Adeza drug doesn't need new trial: FDA experts

FDA advisors recommend no new tests for Gestiva in prevention of preterm births.
NEW YORK -- A U.S. advisory panel on Tuesday said Adeza Biomedical Corp. did not need to conduct another study to show its drug Gestiva was effective in helping prevent premature births in women who previously delivered a baby too early.
The Food and Drug Administration panel of outside experts made the recommendation in a 12-9 vote against another trial for Adeza's (up $0.61 to $15.91, Charts) experimental drug.

Teva settles generic OxyContin suit

Pharmaceutical manufacturer agrees with Purdue Frederick Co. to stop making generic version of popular painkiller.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Teva Pharmaceuticals, the world's biggest manufacturer of generic drugs, has settled a patent infringement case with The Purdue Frederick Company over generic OxyContin, the companies said.
Teva (down $0.67 to $34.69, Charts), based in Jerusalem, said that as part of the settlement it will stop selling generic versions of the painkiller OxyContin "at a future date."
The settlement agreement will be submitted to the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, Teva said. The settlement still has to be approved by U.S. district court for the Southern District of New York.

Schering settles sales probe for $435 million

N.J. drugmaker pleads guilty to criminal charge, puts federal investigation to rest.
NEW YORK -- Schering-Plough said Tuesday it settled a criminal investigation into its sales practices and agreed to pay $435 million in fines and damages.
The New Jersey-based drugmaker said the agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts and the Justice Department calls for it to pay a criminal fine of $180 million to settle the investigation into its sales, marketing and clinical trials.
Schering (up $0.16 to $20.57, Charts), the nation's no. 9 drugmaker, said it pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to make false statements to the government.
The company also agreed to pay $255 million "to resolve civil aspects of the investigation." Schering has set aside $500 million in litigation funds to cover these costs, which more than covers the total damages.
"We do take full responsibility for the actions of the past, but by that same token we're happy to put this behind us and focus on continuing to build the state of the art compliance program for the future to make sure these things don't happen again," Brent Saunders, senior vice president of global compliance and business practices, said to CNNMoney.com.
Saunders said criminal activity occurred before a new management team led by Fred Hassan came to the company in April 2003. Saunders was hired as part of this team in 2003, and said he heads the new compliance department to bring "business integrity into the DNA of the company."
Hassan is seen as a success story, partly because the company's stock price shot up 17 percent since his takeover, compared to the drug industry's paltry gain of 1 percent during the same period. But Schering has underperformed the S&P 500, which gained 46 percent during that time.
The settlement still has to be approved in court.

Hackers steal AT&T customer info

Company notifying nearly 19,000 customers; online store shut down hours after breach occurred.
NEW YORK -- Personal data, including credit card information, of thousands of AT&T customers was stolen by hackers over the weekend, the company reported late Tuesday.
The breach, which affected customers who purchased DSL equipment through AT&T's (Charts) Web store was discovered within hours and the online store was shut down immediately, said AT&T in a press release.
AT&T said it was sending notifications to nearly 19,000 customers, and that it would pay for credit monitoring services for the affected customers.
"We recognize that there is an active market for illegally obtained personal information. We are committed to both protecting our customers' privacy and to weeding out and punishing the violators," said Priscilla Hill- Ardoin, chief privacy officer for AT&T, in a statement.
"We deeply regret this incident and we intend to pay for credit monitoring services for customers whose accounts have been impacted. We will work closely with law enforcement to bring these data thieves to account."

'Small-Marts' take on Wal-Mart

Small, local groups nationwide are fighting back against big business and helter-skelter globalization.
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Local businesses in Whatcom County, Wash., next month will exhort their customers to "Buy Fresh Eat Local." Some people in the scenic, mountainous region will take a pledge to nourish themselves for a week entirely from the local food shed - drinking milk from local cows, eating fresh-baked organic bread and patronizing restaurants like Flats Tapas Bar, which will serve such dishes as flatbread with all-local smoked salmon, caramelized apple, gouda cheese and hazelnuts. Others will enjoy the Downtown Carrot Jubilee, a chance to taste local carrots harvested that day; they'll wear "I Ate Local Today" stickers."We want to help raise awareness of the value of local food systems," explains Max Morange of Sustainable Connections, a network of more than 500 Bellingham-area businesses that sponsors the annual event. "We're losing farmland very quickly." So committed to localism is Morange, a 25-year-old slow-food activist, that last year he churned his own butter rather than buy spread "imported" from elsewhere.The campaign is a stunt, to be sure, but it's also evidence of a backlash - against look-alike chain stores and helter-skelter globalization. Groups like Sustainable Connections have taken root in a variety of places, including downtown Philadelphia, the coast of Maine, rural St. Lawrence County in New York, Santa Fe and Ithaca, N.Y. About 20 local networks have affiliated with a national business group called BALLE - the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies - that was formed just five years ago.How local businesses can fight backOne of the leading thinkers about the new localism is Michael Shuman, a BALLE board member, Stanford-educated lawyer and economist and author of a lively, new book called "The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses are Beating the Global Competition" (Berrett-Koehler, 2006).The subtitle is hyberbolic. Last time we checked, shoppers were leaving Main Street merchants to save money at Wal-Mart, independent bookstores were struggling to compete with Amazon and Barnes & Noble and global giants were swallowing regional banks. But Shuman tries to show how local firms can do battle with the global giants. "There's an awful lot of misunderstanding about small business," Shuman says. "Small-marts are responsible for most of a typical community's economy." He's got a point. Firms with fewer than 500 employees account for about half of private sector employment in the United States. But between 1990 and 2001, about 4 percent of jobs shifted from very small to large firms, a trend Shuman argues can be slowed down and even reversed. In "Small-Mart Revolution," Shuman identifies eight "deglobalizing" trends that he says will help local businesses compete. They include rising energy costs, the inefficiencies of global distribution, consumer desires for more personalized services and the growing loyalty of workers to small, local firms.You can see these forces coming into play already. As shipping costs increase, it doesn't make much sense to ship potatoes from Idaho to remote corners of America where farmers can grow their own. Local, small-scale sources of fuel - from wind farms to solar panels to cellulosic ethanol to methane gas digesters - look more attractive when oil sells for $70 a barrel. Shuman also makes a compelling case that the tax breaks and government subsidies that flow to big companies are not just a waste of taxpayer money, but an unfair burden for small, local, loyal companies. "The playing field is tilted like a double black diamond ski slope against locally-owned business," Shuman writes.To counter the market power of giants like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, Shuman says that small-marts have to join together and consumers have to become more aware of the impact of their spending and investing choices. That's what's happening in Bellingham.Sustainable Connections publishes a coupon book called "Where the Locals Go" that features discounts from more than 160 businesses. The group sponsors workshops on green building, featuring local contractors. It promotes renewable energy with Puget Sound Energy (Charts), the local utility company that operates one wind farm and is building another. While this example of a self-supporting economy is appealing, Shuman's book raises thorny questions. Can "local first" work for all cities and towns? Is it even a desirable goal? Local businesses, after all, are not likely to develop a Boeing 747, an iPod, Google or a Blackberry Green Tea Frappuccino. Nor are local businesses necessarily better for the world than global ones, especially as big companies embrace socially-responsible practices.Maybe the toughest issue raised by the new localism is its potential to morph into protectionism, slamming the door on exports from poor countries and hindering their efforts to grow. To his credit, Shuman addresses this issue at length. He argues that the developing world will benefit by developing small-scale local businesses rather than relying on exports to the west. But he doesn't want to go too far. "If I felt communities were going to shut their door to the rest of the world," he says, "I'd stop doing what I'm doing." Instead, he's trying to start a small-scale chicken business called Bay Friendly Chicken ("Better Bird, Better Taste, Better Bay") with chicken growers in the Delmarva Peninsula, so-called because it cuts across Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. The company will pay living wages, give ownership stakes to farmers and sell natural, air-chilled chickens. It sounds great, but don't expect to see Bay Friendly Chickens in the supermarket anytime soon - unless you live near the Chesapeake Bay.

Google sets ad deal with eBay

Search giant to supply Web search ads overseas, as well as 'click-to-call' links.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -- Google Inc. will supply eBay Inc with Web search advertising outside the United States, and the two will join forces on "click-to-call" ads that link online shoppers to customer service operators, the companies said Monday.
EBay (Charts) said that for international online text advertising it had agreed to rely exclusively on Google instead of existing partner Yahoo Inc (Charts), which in May struck a parallel deal to handle all of eBay's U.S. ads.

The eBay contract is part of a string of deals this month for Google. It previously said it planned to begin testing an ad-supported Web video syndication system with Viacom's MTV Networks. It also struck a deal to supply ads to MySpace users and other Web properties ofNews Corp. (Charts)
"This (latest deal with eBay) in fact is the most important of these areas," Google (Charts) Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a phone interview.
"You can now see Google's strategy in each of these new markets," Schmidt said of MTV Web video, the MySpace community and eBay e-commerce partnerships. "These are very large businesses for us. I don't know what rate they will grow at."
Separately, on Sunday, Google said it was moving beyond search and advertising into the business software market, starting with a set of Web programs for e-mail, scheduling and communications. It plans to add additional programs later.
Financial terms for components of the deal involve revenue sharing, but the companies did not disclose specific details. EBay said it did not expect the Google agreement to have a material impact on its financial results in 2006 or 2007.
EBay increasingly depends on paid search advertising to drive bidders to its auctions and sales. Its new pacts seek to make it easier for buyers to search for items for sale on eBay, while being careful not to offend sellers with competing ads.
Through its deal with Yahoo, Whitman said eBay had already begun testing ads that appear when U.S. customers fail to locate what they want on an eBay auction search.
The Google pact expands this to international sites.
If and when eBay sellers become more comfortable seeing ads alongside their listings, eBay plans to expand the number of pages where Yahoo or Google ads may appear, she said.
Phoning web customer search
The companies said they will jointly offer "click-to-call" advertising using the respective instant message and Web phone-calling services of the two companies - eBay's globally popular Skype and Google's own nascent Google Talk service.
Click-to-call is where advertising merges into e-commerce. It allows potential buyers to click on Web-phone ad links and talk directly to sellers or their representatives.
The technique is seen as a promising way to reach merchants or advertisers who may not have a Web site, or who rely on Yellow Pages telephone directories to find possible customers.
"The vast majority of businesses still serve customers via the phone," eBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman said in a joint interview with Google's CEO. "This is the online equivalent."
"Google and eBay are uniquely positioned to make this market a reality," she added.
EBay is the world's dominant provider of online auctions. It has also signed up more than 100 million users worldwide for its Skype message and Web phone-calling service. Google has a leading position in Web search and associated ad technologies.
EBay said it would soon offer Skype users the option to download the Google Toolbar, which has quick links to Google services, especially Web search. The two will explore making Skype and Google Talk work together for text chats and to help make users aware when users of the other service are online.

Barnes & Noble caught in options fray

Shares of bookseller fall nearly 2 percent as it receives subpoena, becomes latest company to be investigated over how it awarded stock.
NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Barnes & Noble said on Tuesday that it received a subpoena from the attorney for the Southern District of New York, requesting documents on its stock option practices.
Barnes & Noble has become one of more than 80 companies to say it is being investigated in a quickly spreading scandal over stock options.
The operator of the bookstore chain said it received the subpoena on Friday, making the statement in a brief regulatory filing. It had previously announced it was reviewing stock option practices and said the Securities and Exchange Commission was conducting an informal inquiry with respect to them.
Barnes & Noble said it is cooperating fully with the SEC and intends to cooperate fully in responding to the subpoena.
Shares of Barnes & Noble (down $0.67 to $34.60, Charts) fell 1.8 percent on the New York Stock Exchange in early afternoon trading.