Obama to take questions on Dallas attack, race relations

Elsewhere in Texas, police shot and killed a man early Saturday after he was spotted standing in a Houston road with a revolver. Two deaths this week have led to nationwide protests.

“We have to make sure that all of us step back, do some reflection and make sure that the rhetoric we engage in is constructive and not destructive”.

“Americans of all races and all backgrounds are rightly outraged by the inexcusable attacks on police, whether it’s in Dallas or anyplace else”, Obama said from Warsaw, where he attended a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit.

He followed black militant groups on social media, including one that posted a message Wednesday encouraging violence against police.

Sterling, of Louisiana, and Castile, of Minnesota, are both African-American men killed by police in incidents captured on video last week.

“I think Director Comey could not have been more exhaustive”, the president said, adding that Comey “was presenting to Congress for hours on end”.

However, he said contributing to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation effort is something “we need to do so because Russian Federation had a completely unacceptable behaviour, regarding especially Ukraine”.

Police Chief David Brown showed a photograph of a black man dressed in camouflage whom he said witnesses reported was involved in the shootings. “You’ve seen nearly uniformly peaceful protests and you’ve seen, uniformly, police handling those protests with professionalism”.

“What I hope is that my voice has tried to get all of us as Americans to understand the hard legacy of race”, Obama said of that struggle on Saturday. “We just have to have confidence that we can build on those better angels of our nature”.

In addition to the five slain officers, seven officers and two civilians were wounded.

The shooting revives an emotional debate over lethal use of force by police, and problems of alleged police bias towards racial minorities, especially African-Americans.

“We will work together with Canada to find other nations who will support us and join this multinational battalion”, he said.

Joking aside, the deployment along with plans to continue operating a naval frigate in the region and send fighter jets on an occasional basis, represents the largest military commitment to Europe for Canada in more than a decade, Trudeau said.

Still, he didn’t condone the violence. He spoke of hope and change and gun control.

Samuel Walker, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska and an expert on police accountability, told VOA, “There’s deep seated racial prejudice” among some white Americans “and that plays out in police encounters”.

Johnson, 25, who officials say acted alone, was killed by remotely detonated explosives that were sent into a vehicle park where he had taken refuge after the shootings.

“This is not who we want to be as Americans”.

Bomb-making materials, weapons and ammunition were found in Johnson’s home.

A number of gun attacks involving police officers and civilians have occurred in other parts of the U.S. in the aftermath of the deaths in Minnesota and Louisiana.