Tests for foot and mouth disease are being carried out on an East Sussex sheep farm, the government said today.

Officials said movement restrictions on livestock were to be eased this week, if no new cases of foot and mouth were found.

But today a temporary two-mile control zone was put in place around a farm near Rye as a precautionary measure after sheep showed possible symptoms.

A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said laboratory tests were under way but there is no timetable for the results.

He said: “Animal keepers are urged to remain vigilant for disease, check their animals twice a day and report any suspicions immediately.”

If confirmed it would be the first case of foot and mouth outside Surrey since the outbreak in August. Similar scares outside the county have proved to be false alarms.

The current outbreak was discovered in a farm near the government’s Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright, Surrey.

In early September the government lifted movement restrictions and declared the UK free of the disease. But four days later a new case was found at a farm near Egham.

The government was accused of bowing to pressure from the farming industry to lift the restrictions too soon.

So far foot and mouth has been confirmed in eight Surrey farms, and a disease risk area has been declared in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire and West Sussex.

The livestock industry has also been affected by an outbreak of bluetongue that is thought to have spread from insects blown over from the continent. Restrictions to prevent its spread are due to be eased at midnight.

Meanwhile, Defra has been forced to play down a leaked report suggesting it was planning to advise people to switch to long-life milk as an energy-saving measure.

The National Farmers Union said such an idea was “grossly insensitive”.

But today Defra insisted that the report did not represent government policy. “The government is not and will not be telling people what kind of milk to drink,” it said in a statement.

Three of the largest banks in the United States, working together at the behest of the Treasury Department, announced on Monday that they were creating a large fund to serve as a buyer of bonds and other debt at a time when many investors are avoiding them.

Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase will create a fund, called a conduit, that will be able to buy around $75 billion to $100 billion in highly rated bonds and other debt from structured investment vehicles, or SIVs. Those vehicles own mortgage-backed bonds and other securities and have had trouble obtaining financing since early August, when the credit markets froze up.

The effort is intended to help SIVs that need to sell securities do so in an orderly manner. Bank and government officials are concerned that if these vehicles are forced to dump billions of dollars worth of debt in the coming weeks, it could cause a repeat of the crisis that rattled markets in August and sent the cost of mortgages and other loans soaring.

The joint effort is a result of more than a month of negotiations between bankers and government officials in Washington and New York. The talks picked up pace over the weekend, with bankers in New York and officials in Washington holding round-the-clock conference calls, according to people involved in the talks. Many details remain unresolved, but the banks plan to announce today a broad framework for how the fund will operate.

The conduit is expected to start operating in 90 days and will stay in place for a few years until it has disposed of the assets it buys, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

To maintain its credibility with investors from whom it would raising money, the conduit will not buy any bonds that are tied to mortgages made to people with spotty, or subprime, credit histories. Rather, it will buy debt with the highest ratings Д AAA and AA Д and debt that is backed by other mortgages, credit card receipts and other assets.

Each bank will put up an unspecified amount of its own capital into the fund, and other banks from around the world are expected to join the consortium in the coming weeks. The conduit will raise most of its money by selling commercial paper, which is a form of short-term debt like Treasury bills but is issued by banks, corporations and investment vehicles.

The conduit will pay market prices for the securities it buys. But it remains unclear how officials will determine the price of some bonds that have not been actively traded since August, because the difference between what buyers are willing to pay and what sellers want has widened significantly.

One analyst, Christian Stracke of the research firm CreditSights, said the effort appears to be an attempt to soothe tense investors in the debt market, rather than to provide substantive relief to the worst-hit mortgage securities. He noted that many of the banks participating in the fund had already been working on their own to ease problems at SIVs.

“For me, this is more of a P.R. blitz,” he said. The banks are “saying, its not just that we are doing this on an ad hoc, individual basis. Rather, we have a plan and consortium in cooperation with Treasury, which gives it a veneer of respectability.”

Stracke said that by serving as another buyer of the highest-rated securities, the banks are hoping to ease the immediate strain on SIVs, which could be forced to sell billions of dollars worth of assets in a fire sale if they are not able to raise new financing and when their capital falls below certain thresholds. The effort, however, will not resolve the longer-term problem many SIVs face with more risky mortgage bonds, he said.

SIVs issue short-term debt that use the money to invest in longer-term securities with higher yields. There is about $300 billion in such vehicles, which are often organized by banks but are not actually owned or held by them.

The Treasurys role in bringing together the banks is similar to the 1998 Federal Reserve effort that brought together major Wall Street banks to prevent the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management from collapsing under the weight of its aggressive financial positions. It is also an indication that Washington officials feel that the crisis in the credit market merits some intervention.

Beginning in early August, investors faith in complex securities was shaken by the downgrade of mortgage bonds and signs that the problem in the housing market would last longer than many had expected.

NEW YORK—Toy maker went to court Tuesday to declare that the name of its clean-cut dolls doesn’t belong on a model’s pornographic Web site.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Mattel said the Web site for an adult entertainer named has tried to benefit from Mattel’s success with the 48-year-old line of dolls, which includes Barbie’s sister, Skipper, her best friend, Midge, and Skipper’s boyfriend, Kevin.

China Barbie’s site says she’s a “cordial young lady” who sat behind the desks of some of the world’s leading investment banking firms and advertising agencies in New York before getting into porn. It says her filmography includes “Me Luv You Long Time,” “Ethnic Cheerleaders 8″ and “Passport to Paradise.”

The site charges $19.95 for monthly access to its photos and video clips.

The lawsuit said Mattel had registered its trademarks to protect the Barbie line of dolls and the $1.6 billion in sales that it generates. Mattel said it has sold more than a billion Barbie dolls worldwide and a typical American girl owns eight of them.

According to the lawsuit, the offending Web site is registered to Global China Networks LLC and is operated by Terri Gibson, a Hollywood, Fla., resident.

A telephone message left for Gibson and an e-mail sent to China Barbie through the Web site on Tuesday were not immediately returned.

The lawsuit said Global China Networks used a domain name containing the word “barbie” in a “bad faith attempt to profit from Mattel’s Barbie trademarks” and had damaged Mattel’s good name.

The lawsuit asked the court to order the transfer of the domain name registration to Mattel, to award damages of up to $100,000 and to order that any profits Global China Networks achieved be given to Mattel.

El Segundo, Calif.-based Mattel said the Web site is toying with an image it had carefully crafted since company co-founder Ruth Handler created the Barbie doll in 1959 after discovering that her daughter, Barbara, preferred to play with paper cutouts of adult female fashion dolls rather than baby dolls.