Washington, D.C.

White House defensive after Pentagon report

A Pentagon report detailing incidents in which U.S. guards at Guantanamo Bay prison desecrated the Quran is creating another public relations challenge for President Bush.

Two weeks ago, the White House was thrown on the defensive by a now-retracted Newsweek report alleging that U.S. interrogators at the detention center for terror suspects in Cuba had flushed a Quran down a toilet.

The story stirred worldwide controversy, and the Bush administration blamed it for deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan.

On Saturday, a day after the Pentagon described a series of cases of U.S. personnel mishandling the Quran, the White House downplayed the issue.

“It is unfortunate that some have chosen to take out of context a few isolated incidents by a few individuals,” presidential spokesman Scott McClellan said in a statement.

Washington, D.C.

Specter to seek policy on foreign detainees

The continuing uproar over U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib has a top Senate Republican looking at the need to clarify in law the rights of foreign detainees.

On the heels of Amnesty International calling the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “the gulag of our time,” Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., will have hearings this month on the treatment of foreign terrorism suspects there.

Specter, according to an aide, is in the preliminary stages of drafting a bill to establish procedures for detentions and exploring the possibility of making the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court the venue for challenging them.

New York

Nation’s No. 1 oldies station changes formats

It’s the day the music died.

WCBS-FM, the top oldies station in the nation for more than three decades, stunned its legion of listeners by abruptly switching formats this weekend.

“I’m sure this move angered and bewildered its listeners,” said Tom Taylor, editor of the trade publication Inside Radio. “A lot of people punched in WCBS-FM, heard Pink’s ‘Get The Party Started,’ and said ‘Something’s wrong with my radio.”‘

The station had switched to an oldies format in 1972, initially as a bastion for the doo-wop sounds of the ’50s. Although the playlist changed over the years, WCBS-FM always remained the outpost for classic Top 40 radio in the nation’s largest radio market.

The station’s new format is called “Jack,” an eclectic mix of hit music from the ’70s through the present. The station’s owner, Infinity Broadcasting, made the same format shift Friday at its Chicago oldies station, WJMK-FM, where classic Top 40 had aired for the past 21 years.

“We did a lot of market research and found a hole in the market that wasn’t being served by any other station,” said Chad Brown, WCBS-FM vice president and general manager.

New York

Toxic red tide prompts massive fishery closures

The worst toxic red tide in a generation is contaminating dozens of major shellfish beds in New England, prompting fishery closures from Maine to Nantucket, where clams, mussels and bay scallops are a coastal community’s commercial lifeblood.

An unusually intense plankton bloom more than 30 miles wide in places continued to spread Saturday, driven by wind and currents into areas that have never known such infestations before.

The outbreak might peak in another week, officials said. It might be a month or more, however, before the region, which exports quahog clams and other sea fare around the world, can safely resume shell-fishing operations.

Toxins from the algae quickly become concentrated in the shellfish and are poisonous to anyone who consumes them.

“In terms of the region, this red tide is unprecedented,” said Don Anderson, a specialist on red tides and harmful algae blooms at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. “This is a huge area that is affected.”

Algae blooms are a natural occurrence in the coastal waters of California and New England.

California

Scientists free Mars rover from sand dune

The Mars rover Opportunity resumed rolling freely across the Martian surface Saturday after scientists freed it from a sand dune where it had been mired for nearly five weeks, NASA officials said.

Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission, cheered when images beamed back to Earth showed the rover’s wheels were free.

“We’ve got a working rover on Mars that cost $400 million to build and … keep working,” project manager Jim Erickson said. “I’d like to wear it out rather than lose it.”

Opportunity’s wheels started slipping April 26 during a planned 295-foot trip.

Washington, D.C.

Groups weigh in on Web politicking

Lawmakers, campaign finance watchdog groups, election lawyers and bloggers have urged the Federal Election Commission to exempt the vast majority of – if not all – individual political activists on the Internet from new regulations.

The comments, submitted hours before an agency deadline, came Friday as the FEC considers how to regulate online political activities, including blogging, advertising and e-mail.

The authors of the campaign finance reform law, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Martin Meehan, D-Mass., filed a joint statement urging the agency to ignore individuals’ politicking on the Internet and focus instead on governing online activities of unions, corporations and others.