India is looking upon Venezuela as a white knight as its state-owned refiner-marketers grapple with raging oil prices. The oil ministry has asked IndianOil to tap the Andean country for cheaper crude that will yield higher margins and help reduce overall losses accruing from selling motor and kitchen fuels at governmentcapped prices.

Amid mounting worries that rising prices might singe Congress and its UPA partners in the coming elections, government on Wednesday vowed to crack down on cement and steel cartels and announced imports of one million tonnes of edible oil and 15 lakh tonnes of pulses. The announcements were made during the day-long discussion in Parliament on price spiral, with the Opposition and Left savaging government.

Climate change could take malaria and other diseases to Britain and trigger more frequent heatwaves that will have huge health impacts, British doctors said. With the exception of Lyme disease, insect-borne diseases are largely unknown in Britain. But global warming could change that in a few decades, according to a report from the British Medical Association (BMA).

A University of Washington professor says a recently discovered fish that crawls instead of swimming and has forward-looking eyes like humans could be part of an entirely unknown family of fishes. The creature sighted in Indonesian waters off Ambon Island has tanand peach-colored zebra-stripping. It uses its leglike pectoral fins to burrow into cracks and crevices of coral reefs in search of food. UW professor Ted Pietsch says this relative of the anglerfish will have to undergo DNA scrutiny to verify that it is unique. But he says he's never seen anything like it.

On the hike in parking charges proposed during an Environment Pollution Control Authority (EPCA) meeting, MCD and DDA said they have received the minutes of the meeting and were working out the modalities. They added that it was too early to give out details of the new set-up.

Vietnam has started clinical trials for developing a human vaccine for the H5N1 virus, researchers said in the country that has recorded 52 deaths from bird flu. Eleven volunteers, all researchers, received their second dosage of the trial vaccine on Thursday inside spotlessly-clean medical rooms of a company run by the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology in Hanoi. Dr Nguyen Tuyet Nga, the epidemiologist and virologist heading the trial, said experts were using the highly-pathogenic strain of H5N1 taken from humans in Vietnam and known as VN1194.

Want to have a go at building you own ecocity of the future?

Astronomers using robotic cameras said on Wednesday that they had found 10 new planets outside our solar system, while a second team said they had found the youngest planet yet. The findings add to a growing list of more than 270 so-called extrasolar planets, they told a meeting of astronomers in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Gene M130 is a marker of the first human migration out of Africa. R M Pitchappan, who teaches immunology at the Madurai Kamaraj University in Tamil Nadu, tells Narayani Ganesh that he found this in the DNA of members of a community in a village near Madurai: Are Indians the first ever migrants out of Africa?

If the Environment Pollution Control Authority (EPCA) has its way, you will soon have to pay as much as you do at multi-level parking lots to keep your car along the street. With about 25 new multi-level parking lots being constructed in the Capital before the Commonwealth Games 2010 to cater to the Capital's growing vehicular population, the EPCA has proposed to revise parking rates at all surface-level parking areas located in the vicinity of multi-level lots.

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