Minors

The Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday that it would allow 17-year-olds to buy the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B without a prescription, signaling a major shift in the agency's approach to what has been a polarizing debate on reproductive rights.

The girl's voice in the videotape is tiny and tentative. She is talking to a nursing aide in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bloomington, Ind. The girl wants an abortion. The aide explains that the girl will need a parent's consent because she is only 13. The girl balks; she does not want to name the father. "Cause, I mean, he would be in really big trouble," says the girl. Her boyfriend, she explains, is 31. The aide drops her head into her hands.

A parents group is warning about explicit footage in a new Grand Theft Auto video game, even though a California law banning such material from being sold to children was struck down as unconstitutional Friday. Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that reviews games, movies and other entertainment for children, sent out a message late Thursday warning against Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned. "Heavy violence, strong language -- and now nudity," the group said.

Backers of a ballot measure that would require parents to be notified before an abortion is performed on a minor acknowledged Friday that the 15-year-old on which "Sarah's Law" is based had a child and was in a common-law marriage before she died of complications from an abortion in 1994.

As she had so often before, Pamela Almli, 54, gathered her hiking gear and headed out with a friend for a day hike in the North Cascades. Familiar with the terrain, she felt at home on the trails. On that same morning this month, two brothers, ages 14 and 16, set off on a hunting trip. Their grandfather dropped them off at a trailhead on Sauk Mountain near Rockport, Wash., in Skagit County, about 90 miles northeast of Seattle.

A British law that allows courts to prevent forced marriages took effect Tuesday. In the first nine months of 2008, the Forced Marriage Unit, part of Britain's Foreign Office, handled more than 1,300 cases in which there were concerns that someone was to be forced into marriage, or already had been. Nearly 85% of the cases had female victims, and the majority involved families of Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi descent, the unit said. About half involved minors.

A U.S. association of fashion designers said Friday that models younger than 16 should not work runway shows and that any who are diagnosed with eating disorders should get medical help and be barred from working without a medical professional's approval. The recommendations from the Council of Fashion Designers of America come after months of debate and concern regarding models who drop to unhealthy weight levels.

Four months after the congressional page scandal rocked Capitol Hill and helped dash Republican hopes for holding their majorities in Congress, the House voted unanimously Friday to expand the board that oversees the teenage interns and require that it meet regularly. The House voted 416 to 0 to reorganize the House Page Board so that it has two congressional members from each party, the House clerk, the sergeant at arms, one parent of a page and one former page.

A federal judge on Monday sentenced the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire to 200 hours of community service for failing to adequately document the ages of performers in his videos. The heavier-than-expected punishment handed down to Joe Francis in Los Angeles was similar to a sentence his Santa Monica-based production company, Mantra Films Inc., received in Florida last month.

Merck & Co. is helping bankroll efforts to pass state laws requiring girls as young as 11 or 12 to receive the drug maker's new vaccine against the sexually transmitted cervical-cancer virus. Some conservatives and parents' rights groups say such a requirement would encourage premarital sex and interfere with the way they raise their children, and they say Merck's push for such laws is underhanded. But the company said its lobbying efforts had been aboveboard.