Racial Relations

To some police officers, President Obama was merely speaking the truth about how a certain department behaved in a difficult situation. To others, he committed the unpardonable sin of sticking his nose where it does not belong. When Obama accused Cambridge, Mass., police officers Wednesday of acting "stupidly" when they arrested his friend, Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A national furor over race relations paused Thursday as President Obama, in a shady spot on the White House lawn near the Rose Garden, sat down for beers with a black Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him two weeks ago. For the two men who raised their mugs with the president and vice president -- both guests dressed in suits and ties and sitting stiffly in what was meant to be a casual moment -- the discussion of race and policing will go on. Sgt.

Authorities used pepper spray to help end a racially charged fight among two dozen juvenile prisoners at Camp Kilpatrick in Malibu over the weekend, authorities said. The brawl began with name-calling between an African American and a Latino in the camp's dormitory about 6:30 p.m. Saturday, said L.A. County Chief Probation Officer Robert Taylor. The brawl lasted about an hour, and two staff members and several inmates suffered minor injuries. Twenty-three inmates were removed from the camp and housed at two other facilities, and one of the housing units sustained minor damage, Taylor said.

Seated in the corner of a bustling classroom, school volunteer Hanan Masarwa is barely visible amid a scrum of first-graders. The 18-year-old Masarwa is teaching the children to add as part of an Israeli national service program created in August. The volunteer program is an attempt to provide avenues, other than mandatory military service from which they are exempt, for integrating Arabs and religious Jews more fully into the mainstream Jewish state.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday launched an investigation into how the Sheriff's Department conducted a narcotics-search operation at Los Angeles Trade Tech College in which 33 students, all minorities, were detained. The Oct. 17 incident has fueled allegations of racial profiling from civil rights groups and sparked changes in the way the Sheriff's Department communicates with the Los Angeles Community College District.

The absence of Sen. Barack Obama's name from today's Michigan Democratic primary ballot has angered a large swath of African American voters here, exacerbating a racial political divide and threatening party unity heading into the November general election. Many black voters are already unhappy about the state's new voter identification law and a 2006 voter-approved referendum barring affirmative action in public hiring.

Jarvis Jenkins and Kytu Ivory are two black voters with two very different ideas about the racial tensions that have flared between presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Jenkins, a transit system worker, was not offended by Clinton's recent comment that "it took a president" to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- a remark that some critics have found disrespectful toward the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

. -- Barack Obama was down to his shirt-sleeves under the hot gym lights at South Carolina State University, exhorting students at this historically black college that America can and must be transformed. "We cannot treat our poor with disregard," he thundered Tuesday, cataloging America's racial ills, starting with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "We can't leave New Orleans in a mess and then expect to be a model for this world."

Shelby King is a fan of Barack Obama. She admires his charisma and passion and believes he could unite the country as president. On Saturday, however, King plans to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton in South Carolina's Democratic primary. "She's got the experience," said King, 61, a real estate agent in Columbia, the state capital. "She's tough. She's bright. I'm a female of her era, and I know how hard it's been to get to where she's gotten." Edward Pair also likes Obama.

A spasm of cross-racial gang shootings in and around the San Gabriel Valley city of Monrovia has left a 64-year-old African American man and a 16-year-old Latina dead and prompted a law enforcement crackdown to stem the bloodshed. In all, seven people have been killed or wounded in recent weeks, as suspected black and Latino gang members have traded gunfire. At least two of those killed have been bystanders, authorities said.