With a few beers, Obama tries to patch up a race furor

Barack Obama had a beer with a white police officer and an eminent black scholar at the White House on Thursday in a bid to quell a heated national furor over racial profiling Obama welcomed distinguished Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates and police sergeant Jim Crowley for beers on the White House Rose Garden hoping to turn the page on a race row that erupted during a July 16 incident at the scholar s home