountable those who violated the law in connection with the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history."

Federal investigators have been looking into the causes of the blowout and the actions of managers, engineers and rig workers at BP and its subcontractors Halliburton and Transocean in the days and hours before the April 20, 2010, explosion.

But the case against Mix focuses only on the aftermath of the blast, when BP scrambled for weeks to plug the leak. Even then, the charges are not really about the disaster itself, but about an alleged attempt to thwart the investigation into it.

In court papers, the FBI said one of the areas under investigation is whether the oil company intentionally lowballed the amount of crude spewing from the well.

In outlining the charges, the government suggested Mix knew the rate of flow from the busted well was much greater than the company publicly acknowledged.

Prosecutors also said BP gave the public an optimistic account of its May 2010 efforts to plug the well via a technique called a "top kill," even though the company's internal data and some of the text messages showed the operation was likely to fail.

An accurate flow-rate estimate is necessary to determine how much in penalties BP and its subcontractors could face under the Clean Water Act. In court papers, prosecutors appeared to suggest the company was also worried about the effect of the disaster on its stock price.

The charges came a day before a federal judge was to consider granting preliminary approval of a $7.8 billion civil settlement between BP and a committee of plaintiffs.

In a statement, BP said it is cooperating with the Justice Department and added: "BP had clear policies requiring preservation of evidence in this case and has undertaken substantial and ongoing efforts to preserve evidence."

The FBI said in court papers that Mix had been repeatedly notified by BP that instant messages and text messages needed to be preserved.

Mix, who resigned from BP in January, appeared on Tuesday afternoon before a judge in Houston, shackled at his hands and feet, and was released on $100,000 bail. His attorney had no comment afterward. If convicted, Mix could get up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count.

The engineer deleted more than 200 messages sent to a BP supervisor from his iPhone containing information about how much oil was spilling out, then erased 100 more messages to a contractor the following year, prosecutors said. Some of the messages were later recovered via forensic computer techniques.

Many of the messages had to do with an effort to plug up the well with heavy mud injected under high pressure.

In public statements, the company professed optimism that the top kill would work, giving it a 60 to 70 percent chance of success.

On the day the top kill began, Mix estimated in a text to his supervisor that more than 15,000 barrels of oil per day were spilling — three times BP's public estimate of 5,000 barrels and an amount much greater than what BP said the top kill could probably handle.

At the end of the first day, Mix texted his supervisor: "Too much flow rate — over 15,000 and too large an orifice." Despite Mix's findings, BP continued to make public statements that the top kill was proceeding according to plan, prosecutors said. On May 29, the top kill was halted and BP announced its failure.

The company's stock dropped 15 percent on the next trading day, the government said.

David Uhlmann, a University of Michigan law professor who was chief of the Justice Department's environmental crimes section, said the charges are probably "just the first of what will be multiple criminal charges."

"It could be the sign that the government believes there was a more far-reaching cover-up about the size of the spill," he said.

BP stock closed at $41.91 Tuesday, a drop of just 4 cents. Analysts said investors evidently recognized the charges involved just one, low-ranking employee and saw no hint yet of any kind of larger cover-up on BP's part.

The explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 workers. More than 200 million gallons of crude oil leaked from the well off the Louisiana coast before it was capped.

Under the Clean Water Act, polluters can be fined $1,100 to $4,300 per barrel of spilled oil, with the higher amount imposed if the government can show the disaster was caused by gross negligence.

Al Sunseri, whose family-owned oyster business was damaged by the spill, said there was little real news in the arrest of Mix. "I personally believe it's so involved that we could never really understand the magnitude of the bad players involved," he said.

Billy Nungesser, president of hard-hit Plaquemines Parish who has long accused BP of misleading the public about the spill, said: "We're just glad that the truth, and all the truth, will come out. Where crimes were committed, BP needs to pay the price."

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Associated Press reporters Kevin McGill in New Orleans and Ramit Masti-Plushnick in Houston contributed to this story.

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Imploring both political parties to give ground, President Barack Obama declared Monday he would reject any stopgap extension of the nation's borrowing limit, adding fresh urgency for Republicans and fellow Democrats to resolve intense tax and spending disputes and head off economic calamity.

"If not now, when?" Obama said in a news conference just ahead of his latest bargaining session with congressional leaders at the White House. That meeting lasted about 90 minutes and ended with no sign of progress.

Lawmakers planned to return to the White House for more talks Tuesday afternoon.

Obama told reporters the sessions would be an everyday affair until there was agreement, and he refused to even entertain the idea of a backup plan should they fail and the government should default on Aug. 2.

"We are going to get this done," Obama insisted. They have two weeks or less to do so in order to get any deal through Congress in time.

Yet the path to an accord remained hard to see. Even as Obama spoke, Republicans renewed their opposition to the tax increases he sees as crucial along with spending cuts for reducing huge federal deficits and restraining the soaring national debt.

"Do you need to raise taxes in order to get control of spending? I think the answer is no," said House Speaker John Boehner just before heading to the White House.

Said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor: "We are not going to raise taxes. That's all."

And there was no indication late Monday that the latest bargaining session moved either side off its talking points.

"Republicans are insisting on cutting seniors' benefits instead of closing taxpayer-funded giveaways to billionaires and corporate jet owners," Adam Jentleson, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, said after the White House meeting broke up.

Democrats suggested that most spending cuts be concentrated in the later years of a deal, but a Republican aide said GOP lawmakers took issue with that suggestion and want the cuts to begin right away.

A potential deal — a package that could total $2 trillion or more in deficit cuts over a decade — is considered necessary for Congress to lift the nation's $14.3 trillion debt limit. Failure to lift that cap could cause the government to default on its bills and sink the economy and the world into deeper trouble.

Obama renewed his case Monday for a package that would put a historic dent in the country's deficits by blending politically poisonous elements for both parties: tax hikes for the wealthy and big corporations opposed by Republicans and social service cuts that Democrats decry.

Obama tried to alter the debate by saying that any potential tax increases on wealthier people would not take effect until 2013. That would fall after the next election, when Obama will seek re-election and control of the House and the Senate will be at stake. Meanwhile, a short-term debt-limit increase would keep the issue boiling during the campaign.

The president said he would refuse to accept stopgap legislation. "It's not going to get easier; it's going to get harder," Obama said. "So we might as well do it now. Pull of the Band-Aid. Eat our peas."

He said he would refuse to sign into law a short-term extension of the debt limit, which technically left open the possibility that it could become law without his signature. The White House later confirmed that Obama meant he would veto such a bill.

More broadly, Obama sought to position himself as the pragmatist seeking a compromise in a divided town. He tried to build pressure on Congress to prove to a disillusioned American people that "this town can actually do something once in a while."

To Republicans, he said they have long pushed deficit reduction as the way to create desperately needed jobs and now won't take yes for an answer. "Where are they?" he said. "I mean, this is what they claim would be the single biggest boost to business certainty and confidence. So what's the hold-up?"

And to Democrats eager to protect entitlements, Obama said doing nothing is not tenable. The president said Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid have to be made stronger for the longer term and the rising debt each year will crowd out Democratic priorities such as education and medical research.

"So, yeah, we're going to have a sales job," he conceded. "This is not pleasant."

The president himself is under pressure to get a deal that can pass Congress without undermining his own positions — and voters.

Obama's previous meeting with top lawmakers from both parties, on Sunday night, accomplished little.

And that was after the possibility of a grander deal on the magnitude of $4 trillion, as discussed by Obama and Boehner, fell apart Saturday night amid steep Republican opposition.

The meeting Monday was expected to focus on potential debt savings identified by Vice President Joe Biden and lawmakers during earlier talks. But that group, too, was bitterly divided over taxes, and the amount of savings they found elsewhere still falls short of what all sides agree must come together quickly.

For his part, Boehner told reporters that he agreed with Obama that the nation's borrowing limit must be raised, but he said revenues can be raised without hiking taxes. Boehner said Obama insists on raising taxes but the White House isn't serious enough about reforming entitlement programs.

Here, too, there was an enormous gap in how both sides described the state of play.

"I am prepared to take on significant heat from my party to get something done," Obama said, contending he has "bent over backward" to work with Republicans.

The president made clear Monday that any changes to Social Security would be designed to ensure money is available for beneficiaries years from now — as opposed to trimming costs to reduce the deficit. One possibility would lower cost-of-living increases for recipients.

As to why that would be included in debt talks, Obama said it all came back to politics.

"If you're going to take a bunch of tough votes," he said, "You might as well do it now."

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Associated Press writers Erica Werner and Julie Pace contributed to this story.