White House intruder gets farther than 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 The 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.
Getting so far would have required Gonzalez to dash through the main entrance hall, turn a corner, then run through the center hallway half-way across the first floor of the building, which spans 168 feet in total, according to the White House Historical Association.
Beijing faces challenge in curbing protests
BEIJING – Pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have handed China’s Communist leadership a thorny political dilemma.
Beijing cannot crack down too harshly on the semi-autonomous territory where a freewheeling media ensures global visibility, but it is determined to end the demonstrations quickly so as not to embolden dissidents, separatists and anti-government protesters elsewhere in China. It has blocked most news and images of the protests from being published on the mainland.
Demonstrators demanding a greater say in choosing the financial center’s leader, or chief executive, defied attempts over the weekend by riot police to end their sit-ins with blasts of tear gas and pepper spray, and on Monday fanned out to more neighborhoods of Hong Kong in a tense standoff.
“The Chinese authorities do not want to see it spread to the mainland,” said Beijing-based historian and political analyst Zhang Lifan.
Beijing’s increasingly hard-line leadership, which has clamped down over the past year and a half on dissent and any calls for greater democracy, is highly unlikely to agree to any discussion about political reforms in Hong Kong. Nor does it want bloodshed.
Associated Press
