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6A Daily News – Friday, October 4, 2013 Police shoot, kill driver after Capitol Hill chase WASHINGTON (AP) — A woman with a 1-year-old girl led Secret Service and police on a harrowing car chase from the White House past the Capitol Thursday, attempting to penetrate the security barriers at both national landmarks before she was shot to death, police said. The child survived. ''I'm pretty confident this was not an accident,'' said Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier. Still, Capitol Police said there appeared to be no terrorist link. Authorities would not say whether the woman had been armed. Tourists, congressional staff and even some senators watched as a caravan of law enforcement vehicles chase a black Infiniti with Connecticut license plates down Constitution Avenue outside the Capitol. House and Senate lawmakers, inside debating how to end a government shutdown, briefly shuttered their chambers as Capitol Police shut down the building. The woman's car at one point had been surrounded by police cars and she managed to escape, careening around a traffic circle and past the north side of the Capitol. Video shot by a TV camerman showed police pointing firearms at her car before she rammed a Secret Service vehicle and continued driving. Lanier said police shot and killed her a block northeast of the historic building. One Secret Service member and a 23-year veteran of the Capitol Police were injured. Officials said they are in good condition and expected to recover. ''This appears to be an isolated, singular matter, with, at this point, no nexus to terrorism,'' said Capitol Police Chief Kim Dine. Authorities did not immediately identified the driver of the car. Stamford, Conn., Mayor Michael Pavia said the FBI was executing a search warrant at a Stamford address in connection with the investigation. Police officers had cordoned off a condominium building and the surrounding neighborhood in the shoreline city. The pursuit began when the car sped onto a driveway leading to the White House, over a set of lowered barricades. When the driver couldn't get through a second barrier, she spun the car in the opposite direction, flip- ping a Secret Service officer over the hood of the car as she sped away, said B.J. Campbell, a tourist from Portland, Ore. Then the chase began. ''The car was trying to get away. But it was going over the median and over the curb,'' said Matthew Coursen, who was watching from a cab window when the Infiniti sped by him. ''The car got boxed in and that's when I saw an officer of some kind draw his weapon and fire shots into the car.'' Police shot and killed the driver just outside the Hart Senate Office Building, where many senators have their offices. Dine said an officer took the child from the car to a hospital. She is in good condition under protective custody, officials said. A few senators between the Capitol and their office buildings said they heard the shots. ''We heard three, four, five pops,'' said Sen. Bob Casey, DPa. Police ordered Casey and nearby tourists to crouch behind a car for protection, then hustled everyone into the Capitol. Others witnessed the incident, too. ''There were multiple shots fired and the air was filled with gunpowder,'' said Berin Szoka, whose office at a technology think tank overlooks the shooting scene. The shooting comes two weeks after a mentally disturbed employee terrorized the Navy Yard with a shotgun, leaving 13 people dead including the gunman. Before the disruption, lawmakers had been trying to find common ground to end a government shutdown. The House had just finished approving legislation aimed at partly lifting the government shutdown by paying National Guard and Reserve members. Capitol Police on the plaza around the Capitol said they were working without pay as the result of the shutdown. Budget, debt unresolved on shutdown's 3rd day WASHINGTON (AP) — Three days into a government shutdown, President Barack Obama pointedly blamed House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday for keeping federal agencies closed, while the bitter budget dispute moved closer to a more critical showdown over the nation's line of credit. The Treasury warned of calamitous results if Congress fails to raise the debt limit. Answering Obama, Boehner complained that the president was ''steamrolling ahead'' with the implementation of the nation's new health care law. As the government operated sporadically, the stock market sank to its lowest level in nearly a month. The shutdown was clearly leaving its mark. The National Transportation Safety Board wasn't sending investigators to Tennessee to probe a deadly church bus crash that killed eight people and sent 14 others to the hospital. The Labor Department said it wouldn't release the highly anticipated September jobs report on Friday because the government remains shuttered. Outside the Capitol, shots rang out at midafternoon bringing an already tense Congress under lockdown, a nerve-wracking moment in a city still recovering from a Sept. 16 mass shooting at the Navy Yard. Authorities and witnesses said a woman tried to ram her car through a White House barricade then led police on a chase that ended in gunfire and her death outside the Capitol more than 1 mile away. Despite the heated political rhetoric, some signs of a possible way out of the shutdown emerged. But the state of play remained in flux. Two House Republicans said Boehner told them he would allow a House vote Published through a project co-sponsorship agreement with The Daily News DAILY NEWS RED BLUFF TEHAMA COUNTY on restarting the entire government — but only if conservative GOP lawmakers assured him they would not attack it for failing to contain curbs on the health care law. So far they have been unwilling to give that commitment. The two spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal details of private discussions. The shutdown and the approaching debt ceiling were merging into one confrontation, raising the stakes for the president and Congress as well as for the economy. Obama and his Treasury Department said that failure to raise the nation's borrowing limit, expected to hit its $16.7 trillion cap in midOctober, could precipitate an economic nosedive worse than the Great Recession. A default could cause the nation's credit markets to freeze, the value of the dollar to plummet and U.S. interest rates to skyrocket, according to the Treasury report. Obama catalogued a litany of troubles that could be caused by the failure to raise the debt ceiling, from delayed Social Security and disability checks to worldwide economic repercussions. ''If we screw up, everybody gets screwed up,'' he said. The speaker's office reiterated Boehner's past assertion that he would not let the United States default on its debt. ''But if we're going to raise the debt limit, we need to deal with the drivers of our debt and deficits,'' his spokesman, Michael Steel, said. ''That's why we need a bill with cuts and reforms to get our economy moving again.'' Conservatives have insisted that either reopening the government or increasing the debt ceiling must be accompanied by a measure that either delays or defunds the nation's new health care law. Absent those concessions, Republicans want cuts in spending, savings in major benefit programs and an overhaul of the tax system. Obama, for his part, firmly restated his opposition to a negotiation. ''You don't get to demand some ransom in exchange for keeping the government running,'' he said tartly. ''You don't get to demand ransom in exchange for keeping the economy running.'' Looking to deflect the Democratic finger-pointing on the shutdown, the Republican-controlled House pushed a pair of bills through the House on Thursday restoring money to veterans' programs and to pay National Guard and Reserve members. House leaders also have scheduled a vote on legislation backed by some of the chamber's top Democrats to give federal workers furloughed in the ongoing partial shutdown their missed pay when the government reopens. That vote could come as early as Friday or over the weekend. Senate Democrats made clear they will not agree to reopening the government on a piecemeal basis. ''You can't fall for that legislative blackmail or it will get worse and worse and worse,'' said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York.