Time for plan B

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says it will consider permitting pharmacies to sell the morning-after contraceptive, Plan B. Critics have attacked the regulator for failing to allow such sales on non-scientific grounds, three years after its advisory panels said that they should go ahead. The day before Andrew von Eschenbach, who has been nominated by President Bush to serve as the FDA's commissioner, faced a Senate confirmation hearing, the agency announced that it wants to meet the Plan B's manufacturer, Barr Pharmaceuticals, to discuss terms for approval. Von Eschenbach's failure to approve the treatment while he was acting commissioner was a focal point of the hearing — but some senators said afterwards they'd still block his confirmation.

Chips on the table

The semiconductor industry is sitting on a US$2-billion surplus of microchips, mainly because of overproduction at Intel, the largest chip producer, says California-based market-research firm iSuppli. The number of chips worldwide almost doubled between the first and second quarters of 2006, the firm reports. But it says that because the glut of chips is largely down to miscalculations at just one manufacturer, it is unlikely to cause the industry any major problems.

Merck court win

A court in California has rejected a claim by a 71-year-old man that his heart attack was caused by taking Vioxx, the painkiller withdrawn from sale by Merck in September 2004. This latest ruling means that the drug firm has now won five Vioxx cases out of eight, leading some analysts to conclude that its strategy of fighting the cases one-by-one is bearing fruit. Merck says there are 14,200 cases pending in the United States over alleged side effects of the drug (see Nature 440, 277; 2006).