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ByAliciaA.Caldwell TheAssociatedPress WASHINGTON Underwith- ering criticism from Con- gress, the director of the Secret Service on Tuesday admitted failures in her agency's critical mission of protecting the president but repeatedly sidestepped key questions about how a knife-carrying intruder penetrated ring after ring of security before finally being tackled deep inside the White House. Despite the extraordi- nary lapses in the Sept. 19 incident, Julia Pierson as- serted: "The president is safe today." Hours later, reports emerged of yet another fail- ure in Secret Service proto- col, this time in President Barack Obama's presence. On Sept. 16, an armed federal contractor rode on an elevator with Obama and his security detail while the president was visiting the Centers for Dis- ease Control and Preven- tion in Atlanta, the Wash- ington Examiner reported. The Washington Post re- ported similar details and added that the man had three convictions for as- sault and battery. The of- fice of Republican Rep. Ja- son Chaffetz of Utah, who has helped lead Congress' investigation, said a whis- tleblower had provided him the same details. The gun was discovered only because the contrac- tor was questioned after he persisted in taking video of Obama on the elevator, the reports said. The contrac- tor was immediately fired by his employers. Was Obama informed? It was unclear. But Pier- son, under questioning at the hearing, said that she is the one who briefs Obama on threats to his personal security and that she had d briefed him only once this year, "for the Sept. 19 inci- dent." At the Capitol, Demo- cratic and Republican law- makers alike expressed the view that the Sept. 19 breach of White House security had blemished the storied agency, and several pressed for an independent inquiry into what went wrong. They were not assuaged by Pier- son's vow that "I'll make sure that it does not hap- pen again" or by the agen- cy's own investigation. "I wish to God you pro- tected the White House like you protected your rep- utation here today," Demo- cratic Rep. Stephen Lynch told Pierson at a public hear- ing that was followed by a classified, closed-door brief- ing. Rep. Chaffetz said after- ward: "The more I learn, the more it scares me." Calm but defensive in testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Pier- son disclosed that shortly before the intruder jumped the fence at least two of her uniformed officers recog- nized him from an earlier troubling encounter but did not approach him or report his presence to su- periors. On Aug. 25, Army vet- eran Omar J. Gonzalez was stopped while car- rying a small hatchet near the fence south of the White House, Pierson said. Weeks later, the same officers observed him "for some time" on the Penn- sylvania Avenue north side but never intervened. Gon- zalez later went over the fence, sprinted to the un- locked front door and ran through half the first floor of the White House before being tackled. Gonzalez was indicted Tuesday on a federal charge of entering a restricted building while carrying a deadly weapon and two vi- olations of District of Co- lumbia law. At the House hearing, Pierson said she did not know why Gonzalez was not intercepted earlier. "Personnel actions will be taken" once the agen- cy's review is complete, she said, in what appeared to be a euphemism for possi- ble discipline or termina- tions. Lawmakers stopped short of calling on her to resign. Chaffetz said he was not there "yet." Lynch said, "Let's just say I'm not im- pressed with how she has dealt with White House se- curity." Obama and his daugh- ters had left for Camp Da- vid shortly before the epi- sode; Michelle Obama had gone to the retreat earlier in the day. Obama continues to have confidence in the Se- cret Service, White House press secretary Josh Ear- nest said Tuesday, though the spokesman urged the agency to release non-clas- sified results from its in- vestigation as soon as pos- sible. He cited a "legitimate public interest in this mat- ter because it relates to the safety and security of the commander in chief." Even when their protec- tors fall short, presidents rarely publicly criticize those who risk their lives to keep the first family safe, but rather express appreci- ation for their service. That means Congress provides the only real public over- sight of the Secret Service. KNIFE-CARRYING INTRUDER SecretServicechiefgrilled over White House intrusion J.SCOTTAPPLEWHITE—THEASSOCIATEDPRESS Secret Service Director Julia Pierson testifies Tuesday before the House Oversight Committee in its examination of a security breach at the White House. WONG MAYE-E — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A protester rests next to a defaced cut-out of Hong Kong's Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying at a protest sites near the government headquarters Tuesday in Hong Kong. By Didi Tang The Associated Press BEIJING China's govern- ment has cut off news about Hong Kong's pro-democ- racy protests to the rest of the country, a clampdown so thorough that no image of the rallies has appeared in state-controlled media, and at least one man has been detained for repost- ing accounts of the events. By contrast, media in semiautonomous Hong Kong have been broad- casting nonstop about the crowds, showing unarmed students fending off tear gas and pepper spray with um- brellas as they call for more representative democracy in the former British colony. The contrast highlights the differences in the "one country, two systems" ar- rangement that China's Communist Party agreed to when it negotiated the 1997 return of Hong Kong. It also reflects Beijing's ex- treme sensitivity about any possible sparks of pro-de- mocracy protest spreading to the mainland. "The authorities see this as a matter of life and death," said Shanghai- based columnist and inde- pendent analyst Zhao Chu. "They don't see it as a lo- cal affair but a fuse that can take down their world." In Hong Kong, broad- casters NOW and Cable TV have carried wall-to-wall coverage of the unfolding events, including student leaders storming govern- ment headquarters Friday and the running clashes with police over the week- end. Hong Kong's pro-de- mocracy newspaper, the popular Apple Daily, has run its own live Internet feed that features aerial im- ages of the crowds captured by a drone. Beijing clearly has not been pleased with the un- fettered coverage and has appeared to lump the Hong Kong media outlets in with foreign ones. "Several Western media are making a big fuss, and some even have done live casts," said an editorial on the party-run news site of the People's Daily. While Hong Kong en- joys civil liberties unheard of on the mainland under the "one country, two sys- tems" arrangement, the situation is vastly different in Beijing's official media, through which the authori- ties can largely control the narrative on any outbreaks of unrest in the mainland. The coverage of the Hong Kong protests has been con- fined in mainland China to TV anchors reading brief statements with no video and text reports with no photos. China bars images of p ro te st s in m ed ia STATE-CONTROLLED MEDIA By Josh Boak The Associated Press WASHINGTON Education is supposed to help bridge the gap between the wealthiest people and everyone else. Ask the experts, and they'll count the ways: Preschool can lift chil- dren from poverty. Top high schools prepare students for college. A college degree boosts pay over a lifetime. And the U.S. economy would grow faster if more people stayed in school longer. Plenty of data back them up. But the data also show something else: Wealth- ier parents have been step- ping up education spend- ing so aggressively that they're widening the na- tion's wealth gap. When the Great Recession struck in late 2007 and squeezed most family budgets, the top 10 percent of earners — with incomes averaging $253,146 — went in a differ- ent direction: They doubled down on their kids' futures. Their average education spending per child jumped 35 percent to $5,210 a year during the recession com- pared with the two pre- ceding years — and they sustained that faster pace through the recovery. For the remaining 90 percent of households, such spend- ing averaged around a flat $1,000, according to re- search by Emory University sociologist Sabino Kornrich. "People at the top just have so much income now that they're easily able to spend more on their kids," Kornrich said. The sums being spent by wealthier parents amount to a kind of calculated in- vestment in their children. Research has linked the ad- ditional dollars to increased SAT scores, a greater likeli- hood of graduating from college and future job secu- rity and high salaries. The trend emerged grad- ually over the past three de- cades but accelerated during the worst economic slump since the 1930s. Now, en- rollments at pricier private schools are climbing. Par- ents are bidding up home prices in top public school districts. Pay is surging for SAT tutors, who now aver- age twice the median U.S. hourly wage of $24.45. The patterns suggest that the wealth gap could widen in coming years, analysts say. "If you're at the bottom and the top keeps pulling away, you're just further be- hind," said Melissa Kearney, a senior economics fellow at the Brookings Institution. Between 2007 and 2011, enrollment at private el- ementary and secondary schools whose annual tu- ition averaged $28,340 — more than half the median U.S. household income — jumped 36 percent, accord- ing to federal data. The in- tensified reach for the cost- liest schools occurred even as enrollment in private schools overall fell. "Whatweknowaboutpar- ents who send their kids to private school is that by and large they place a very high priority on education," said John Chubb, president of the National AssociationofInde- pendent Schools. "As prices go up, they may befrustrated and angry, but they find a way to make it work." Most families can't com- pete. Incomes have barely budged for most Americans since 1980 after accounting for inflation. For the top 10 percent, IRS data show pay has jumped 80 percent after inflation. For the top 1 per- cent, it's soared 177 percent. The education divide has grown despite the multi-de- cade presence of Head Start, the federal program for nu- trition and early childhood education. Most states rely primarily on a private pre- school system that can re- inforce the wealth gap, said Sean Reardon, a Stanford University professor who has studied education and income inequality. DATA School spending by affluent is widening wealth gap, study says The Associated Press DALLAS A patient being treated at a Dallas hospital has tested positive for Eb- ola, the first case of the dis- ease to be diagnosed in the United States, federal health officials announced Tuesday. Officials at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital said the unidentified patient is being kept in isolation and that the hospital is follow- ing Centers for Disease Con- trol recommendations to keep doctors, staff and pa- tients safe. The hospital had an- nounced a day earlier that the patient's symptoms and recent travel indicated a case of Ebola, the virus that has killed more than 3,000 people across West Africa and infected a handful of Americans who have trav- eled to that region. The CDC initially embar- goed the announcement of the diagnosis until 4:30 p.m. CDT, but then lifted the embargo after several news organizations broke that restriction. The CDC has said 12 other people in the U.S. have been tested for Ebola since July 27. Those tests came back negative. Four American aid work- ers who have become in- fected while volunteering in West Africa have been treated in special isolation facilities in hospitals in At- lanta and Nebraska, and a U.S. doctor exposed to the virus in Sierra Leone is un- der observation in a simi- lar facility at the National Institutes of Health. 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