LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Weeks after a fight over the Sacramento Kings basketball team ended with promises of a new arena and a decision to stay in town, a tussle over another ball club is roiling professional sports in California - this time involving baseball.

In an action that highlights the big dollars at stake when teams move to a new community, the city of San Jose sued Major League Baseball on Tuesday, alleging it was holding up a proposed relocation by the Oakland Athletics.

San Jose's argument - that a new stadium and the presence of the Athletics would add thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in needed revenue - is a key element in an ongoing series of relocation fights among cities and sports teams.

In California, some cities have been loath to spend money that teams are demanding for new stadiums, said David Carter, a sports business expert at the University of Southern California.

"California is leading the nation in an unwillingness to allocate taxpayer dollars to keeping teams in town with respect to new arenas and otherwise subsidizing these owners," Carter said.

A key reason is the example of Staples Center in Los Angeles, which is highly successful and was built with more private money than many of the deals demanded by teams and their owners, he said.

Staples Center's owner, Anschutz Entertainment Group, "proved that private dollars can create a successful venue," Carter said, "and that has spawned a ripple effect that has affected every major league sport."

In neighboring Arizona, a similar fight is heating up over a professional hockey team. A group seeking to buy the National Hockey League's Phoenix Coyotes is asking the suburb of Glendale, where the team plays, to contribute up to $15 million a year to help manage the team's arena.

The league, which took ownership of the team almost four years ago, has rejected all attempts to relocate the team. But if the new ownership group is unable to negotiate a lease with Glendale, moving the franchise may be the only solution.

AGING STADIUM

In the Northern California city of Oakland, next door to San Francisco, the owners of the Athletics have long been frustrated with the city's aging stadium.

In 2011, the team signed an agreement with San Jose, in nearby Silicon Valley, that granted the Athletics, owner Lew Wolff, partners and family members the right to buy land there for a new stadium. The land would cost $7 million, both sides agreed.

But San Jose's lawsuit, filed in federal court, says that Major League Baseball views San Jose as part of the territory of the San Francisco Giants - meaning the Oakland team cannot move there without permission.

Joseph Cotchett, the lawyer representing the city in the suit, said that amounted to a violation of federal anti-trust laws, which regulate monopolies, even though a Supreme Court decision decades ago exempted baseball from some of those laws.

Major League Baseball, he told Reuters, had not acted in a timely way to consider the San Jose deal, costing the city more than 1,000 construction jobs and millions in lost revenue.

He said that Major League Baseball, long a proponent of the idea that stadium deals bring needed money to cities, was expected to argue that San Jose had not been harmed by its slowness in approving this one.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig "is going to make that argument along with the other owners," Cotchett said. "And we know it's false."

Neither Selig nor a spokesman for Major League Baseball was immediately available for comment on Tuesday.

Wolff, the Athletics' owner, cited a desire to move to downtown San Jose, but said his team would respect "agreements that govern our participation in MLB."

"We seek our needed new venue based solely on the merits of the move and the benefits to MLB, the A's and our fans and sponsors," he said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Jonathan Kaminsky in Olympia, Washington; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Peter Cooney)

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The frightened but powerful bruin fell into a swimming pool at least twice during the ordeal, according to a report Saturday in the Press Enterprise of Bloomsburg (http://bit.ly/166z97k ). But the group eventually yanked off the jar and set the animal free.

"I thought, 'No one is going to believe us,'" said Morgan Laskowski, 22, the bartender at the Jamison City Hotel and a member of the impromptu bear-wrangling team.

Area residents first spotted the 100-pound bruin with its head in a red jar on June 3, but it eluded game wardens. The animal was attracted to the container because it appeared to have once contained cooking oil.

"He put his head in, and had a problem," said Mike Jurbala, 68, another rescuer. "He'd have died in a couple more days."

Jurbala saw the bear Thursday night as he was leaving the bar at the Jamison City Hotel. He called Jeff Hubler, a local employee of the state Game Commission who had been among those trying to capture it for days with a lasso.

The two teamed up with Laskowski and her mother, bar owner Jody Boyle, to follow the bear through the darkness.

"You knew where he was because you could hear him banging into things," Jurbala said.

They cornered the bear in a resident's backyard, where it ended up falling into a pool a couple of times. Eventually, they wrangled the animal into a position where Hubler could pull off the jar.

"You'd think the bear would be weak, because it hadn't eaten or drunk for a week, but it was strong," Boyle said.

Hubler said people should keep lids on food jars that they throw away.

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Information from: Press Enterprise, http://www.pressenterpriseonline.com

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- PPL Montana has agreed to install an estimated $10 million in new pollution controls at a Billings power plant if the company reverses its plan to close the facility in less than two years, state officials and company representatives said Monday.

PPL also agreed to a $250,000 penalty for past pollution violations.

The legal settlement would reduce future sulfur dioxide pollution from the 154-megawatt J.E. Corette coal plant by 60 percent from current levels, said Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

"It means cleaner air in Billings," she said, adding that other steps to be taken by the company would improve visibility by reducing particulates emitted from the plant's smokestack.

The new equipment would have to be in place by April 2015.

PPL said last year that it would mothball the 45-year-old plant by that date, citing environmental regulations and competition from other power sources that has made coal more expensive to burn.

The announcement just weeks before the 2012 election was seized on by Republicans including U.S. Senate candidate Denny Rehberg and gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill, who blamed Democrats for the pending loss of Corette's 35 jobs. Neither candidate prevailed in November.

PPL spokesman Dave Hoffman said the company still intends to mothball the plant, but it could re-open at a later date.

Sulfur dioxide can cause respiratory illnesses, particularly in children, the elderly and asthmatics. The estimated $10 million that would be needed for PPL to achieve the 60 percent reduction was provided by Dave Klemp, DEQ's air pollution bureau chief.

Hoffman could not confirm the cost figure.

But he said that to be fully in compliance with federal air pollution laws, the company would have to install $38 million in equipment that removes other air pollutants.

"At this point, conditions haven't changed adequately to justify that investment even though the market has been a little stronger than we anticipated," Hoffman said. "It's a two-year lead time for construction. In any event, you're going to see some period of retirement starting in April 2015."

Stone-Manning said the agreement with PPL underscores the state's contention that it is addressing federal regulators' concerns about high sulfur dioxide levels in Yellowstone County.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year said it intends to declare the county a "non-attainment area" for the pollutant, which could mean tighter regulations for industry. State officials have fought against the designation and argued that the agency was not gauging pollution levels appropriately.

Stone-Manning said that becomes "irrelevant" if Corette one of Yellowstone's largest sources of sulfur dioxide achieves a 60 percent reduction.

But Anne Hedges with the Montana Environmental Information Center said that ignores other major sources of sulfur dioxide in the county that produce comparable amounts. She called the agreement with PPL a "backdoor attempt" to avoid the federal designation.

The agreement between PPL and the state also requires the company to take steps to reduce pollution and improve visibility both for Corette and another, larger PPL coal plant located in Colstrip.

The deal approved Friday by state District Judge Susan Watters does not require any new equipment to be installed to help with visibility. Rather, the company agreed to set up a task force to identify ways to make improvements.

The 2,100-megawatt Colstrip plant, co-owned by five companies and operated by PPL, is the second-largest coal-fired plant west of the Mississippi.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- The board in charge of Minnesota's new health insurance marketplace will begin hearing regular presentations from its future customers.

The MNsure board holds its second meeting Wednesday. On the agenda is a short presentation from Dana Hoenigschmidt, owner of a child care company in St. Francis that employs 25 people. According to MNsure's website, she's hoping MNsure will bring down her soaring health insurance premiums and let her provide her employees with high quality health plans.

The board will also get an update on customer service preparations.

About 1.3 million Minnesotans are expected to get coverage through MNsure, including 300,000 who currently don't have insurance, under the Obama administration's health care overhaul. The system is due to go live Oct. 1, offering plans that will take effect in January.

Except that the students in this case were al-Qaida fighters in Mali. And the manual was a detailed guide, with diagrams and photographs, on how to use a weapon that particularly concerns the United States: A surface-to-air missile capable of taking down a commercial airplane.

The 26-page document in Arabic, recovered by The Associated Press in a building that had been occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu, strongly suggests the group now possesses the SA-7 surface-to-air missile, known to the Pentagon as the Grail, according to terrorism specialists. And it confirms that the al-Qaida cell is actively training its fighters to use these weapons, also called man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, which likely came from the arms depots of ex-Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

_________________

EDITOR'S NOTE This is the fourth story in an occasional series based on thousands of pages of internal al-Qaida documents recovered by The Associated Press earlier this year in Timbuktu, Mali.

_________________

"The existence of what apparently constitutes a 'Dummies Guide to MANPADS' is strong circumstantial evidence of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb having the missiles," said Atlantic Council analyst Peter Pham, a former adviser to the United States' military command in Africa and an instructor to U.S. Special Forces. "Why else bother to write the guide if you don't have the weapons? ... If AQIM not only has the MANPADS, but also fighters who know how to use them effectively," he added, "then the impact is significant, not only on the current conflict, but on security throughout North and West Africa, and possibly beyond."

This is not the first al-Qaida-linked group thought to have MANPADS - they were circulating in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a terror cell in Somalia recently claimed to have the SA-7 in a video. But the U.S. desperately wanted to keep the weapons out of the hands of al-Qaida's largest affiliate on the continent, based in Mali. In the spring of 2011, before the fighting in Tripoli had even stopped, a U.S. team flew to Libya to secure Gadhafi's stockpile of thousands of heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles.

By the time they got there, many had already been looted.

"The MANPADS were specifically being sought out," said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, who catalogued missing weapons at dozens of munitions depots and often found nothing in the boxes labeled with the code for surface-to-air missiles.

The manual is believed to be an excerpt from a terrorist encyclopedia edited by Osama bin Laden. It adds to evidence for the weapon found by French forces during their land assault in Mali earlier this year, including the discovery of the SA-7's battery pack and launch tube, according to military statements and an aviation official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to comment.

The knowledge that the terrorists have the weapon has already changed the way the French are carrying out their five-month-old offensive in Mali. They are using more fighter jets rather than helicopters to fly above its range of 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) from the ground, even though that makes it harder to attack the jihadists. They are also making cargo planes land and take off more steeply to limit how long they are exposed, in line with similar practices in Iraq after an SA-14 hit the wing of a DHL cargo plane in 2003.

And they have added their own surveillance at Mali's international airport in Bamako, according to two French aviation officials and an officer in the Operation Serval force. All three spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.

"There are patrols every day," said the French officer. "It's one of the things we have not entrusted to the Malians, because the stakes are too high."

First introduced in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, the SA-7 was designed to be portable. Not much larger than a poster tube, it can be packed into a duffel bag and easily carried. It's also affordable, with some SA-7s selling for as little as $5,000.

Since 1975, at least 40 civilian aircraft have been hit by different types of MANPADS, causing about 28 crashes and more than 800 deaths around the world, according to the U.S. Department of State.

The SA-7 is an old generation model, which means most military planes now come equipped with a built-in protection mechanism against it. But that's not the case for commercial planes, and the threat is greatest to civilian aviation.

In Kenya in 2002, suspected Islamic extremists fired two SA-7s at a Boeing 757 carrying 271 vacationers back to Israel, but missed. Insurgents in Iraq used the weapons, and YouTube videos abound purporting to show Syrian rebels using the SA-7 to shoot down regime planes.

An SA-7 tracks a plane by directing itself toward the source of the heat, the engine. It takes time and practice, however, to fire it within range. The failure of the jihadists in Mali so far to hit a plane could mean that they cannot position themselves near airports with commercial flights, or that they are not yet fully trained to use the missile.

"This is not a 'Fire and forget' weapon," said Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. "There's a paradox here. One the one hand it's not easy to use, but against any commercial aircraft there would be no defenses against them. It's impossible to protect against it. ... If terrorists start training and learn how to use them, we'll be in a lot of trouble."

In Timbuktu, SA-7 training was likely part of the curriculum at the 'Jihad Academy' housed in a former police station, said Jean-Paul Rouiller, director of the Geneva Center for Training and Analysis of Terrorism, one of three experts who reviewed the manual for AP. It's located less than 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the Ministry of Finance's Budget Division building where the manual was found.

Neighbors say they saw foreign fighters running laps each day, carrying out target practice and inhaling and holding their breath with a pipe-like object on their shoulder. The drill is standard practice for shoulder-held missiles, including the SA-7.

As the jihadists fled ahead of the arrival of French troops who liberated Timbuktu on Jan. 28, they left the manual behind, along with other instructional material, including a spiral-bound pamphlet showing how to use the KPV-14.5 anti-aircraft machine gun and another on how to make a bomb out of ammonium nitrate, among other documents retrieved by the AP. Residents said the jihadists grabbed reams of paper from inside the building, doused them in fuel and set them alight. The black, feathery ash lay on top of the sand in a ditch just outside the building's gate.

However, numerous buildings were still full of scattered papers.

"They just couldn't destroy everything," said neighbor Mohamed Alassane. "They appeared to be in a panic when the French came. They left in a state of disorder."

The manual is illustrated with grainy images of Soviet-looking soldiers firing the weapon. Point-by-point instructions explain how to insert the battery, focus on the target and fire.

The manual also explains that the missile will malfunction above 45 degrees Celsius, the temperature in the deserts north of Timbuktu. And it advises the shooter to change immediately into a second set of clothes after firing to avoid detection.

Its pages are numbered 313 through 338, suggesting they came from elsewhere. Mathieu Guidere, an expert on Islamic extremists at the University of Toulouse, believes the excerpts are lifted from the Encyclopedia of Jihad, an 11-volume survey on the craft of war first compiled by the Taliban in the 1990s and later codified by Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, who led a contingent of Arab fighters in Afghanistan at the time, paid to have the encyclopedia translated into Arabic, according to Guidere, author of a book on al-Qaida's North African branch.

However, the cover page of the manual boasts the name of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

"It's a way to make it their own," said Guidere. "It's like putting a logo on something. ... It shows the historic as well as the present link between al-Qaida core and AQIM."

Bin Laden later assembled a team of editors to update the manual, put it on CD-ROMs and eventually place it on the Internet, in a move that lay the groundwork for the globalization of jihad, according to terrorism expert Jarret Brachman, who was the director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center when the al-Qaida encyclopedia was first found.

N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an arms expert in Australia, confirmed that the information in the manual in Timbuktu on the missile's engagement range, altitude and weight appeared largely correct. He cautions though that the history of the SA-7 is one of near-misses, specifically because it takes training to use.

"Even if you get your hands on an SA-7, it's no guarantee of success," he said. "However, if someone manages to take down a civilian aircraft, it's hundreds of dead instantly. It's a high impact, low-frequency event, and it sows a lot of fear."

___

Associated Press writer Lori Hinnant contributed to this report from Paris, and AP journalist Amir Bibawy translated the document. Callimachi reported this article in Timbuktu, Mali and in Dakar, Senegal.

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The document from al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Arabic and English can be seen at http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_international/_pdfs/al-qaida-papers-dangerous-weapon.pdf

Rukmini Callimachi can be reached at www.twitter.com/rcallimachi

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt predicted on Tuesday that there will be more than a billion smartphones in use featuring its Android software within the next six to nine months.

Schmidt also noted that Google had no intention of blocking access to a new app from Facebook Inc, saying he was "phenomenally happy" with the app from Google's rival, which replaces the homescreen on Android phones.

The new Facebook Home app was released on Friday and gives the social networking service prominent placement on Android phones.

Removing Facebook Home from Google's app store would be counter to Google's "public statements, our policies, our religion," Schmidt said at a conference in New York on Tuesday organized by the technology blog AllThingsD.

Because the Android software is open source, companies are free to tinker with it and customize it to their needs. Facebook's Home app prominently displays Facebook's newsfeed and messages on the homescreen, stealing the spotlight from Google's own services such as Web search and maps.

The five-year old Android software has been a huge hit for Google, giving the Internet search company a strong footing with consumers who increasingly access the Web from mobile phones rather than from PCs. Android is now the world's No.1 mobile phone software, with more than 750 million mobile devices featuring Android in use across the world.

At the current rate, Schmidt said that Google should cross the 1 billion mark within six to nine months and will be "nearing 2 billion in a year or two."

Schmidt also said the European Union antitrust regulators were not looking at Android issues and he noted that regulators could be done evaluating a proposal to settle an investigation of the company within the year.

"If that proceeds think it will be a pretty good outcome for everybody," Schmidt said.

The European Commission, which began investigating Google's business practices in 2010, said Google may have violated antitrust rules by pushing its own services over those of rivals, copying travel and restaurant reviews from competing sites without permission and restricting advertisers from moving to competing services.

The world's most popular search engine formally submitted a package of concessions to European regulators last week. Neither the Commission nor Google have given details of the proposals. But people familiar with the matter have told Reuters these could include Google labeling its own services to differentiate them from rivals', and also imposing fewer restrictions on advertisers.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Alden Bentley)

Yes, gridlock still prevails and drivers' blood pressure still spikes as LA's traffic arteries seize up during every morning and afternoon rush hour.

Yet, with the flip of a switch earlier this year, Los Angeles became a worldwide leader by synchronizing all of its nearly 4,400 stoplights, making it the world's first major city to do so.

The result? Well, it can still be hell to cross the City of the Angels by car. Synchronization has allowed LA to boast of real improvements on paper, however, the average driver won't always be able to discern the difference of a project that took nearly 30 years to complete.

"To be honest with you, I haven't felt it, yet," said Jack Abramyam, who has been driving a cab across LA's mean streets for 20 years.

"Late at night, maybe, yes," Abramyam said as he sat outside his cab on a street in Chinatown recently, waiting for a fare. "But it was never really bad then anyway. During the day it was bad. And it's still bad."

The way synchronization works is simple enough: With all the signals synchronized, if you drive down a street at the posted speed limit you should be able to make every green light from one end of this sprawling city of 469 square miles to the other.

Of course there are any number of obstacles that can prevent that.

On a recent mid-afternoon test drive down eight miles of Wilshire Boulevard, for example, I was cut off by a bus, stuck behind more than one right-turner waiting for pedestrians to cross the intersecting street and at one point had my lane blocked by a delivery truck.

Approaching the world famous La Brea Tar Pits where prehistoric dinosaurs once got stuck in muck, not traffic so many people were waiting to turn left into a parking lot that the street became gridlocked for more than two blocks. The numerous synchronized green lights didn't wait for me. But why would they? With the posted speed limit 35 mph, I was only averaging 15.

Still, once the LA County Museum of Art, the high-rise apartments, the headquarters of porn publisher Larry Flynt and the various other Wilshire Boulevard landmarks were in the rear-view mirror, the pace did pick up. So much so that 11 green lights in a row suddenly materialized. That string ended on the edge of downtown, however, when Wilshire simply became clogged with too many cars. It was a non-rush hour jam that demonstrated that, good as synchronization may be, it isn't a magic, traffic-breaking bullet.

Los Angeles Department of Transportation officials agree.

As they stated in a recent report praising the benefits of synchronized signals, "No traffic signal system is capable of 'fixing traffic.'"

If more motor vehicles show up in the years ahead (and there are already more than 7.1 million of them registered in Los Angeles County, a number greater than that of most states), then officials say LA traffic jams will probably get worse.

That's why, said Clinton Quan, an engineering associate with the Department of Transportation, planners are continuing to push people to ride bicycles, take commuter rail lines and other public transportation and move close enough to work that they can walk there.

The city has added three light rail lines in the last seven years and has more planned. Officials also recently approved plans to allow high-rise apartment and condominium buildings along a corridor in Hollywood where a subway connecting the city's West Side to downtown is supposed to go.

In the meantime, Quan says, the synchronized signal program is putting up some pretty impressive numbers, even if the average driver isn't noticing them. It has reduced the drive time on several major LA corridors, for example, by about 12 percent.

In driver-speak, that means the trip across town that used to take you an hour has been reduced to about 53 minutes.

And that's nothing to shrug at, says Robert Puentes, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution's metropolitan policy program, which studies among other things the impact of traffic on the quality of life in metropolitan areas.

Several other traffic-clogged cities are looking into instituting similar programs and New York already synchronizes some of its stoplights, said Puentes, who works in Washington, D.C., the ninth-worst traffic-clogged city in the country.

"If you can get a 12 percent reduction on, say, the Washington Beltway, that would be phenomenal," he said.

The politically volatile debate reflects a reality that's difficult for parents, including the president, to swallow: Quite a number of teenagers have sex. So how easily should they be able to get a pill that prevents pregnancy if taken soon enough after sex?

On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration made it a little easier, saying anyone 15 or older could begin buying one brand, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription two years younger than the current age limit of 17 and that the pill no longer has to be locked behind pharmacy counters.

But it's far from clear whether that will happen. U.S. District Judge Edward Korman of New York had given the FDA until Monday to lift all age limits on Plan B and a cheaper generic, mandating that emergency contraception be sold just like aspirin. Instead, by requiring that buyers prove their age at the cash register, the FDA decided to treat it like beer.

The Justice Department hasn't said whether it will appeal Korman's order and thus back FDA's new approach, and that leaves the whole issue in limbo.

"This is a truly bizarre and unprecedented situation," said American University law professor Lewis A. Grossman, a specialist in food and drug law.

On Wednesday, doctors' groups, led by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, urged the Obama administration not to let the FDA action be the last word.

Any over-the-counter access marks a long-awaited change, but it's not enough, said Dr. Cora Breuner of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which supports nonprescription sale of the morning-after pill for all ages.

"We still have the major issue, which is our teen pregnancy rate is still too high," Breuner said.

Even though few young girls likely would use Plan B, which costs about $50 for a single pill, "we know that it is safe for those under 15," she said.

Most 17- to 19-year-olds are sexually active, and 30 percent of 15- and 16-year-olds have had sex, according to a study published last month by the journal Pediatrics. Sex is much rarer among younger teens. Likewise, older teens have a higher pregnancy rate, but that study also counted more than 110,000 pregnancies among 15- and 16-year-olds in 2008 alone.

The White House sought Wednesday to put much as much distance as possible between President Barack Obama and this political hot potato.

"The president, the White House, did not weigh in on this decision," White House spokesman Jay Carney said of the FDA's move.

Obama must balance his own instincts as the father of two school-age daughters with the wishes of numerous political constituencies, including women's groups whose influence runs deep within the Democratic Party. It was just last week that Obama became the first president to address Planned Parenthood in person, telling the abortion rights group that as long as women must fight to make their own health choices, "you've also got a president who's going to be right there with you fighting every step of the way."

Contraception advocates see a double standard. No one is carded when buying a condom, but under the FDA's decision they would have to prove their age when buying a pill to prevent pregnancy if that condom breaks.

"This isn't a compromise. This is wrong," said Cynthia Pearson of the National Women's Health Network.

Likewise, social conservatives were outraged by the FDA's move, saying it was important for parents and medical professionals to be involved in such decisions involving teens.

"This decision undermines the right of parents to make important health decisions for their young daughters," said Anna Higgins of the Family Research Council. She added that removing the prescription requirement meant "teens and women will avoid necessary medical screenings" that could detect serious problems.

The FDA had been poised to lift all age limits and let Plan B sell over the counter in late 2011, when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, in an unprecedented move, overruled her own scientists. Sebelius said some girls as young as 11 were physically capable of bearing children but shouldn't be able to buy the pregnancy-preventing pill on their own.

Ruling earlier this month in a lawsuit challenging that decision, Korman blasted the Obama administration for letting election-year politics trump science. The judge called the morning-after pill "among the safest drugs sold over the counter," and gave the government 30 days to lift all age limits.

Obama aides bristled at the suggestion that the FDA decision was an attempt at political compromise, insisting the FDA merely responded to an application filed by Plan B's manufacturer which sought the 15 age limit and over-the-counter sales.

At the same time, Carney signaled that a policy allowing 15-year-olds to buy the pill off the shelf would be more palatable to Obama than the prospect of 11-year-olds having unfettered access. Pointing to Obama's comments in support of Sebelius back in 2011, Carney said, "he referred to younger girls, and I believe so did Secretary Sebelius."

If a woman already is pregnant, the morning-after pill has no effect. It prevents ovulation or fertilization of an egg. According to the medical definition, pregnancy doesn't begin until a fertilized egg implants itself into the wall of the uterus. Still, some critics say Plan B is the equivalent of an abortion pill because it may also be able to prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, a contention that many scientists and Korman, in his ruling said has been discredited.