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The House approved a non-binding measure late Thursday night calling for active-duty military personnel to be exempt from the District’s gun laws, the latest in a series of issues that have divided Congress and local leaders.

(Ricky Carioti) The “Sense of Congress” resolution — offered by Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) as an amendment to the massive Defense authorization bill — has no force of law and passed by voice vote, without a roll call. But it still drew a harsh response from Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), who was already smarting from being denied the chance to testify Thursday at a hearing on a measure that would ban late-term abortions in the District.

“If Representative Gingrey believes that active duty military personnel should be exempt from federal or state or local firearms laws, why did he not offer an amendment that would apply nationwide?” Norton asked on the House floor Thursday night. “Perhaps he did not offer such an amendment for the same reason that the Republican sponsor of the bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks in the District of Columbia did not introduce a 20-week bill that would apply nationwide, either. They pick on D.C. because they think they can.”

(Tim Craig/The Washington Post)

Marveling over what they billed as the potential future for getting around town, D.C. Council members Mary Cheh and Tommy Wells took a quick spin Thursday in Google’s new self-driving car.

Cheh (D-Ward 3), chairwoman of the Committee on the Environment, Public Works and Transportation, and Wells (D-Ward 6) rode about 10 blocks in the self-driving Toyota Prius following a briefing with Google officials at the company’s Washington office on New York Avenue NW.

 “It would enable people who are not able to drive, people who are blind or disabled, it would enable them to drive a car,” Cheh said after the trip. “It would also have an extraordinary impact on parking, and traffic itself, because cars are idle about 90 percent of the time…so cars could be used by more than one person. You could get out of your car and tell it to go find a parking space.”

Google received a special permit from the District to bring the prototype of the car to city and test drive it on city streets – so long as there was someone in the vehicle who could manually control it at a moment’s notice.

This item has been updated.

Democrats and District officials amplified their complaints Thursday ahead of an afternoon congressional hearing on a bill that would ban all abortions in the District after 20 weeks.

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) said the abortion bill made her feel “disgust and anger.” (Melina Mara - THE WASHINGTON POST) Rep. Trent Franks’ (R-Ariz.) bill, the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, would prohibit all D.C. abortions beyond 20 weeks except to save the life of the mother, based on the much-debated idea that fetuses beyond that point are capable of feeling pain. The measure will be the subject of a 4 p.m. hearing before the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, which Franks chairs.

District leaders are fiercely opposed to the measure, and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) has complained that she asked to testify at the hearing and was rejected.

The District will get $70,349 of the record $45 million that Skechers is paying to settle charges that its line of toning shoes were hyped with unsubstantiated health-related claims, including weight loss and toning muscles.

The city was included in the class-action lawsuit with the Federal Trade Commission and 43 states against Skechers, which denied the wrongdoing but agreed to settle.

D.C. residents bought about $2 million worth of the shoes and will get about $80,000 in restitution from the settlement, according to the city attorney general’s office.

Neighboring Virginia will get $115,000 from the settlement.

Consumers of the Shape-Ups, Tone-Ups or Skechers Resistance Runner can get information about filing a claim for a partial refund at www.ftc.gov/skechers.

Mayor Vincent C. Gray announced Wednesday that 3,000 District residents have now found jobs through the One City One Hire program, an aggressive effort to put 10,000 unemployed residents back to work in a year’s time.

Gray (D) used his biweekly news conference to give an update on the program that launched in September 2011 and is modeled after a similar initiative in Atlanta.

The District Department of Employment Services program matches unemployed residents with jobs available, mostly in the private sector. The city lures employers with tax credits, wage subsidies and money for on-the-job training. When the program began last year, 15 businesses signed up. Gray said the city now has 655 employer participants.