News reports: White House intruder gets much farther into mansion than previously described
WASHINGTON — The intruder who climbed a fence made it farther inside the White House than the Secret Service has publicly acknowledged, the Washington Post and New York Times newspapers reported Monday. The disclosures came on the eve of a congressional oversight hearing with the director of the embattled agency assigned to protect the president’s life.
Citing unnamed sources — three people familiar with the incident and a congressional aide — the newspapers said Omar J. Gonzalez ran past the guard at the front door and into the East Room, which is about halfway across the first floor of the building. Gonzalez was eventually “tackled” by a counter-assault agent, according to the Post, which was first to report the news.
In the hours after the fence-jumper incident, Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan told The Associated Press that the suspect had been apprehended just inside the North Portico doors of the White House.
The Secret Service also said that night that the suspect had been unarmed — an assertion that was revealed to be false the next day when officials acknowledged Gonzalez had a knife with him when he was apprehended.
For some young women, experiencing a recession can mean forgoing children for life, study says
NEW YORK — When the economy tanks, women have fewer babies. But what happens in the following years, when conditions improve?
A massive new study suggests that for some U.S. women, living through a recession can mean they will never have children.
In fact, the authors project that among women who were in their early 20s in 2008 — early in the so-called “Great Recession” — about 151,000 will forgo having any children as a result, at least by age 40.
Overall, the lingering impact of that recession may ultimately mean some 427,000 fewer children being born over the course of a couple decades, the authors say.
On a societal level these effects are small. The projected number of childless women is a tiny fraction of the 9 million women in that age group, 20-24. The drop-off in births isn’t much for a nation that produces around 4 million babies a year.
Hong Kong police defend use of tear gas, but soften tactics against protesters
HONG KONG — Hong Kong’s embattled police defended their use of tear gas but softened their tactics Monday after forceful attempts to quell pro-democracy protests drew tens of thousands more people into the streets in an unprecedented show of civil disobedience.
“The students are protecting the right to vote, for Hong Kong’s future. We are not scared, we are not frightened, we just fight for it,” said Carol Chan, a 55-year-old civil service worker who said she took two days off to join the protests after becoming angered over police use of tear gas Sunday.
Instead of candlelight, a few hundred people staged a brief “mobile light” vigil Monday night, waving their glowing cell phones as the protests stretched into their fourth day. Crowds chanted calls for the city’s unpopular leader, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, to resign, and sang anthems calling for freedom.
Schools develop ‘newcomer’ programs, English help for teens crossing US border alone
FRANKFORD, Del. — American schools are scrambling to provide services to the large number of children and teenagers who crossed the border alone in recent months.
Unaccompanied minors who made up the summer spike at the border have moved to communities of all sizes, in nearly every state, Federal data indicates, to live with a relative and await immigration decisions. The Supreme Court has ruled that schools have an obligation to educate all students regardless of their immigration status, so schools have become a safe haven for many of the tens of thousands of these young people mostly from central America living in limbo.
Delaware’s rural Sussex County has long attracted immigrants, partly because of work in chicken factories, and soybean and corn fields. The district’s population is more than one-quarter Hispanic, and for years has offered an early learning program for non-English speakers.
By wire sources