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A new species of the deadly Ebola virus has been identified by American and Ugandan scientists.

The new virus, called Bundibugyo ebolavirus, caused an outbreak in western Uganda in 2007. It is genetically distinct from all other known Ebola virus species, differing by more than 30 percent at the genetic level, said the scientists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Columbia University, the Uganda Virus Research Institute, and the Uganda Ministry of Health.

To determine the genetic signature of the new virus, the scientists had to employ a recently developed “random-primed pyro-sequencing” method. Using this, they were able to quickly determine more than 70 percent of the virus genome, which then enabled rapid development of a molecular detection assay that was used during the outbreak.

The draft genetic sequence also led to completion of the entire virus genome sequence using a traditional method and immediate confirmation that this was a new species of Ebola virus. Current efforts to develop effective Ebola diagnostics, antivirals and vaccines will need to factor in the distinct genetic makeup of this new species, the scientists said in an article published Nov. 21 in the journal PLoS Pathogens.

Currently, there is no treatment or vaccine for Ebola infection in humans, which has a death rate of between 53 percent and 90 percent.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani Friday said the prime minister’s office had been ‘devalued over the last few years’ and charged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of turning a blind eye to corruption.

‘There can be no Congress president more important than the prime minister. Over the last few years the office of the prime minister has been devalued. 7 Race Course Road (the prime minister’s official residence) has to be more important than 10, Janpath (resident of Congress president Sonia Gandhi),’ said Advani while responding to a query on why he had described Manmohan Singh as a weak prime minister.

‘The prime minister has turned a blind eye on the blatant use of authority and shocking level of corruption, which is never seen before in India,’ said Advani at the Hindustan Times leadership summit.

‘There has been no consultation with the opposition.’

Delving on differences between the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the current government, Advani said ‘the United Progressive Alliance is not a coalition but a collection functioning without any fear of the prime minister. Any minister is doing whatever he want wants without caring for the authority of the prime minister.’

‘There is a difference in political functioning. The NDA was cohesive with Vajpayeeeji as the supreme authority.’

Referring to the international financial crisis, Advani said the present ruling coalition had inherited a 8.5 percent economic growth but will demit office with no more than seven percent economic expansion.

‘We shall take all those measures necessary to reinstate the confidence of the people within six months,’ said the senior BJP leader, adding this was the response to those who were asking him what his immediate priorities would be.

‘I believe in times of current crisis, hurting though it is, we can make most of the opportunity to take a leap forward.’

‘Let me sum up by saying that if NDA gets the mandate, the future of economy and governing strategy will be radically different from the incumbent UPA government,’ he added.

‘Within the first six months, we will aim at stars.. in every sphere of national accomplishment - both social and economic.’

Advani also reiterated what he told top industrialists Thursday - that he was deeply concerned that the economic slowdown was creating insecurity and fear among the poor and the middle classes.

‘The point I wish to make is that a nation’s economy is like its eco-system. If there is a fire in the forest, it not only burns the trees but also endangers birds, insects and micro-organisms. Therefore, we must quickly put down this fire called the economic crisis,’ he said during the two-hour meeting with the industrialists.

Movies are increasingly creeping online, as video sites like YouTube and Hulu are adding feature films to their extensive libraries.

At the Google-owned YouTube, there is the YouTube Screening Room, which every two weeks, adds four new films — mostly independent works — to the site. Hulu, the joint creation of NBC Universal and News Corp., has hundreds of films available for stream, from “Basic Instinct” to “Wuthering Heights.”

Of course, many people download films illegally on BitTorrent sites, but movies are nevertheless becoming more populated — legally — online.

Hulu recently added 1962’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” which begs the question: Should anyone watch a nearly four-hour-long epic of sweeping grandeur on their laptop? Or, heaven forbid, their cell phone?

Here are the top ten films that should never be brought down to size:

1. “Lawrence of Arabia“: David Lean’s film, which won seven Oscars including best picture, was made for the big screen — particularly as projected in all of its 70 millimeter glory. Though Hulu (like YouTube) streams films in high quality, the enormity of the Arabian desert loses something when dwarfed to a 4-inch by 6-inch screen.

2. “Last of the Mohicans“: Michael Mann’s 1992 adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel pulses with the raw nature of early America so much that film critic David Thomson has written that he expects William Wordsworth to pop up at any moment. You won’t get that rugged feeling on a computer.

3. “Jaws“: Really, how scary can that shark be if he’s two inches tall?

4. “North By Northwest”: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic is just too big for your computer. It’s almost too big for a movie screen. The film, after all, includes a chase seen with an airplane, Bernard Herrmann’s robust score, Mount Rushmore and, well, Cary Grant in sunglasses.

5. “Star Wars“: It’s true, a hologram of Princess Leia on your computer is just about as fitting as one of Will.i.am on CNN. But do you really want to see (spoiler alert!) the Death Star explode next to your e-mail?

6. “WarGames”: There isn’t anything so cinematic about this 1983 thriller starring Matthew Broderick. But watching a movie about Cold War-era paranoia in which a computer threatens to bomb the world might cause you to panic out of distrust for all things computerized and throw your laptop out the window.

7. “Barry Lyndon“: The same computer rebellion of “WarGames” might also apply to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but the Kubrick film that deserves the absolute best presentation is his 1975 period piece. The cinematography by John Alcott — including a candlelit scene shot with NASA-developed camera lenses — is best seen projected in the dark.

8. “Raiders of the Lost Ark“: You have to worry that a story about an adverture-seeking archaeologist with a whip fetish who gets chased by boulders might seem a tad unrealistic when shrunk down from the big screen. (But feel free to be disappointed by the latest “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” on whatever platform you like.)

9. “The Third Man“: Carol Reed’s 1949 film is one of the most exquisitely shot films ever and meant for the movie theater. Also, a Web junky might take the wrong lesson from “The Third Man.” The Internet has a way of depersonalizing people, much in the way Orson Welles famously looks down at far below humans from atop a Ferris wheel in “The Third Man,” caring nothing if the “little dots” stopped moving.

10. “You’ve Got Mail“: It’s just a little too cutesy to watch this romantic comedy on your computer, don’t you think?

The inflation rate eased to a nearly six-year low of 8.9 per cent for the week ended November 8, from 8.98 per cent for the week before raising hopes of fresh round of interest rate cut over the next few days. It could bring cheer to corporations grappling with options to meet capital requirements for planned and current projects.

Inflation slipped to single-digit levels after 21 weeks and hitting 12.91 per cent in August. Earlier this week, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor D Subbarao met Finance Minister P Chidambaram to discuss steps to make more funds available to the corporations.

The RBI has cut the cash reserve ratio - proportion of money banks have to park with the central bank - by 3.5 percentage points to 5.5 per cent releasing about Rs 1,40,000 crore into the system. The repo rate - the rate at which banks borrow from the RBI - has also been cut by 1.5 percentage points to 7.5 per cent.

“Given the increasing downside risks to the growth momentum coupled with tight liquidity conditions, we expect RBI to cut CRR and repo rate by 50 basis points each in near future,” said Kaushal Sampat, chief operating officer of data services and consulting firm Dun and Bradstreet. On Monday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh conferred for more than one-and-a-half hours with key macroeconomic managers, including Chidambaram, Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath, Subbarao and Planning Commission Deputy Chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia and other senior officials on the current economic downturn and shrinking demand for India’s exports.

India’s exports are projected to decline by 15 per cent in October this fiscal, for the first time in any month in five years, and likely to miss the $200 billion target for 2008-09.

Online dating service eHarmony has agreed to create a new website for gays and lesbians as part of a settlement with a gay man in New Jersey, the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General said on Wednesday.

The website will provide a dating service with “male seeking a male” or “female seeking a female” options, the Attorney General’s office said in a statement.

eHarmony said it will launch the new same-sex dating site, named “Compatible Partners,” by March 31.

The settlement was the result of a discrimination complaint filed by Eric McKinley against eHarmony in 2005, which will be dismissed under the settlement agreement.

eHarmony was founded in 2000 by evangelical Christian Dr. Neil Clark Warren and had ties with the influential religious conservative group Focus on the Family.

The New Jersey complaint is not the only legal action to be brought against eHarmony for failing to provide a same-sex option.

In March, lawyers in California brought a lawsuit against the company on behalf of San Francisco resident Linda Carlson, who was denied access to eHarmony because she is gay.

“We believe that this case is now essentially moot, and we’re confident that we will prove that in court,” eHarmony vice president Antone Johnson said in a statement about the California case.

When it comes to watching porn or experimenting with drugs and alcohol, school-going children in Delhi, be it boys or girls, are far from being shy, claims a latest survey.”26 per cent of the boys surveyed fell in the moderate category and 21 per cent fell in the high category when it came to talks about visiting porn sites, being a common conversation in schools. Among girls, 24 per cent fell in moderate category and five per cent in high category,” Chief Psychiatrist, Max Healthcare Dr Samir Parikh, who conducted the survey, said.

The survey conducted among 1000 children (541 boys and 459 girls) from the top public schools in the national capital stated, high population of boys and girls know or visit sites that are not for their age groups.

It also revealed that experimenting with drugs once in a while is common in all schools especially at parties. While 23 per cent boys agreed that experimenting with drugs was common in parties, 13 per cent of the girls did the same, taking the total to 36 per cent.”These results seem to indicate that a lot of risky indulgences take place in parties,” said Dr Parikh.

Its not just drugs and sleaze that seem to be a favourite among school children but also alcohol.

While 22 per cent of the boys in the moderate category thought having one drink of alcohol at parties is something that everyone does, 16 per cent fell in high category.

“This seems to indicate that a large population, which is more than 60 per cent of students of the total surveyed, consume alcohol,” Dr Parikh pointed out.

Smoking within school premises is also frequently done by the children surveyed who belong to the age group of 13-17 years.

“The entire survey was done to understand the though process of the youngsters. It shows that the children are prone to risky behaviour,” the doctor added.

Ear infections are common in children, and may occur for a variety of reasons.

But certain factors — both environmental and beyond anyone’s control — may increase your child’s risk.

The American Academy of Family Physicians lists these common risk factors for ear infections in children:

• Being around cigarette smoking.
• Having had ear infections before, frequent colds, or having a family history of ear infections.
• Going to a day-care center.
• Being born premature or at low birth weight.
• Going to bed with a bottle or using a pacifier.
• Being male.
• Having allergies that cause congestion.

Maruti Suzuki India, the country’s top car maker, is worried about adverse economic conditions but expects new models to help it maintain last year’s production and sales volumes, said Chairman R.C. Bhargava at the launch of Maruti’s A-star hatchback on Wednesday.

Maruti, 54.2 per cent-owned by Suzuki, has more than half of the Indian car market. It sold 711,824 cars in the local market in the fiscal year ending March and exported 51,669 cars, industry data showed.

“Slowing down so far is really not the kind of slowing down which I think most people trying to say we are having. The next five months, again very difficult to predict. Our expectation is that we do not expect sales and production this year to go below last years figure,” said Bhargava.

High borrowing costs and a slowing economy have hit car sales in India. Sales have fallen from a year earlier in three of the past four months, and an industry body has said the challenge was to sustain single-digit growth in the fiscal year to March 2009.

Bhargava said Maruti’s sales in the first seven months of 2008-09 were four per cent higher than a year earlier, but commodity prices had hit profitability.

“But I would imagine that the export volume could in the worst circumstances may be come down to around 150, 000. in the good circumstances it could reach to 100, 000 or more, it depends how the thing goes but I think the range could be around 50 000 cars,” he said, adding benefits from the recent falls in commodity prices were expected to be seen from February.

When asked whether the current recessionary trends are affecting the sales and the turnover of the company, Bhargava said that the company has sold more cars in this period than in the last year.

He also added that with the global meltdown and the fluctuating fuel prices, people are taking to small cars and that would help the company.

“I don’t think this is the worst recession, I don’t see where so much recession is because as I said we have sold till October, more cars than we had sold last year and the demand for some of the models is still very strong…..I think the world trend is towards smaller cars now as you have seen in the USA and in Europe, SUVs and the larger fuel guzzling vehicles have all lost enormously in the market place and I think even if the crude prices have come down in the last couple of weeks, I think people are not going to easily forget that they could go up against to 150 dollar as they did . So I think people would be more cautious in the kind of vehicle they buy and I think they will move towards more fuel efficient cars,” said Bhargava.

The A-star, the company’s eighth new model in the last three years, will have a base price of 346,775 rupees.

Maruti will export the A-star to Europe from January. It expects its total vehicle exports to reach 200,000 by 2010-11, Bhargava said.

Bhargava said Maruti expected it would get an order early next year from Japan’s Nissan Motor Co. under a contract manufacturing deal struck in 2006.

Maruti had earlier said it would make 50,000 cars for Nissan, but today Bhargava said that was yet to be finalised.

Shares in Maruti rose 0.7 to 516.50 rupees in a Mumbai market that closed down 1.8 per cent.

If breast cancer runs in the family, women can be at high risk even if they test free of the disease’s most common gene mutations, sobering new research shows. The genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 are linked with particularly aggressive hereditary breast cancer, and an increased risk of ovarian cancer, too.

When a breast cancer patient is found to carry one of those gene mutations, her relatives tend to breathe a sigh of relief if they test gene-free.

But those headline-grabbing genes account for only about 15 percent of all breast cancer cases. Even in families riddled with breast cancer, a BRCA gene is the culprit only in roughly one family of every five that gets tested, said University of Toronto cancer specialist Dr. Steven Narod.

So clearly members of those families remain at risk from other yet-to-be-found genes, but how much risk?

Narod tracked nearly 1,500 women from 365 breast cancer-prone families, who tested negative for BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations.

After five years, those women had a fourfold higher risk than average women of developing breast cancer, Narod reported Monday at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

This is crucial information for women considering gene testing, said Georgetown University genetics counselor Beth Peshkin, who wasn’t part of the study.

“This is contrary to what I think the common perception is,” Peshkin said. “Unless a mutation is identified in the family, a negative test result doesn’t provide reassurance.”

The good news: Narod’s study showed these women didn’t have an increased risk of ovarian cancer, like BRCA1- and BRCA2-carriers do.

While the $3,000 BRCA tests are well-accepted, newer tests for other genes linked to breast cancer are coming on the market.

But “the family history is a much stronger predictor,” stressed Narod. He recommends that such women take the anti-cancer drug tamoxifen and undergo MRI cancer checkups instead of easier mammograms “regardless of what other gene tests showed.”

Police across Southeast Asia have arrested 27 people and seized 6.6 million dollars worth of counterfeit anti-HIV drugs, antibiotics, and other medicines, Interpol said Tuesday.

The global police organisation said 16 million fake pills, also including anti-malaria and anti-tuberculosis drugs, were netted in Operation Storm, a five-month sting that ended in September.

Nearly 200 raids were carried out in Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam with the support of Interpol and the World Health Organisation, it said in a statement.

The crackdown targeted individuals and groups involved in the manufacture and distribution of four classes of counterfeit medicines identified as posing “a significant public health risk,” Paris-based Interpol said.

The operation “will provide a blueprint for future actions in targeting this type of criminal activity which affects every corner of the globe,” Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said in the statement.

The results of the operation were released Monday at the start of an international law enforcement training seminar on combating counterfeit drugs in Cambodia, Interpol said.