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Illinois asks if it may buy European flu shots

CHICAGO - Citing "an urgent need" at a time of flu vaccine shortages, Illinois asked for federal permission Monday to buy at least 62,000 vaccine doses from Europe for the state's nursing home residents.

A letter outlining the proposal was sent to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which Gov. Rod Blagojevich has been battling over his push to import lower-priced prescription drugs from Canada.

Blagojevich wants the FDA to inspect a manufacturing facility in France that makes the Aventis Pasteur flu vaccine for distribution in Canada and Europe. The FDA would have to test the vaccine before it could be approved, officials said. Aventis is the country's other major supplier.

Blagojevich said state officials had negotiated a tentative deal to buy the Aventis flu vaccine for $7 a dose, well below the normal U.S. price. He also said officials had located tens of thousands more doses that could be in Illinois within days if approved.

Today, barring a weather-caused delay, the United States for the first time will send an autonomous robot vehicle to join up with a satellite and conduct a 20-hour demonstration of its ability to make close approaches, separations and loops - without any human guidance, either aloft or on the ground.

NASA's Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology will leave California's Vandenberg Air Force Base suspended beneath a Stargazer L1011 aircraft, which will drop it shortly after 2 p.m. Eastern time about 40,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean. A Pegasus rocket will ignite and carry DART into orbit.

WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft did not violate antilobbying laws when he gave a series of speeches last year promoting the antiterror Patriot Act, Justice Department internal investigators have concluded.

The agency's inspector general, Glenn Fine, said trips to 16 cities in August and September 2003 did not run afoul of laws barring executive branch officials from engaging in grass roots lobbying or prohibiting spending of government money on unauthorized "publicity or propaganda."

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., asked for the investigation after a Government Accountability Office report showed that Ashcroft's tour and a pro-Patriot Act Internet site had cost more than $208,000 and also had involved activities by 80 of the 93 U.S. attorneys.