They weren't invited to the Rose Garden to hoist beers with President Barack Obama, yet their lives have been turned upside-down by the encounter between a black Harvard scholar and a white Cambridge, Mass., police officer. By chance or their own doing, these peripheral ...

Just as Congress makes progress on health care legislation, President Barack Obama will have to set aside his top legislative priority to revisit the racially charged issue that stole the spotlight from his health care push last week — the arrest of his Harvard professor friend. Obama, Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., will ...