US President Barack Obama has sought to defuse the first race row of his presidency, saying he regretted having said a white policeman acted “stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard professor.
Obama, the country’s first African American president, spoke on Friday during a surprise appearance before reporters in the White House barely two hours after angry police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, demanded he say he was sorry for linking the professor’s arrest to racial tensions.
Obama said he had phoned the arresting officer, Sergeant James Crowley, and expressed regret for “an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge police department or Sergeant Crowley specifically.”
PHOTO: EPA
“I could have calibrated those words differently and I told this to Sergeant Crowley,” he said.
The row, which has the potential to torpedo Obama’s carefully crafted image as the country’s first post-racial president, started last week when police briefly detained Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.
Gates was arrested after a neighbor saw him breaking into his house and mistakenly reported a burglary. An altercation followed in which Gates accused police of racist treatment and was charged with disorderly conduct.
Obama, who is a friend of Gates, made a rare foray into the political minefield of race relations, saying police acted “stupidly.”
He also raised the painful issue of police discrimination against non-whites.
It appeared that Obama’s conciliatory words did much to defuse the situation.
In a statement late on Friday, Cambridge police commissioner Robert Haas said Crowley was “so pleased to have had the opportunity to speak with the president.”
City officials and the police department were “optimistic that we are moving forward toward a resolution. We continue to reflect and learn from this incident. I wish to share our sincere appreciation to President Obama for his graciousness,” Haas said.
Gates, who is editor in chief of the Root newspaper, said he would accept Obama’s invitation to meet him and the police officer for beer at the White House.
“I told the president that my principal regret was that all of the attention paid to his deeply supportive remarks during his press conference had distracted attention from his health care initiative,” Gates said in statement.
Nevertheless, the White House refused to characterize Friday’s statement as a formal apology and Obama stuck by the substance of his original comments made at a press conference on Wednesday.
“The fact that this has become such a big issue I think is indicative of the fact that race is still a troubling aspect of our society,” Obama said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
RSS