Oscar snubs leave Globes with also-ran nominees

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Hollywood's junior prom for film honors features quite a different cast than the senior prom at next month's Academy Awards.

Sunday night's Golden Globes are in a rare place this season, coming after the Oscar nominations, which were announced earlier than usual and threw out some shockers that have left the Globes show a little less relevant.

Key Globe contenders lined up largely as expected, with Steven Spielberg's Civil War saga "Lincoln" leading with seven nominations and two CIA thrillers — Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" and Ben Affleck's "Argo" — also doing well.

All three films earned Globe nominations for best drama and director. Yet while "Lincoln," ''Argo" and "Zero Dark Thirty" grabbed best-picture slots at Thursday's Oscar nominations, Bigelow and Affleck were snubbed for directing honors after a season that had seen them in the running for almost every other major award.

The Globe and Oscar directing fields typically match up closely. This time, though, only Spielberg and "Life of Pi" director Ang Lee have nominations for both. Along with Spielberg, Lee, Bigelow and Affleck, Quentin Tarantino is nominated for directing at the Globes. At the Oscars, it's Spielberg, Lee, "Silver Linings Playbook" director David O. Russell and two surprise picks: veteran Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke for "Amour" and first-time director Benh Zeitlin for "Beasts of the Southern Wild."

That forces some top-name filmmakers to put on brave faces for the Globes. And while a Globe might be a nice consolation prize, it could be a little awkward if Affleck, Bigelow or Tarantino won Sunday and had to make a cheery acceptance speech knowing they don't have seats at the grown-ups table for the Feb. 24 Oscars.

That could happen. While "Lincoln" has the most nominations, it's a purely American story that may not have as much appeal to Globe voters — about 90 reporters belonging to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association who cover entertainment for overseas outlets.

The Bigelow and Affleck films center on Americans, too, but they are international tales — "Zero Dark Thirty" chronicling the manhunt for Osama bin Laden and "Argo" recounting the rescue of six U.S. embassy workers trapped in Iran amid the 1979 hostage crisis.

Globe voters might want to make right on a snub to Bigelow three years ago, when they gave their best-drama and directing prize to ex-husband James Cameron's sci-fi blockbuster "Avatar" over her Iraq war tale "The Hurt Locker."

Bigelow made history a month later, becoming the first woman to win the directing Oscar for "The Hurt Locker," which also won best picture.

Globe voters like to be trend-setters, but they missed the boat on that one. Might they feel enough chagrin to hand Bigelow the directing trophy this time?

Spielberg already has won two best-director Globes, so that might be a further inducement for the foreign-press members to favor someone else this time.

Their votes were locked in before the Oscar nominations came out. Globe balloting closed Wednesday, the day before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its awards lineup.

The Globes feature two best-picture categories — one for drama and one for musical or comedy. Most of the Globe contenders also earned Oscar best-picture nominations, including all of the drama picks: "Argo," ''Lincoln," ''Life of Pi," ''Django Unchained" and "Zero Dark Thirty."

Yet only two of the Globe musical or comedy nominees — "Les Miserables" and "Silver Linings Playbook" — are in the running at the Oscars. That's not unusual, though, since Oscar voters tend to overlook comedy. The other Globe nominees for musical or comedy are "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," ''Moonrise Kingdom" and "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen."

Acting contenders include Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones for "Lincoln"; Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway for "Les Miserables"; Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman for "The Master"; Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence for "Silver Linings Playbook"; Leonardo DiCaprio and Christoph Waltz for "Django Unchained"; Alan Arkin for "Argo"; and Jessica Chastain for "Zero Dark Thirty."

Globe acting recipients usually are a good sneak peek for who will win at the Oscars. All four of last season's Oscar winners — Meryl Streep for "The Iron Lady," Jean Dujardin for "The Artist," Octavia Spencer for "The Help" and Christopher Plummer for "Beginners" — took home a Globe first.

Jodie Foster will receive the Globes' Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement at the 70th Globes ceremony, airing live from 8-11 p.m. EST on NBC.

There will be a friendly rivalry between the hosts of the Globe ceremony, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. The co-stars of the 2008 big-screen comedy "Baby Mama" both are nominated for best actress in a TV comedy or musical series, Fey for "30 Rock" and Poehler for "Parks and Recreation."

The Globes present 14 film awards and 11 television prizes.

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City Room: Cuomo Declares Public Health Emergency Over Flu Outbreak

With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.

There have been nearly 20,000 cases of flu reported across the state so far this season, officials said. Last season, 4,400 positive laboratory tests were reported.

“We are experiencing the worst flu season since at least 2009, and influenza activity in New York State is widespread, with cases reported in all 57 counties and all five boroughs of New York City,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement.

Under the order, pharmacists will be allowed to administer flu vaccinations to patients between 6 months and 18 years old, temporarily suspending a state law that prohibits pharmacists from administering immunizations to children.

While children and older people tend to be the most likely to become seriously ill from the flu, Mr. Cuomo urged all New Yorkers to get vaccinated.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said that deaths from the flu had reached epidemic levels, with at least 20 children having died nationwide. Officials cautioned that deaths from pneumonia and the flu typically reach epidemic levels for a week or two every year. The severity of the outbreak will be determined by how long the death toll remains high or if it climbs higher.

There was some evidence that caseloads may be peaking, federal officials said on Friday.

In New York City, public health officials announced on Thursday that flu-related illnesses had reached epidemic levels, and they joined the chorus of authorities urging people to get vaccinated.

“It’s a bad year,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, told reporters on Thursday. “We’ve got lots of flu, it’s mainly type AH3N2, which tends to be a little more severe. So we’re seeing plenty of cases of flu and plenty of people sick with flu. Our message for any people who are listening to this is it’s still not too late to get your flu shot.”

There has been a spike in the number of people going to emergency rooms over the past two weeks with flulike symptoms – including fever, fatigue and coughing – Dr. Farley said.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo made a public display of getting shots this past week.

In a briefing with reporters on Friday, officials from the C.D.C. said that this year’s vaccine was effective in 62 percent of cases.

As officials have stepped up their efforts encouraging vaccinations, there have been scattered reports of shortages. But officials said plenty of the vaccine was available.

According to the C.D.C., makers of the flu vaccine produced about 135 million doses for this year. As of early this month, 128 million doses had been distributed. While that would not be enough for every American, only 37 percent of the population get a flu shot each year.

Federal health officials said they would be happy if that number rose to 50 percent, which would mean that there would be more than enough vaccine for anyone who wanted to be immunized.

Two other diseases – norovirus and whooping cough – are also widespread this winter and are contributing to the number of people getting sick.

The flu can resemble a cold, though the symptoms come on more rapidly and are more severe.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/13/2013, on page A21 of the NewYork edition with the headline: New York Declares Health Emergency.

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Treasury Will Not Mint $1 Trillion Coin to Raise Debt Ceiling

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said Saturday that it will not mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to head off an imminent battle with Congress over raising the government’s borrowing limit.

“Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit,” Anthony Coley, a Treasury spokesman, said in a written statement.

The Obama administration has indicated that the only way for the country to avoid a cash-management crisis as soon as next month is for Congress to raise the “debt ceiling,” which is the statutory limit on government borrowing. The cap is $16.4 trillion.

“There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills, or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Congress needs to do its job.”

In recent weeks, some Republicans have indicated that they would not agree to raise the debt limit unless Democrats agreed to make cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security.

The White House has said it would not negotiate spending cuts in exchange for Congressional authority to borrow more, and it has insisted that Congress raise the ceiling as a matter of course, to cover expenses already authorized by Congress. In broader fiscal negotiations, it has said it would not agree to spending cuts without commensurate tax increases.

The idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin drew wide if puzzling attention recently after some bloggers and economic commentators had suggested it as an alternative to involving Congress.

By virtue of an obscure law meant to apply to commemorative coins, the Treasury secretary could order the production of a high-denomination platinum coin and deposit it at the Federal Reserve, where it would count as a government asset and give the country more breathing room under its debt ceiling. Once Congress raised the debt ceiling, the Treasury secretary could then order the coin destroyed.

Mr. Carney, the press secretary, fielded questions about the theoretical tactic at a news conference last week. But the idea is now formally off the table.

The White House has also rejected the idea that it could mount a challenge to the debt ceiling itself, on the strength of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which holds that the “validity of the public debt” of the United States “shall not be questioned.”

The Washington Post earlier published a report that the Obama administration had rejected the platinum-coin idea.

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French Airstrikes Push Back Islamist Rebels in Mali

ECPAD, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In a video still released by the French Army, French air force officers briefed at a military base in Chad before French military operations in Mali overnight.

PARIS — French airstrikes overnight in Mali pushed back Islamist rebels from a key village and destroyed a rebel command center, France said Saturday, as West African nations authorized what they said would be a fast deployment of troops to Mali in support of the weak government there.

France intervened Friday, dropping bombs and firing rockets from helicopter gunships and jet fighters after the Islamist rebels who already control the north of Mali pressed southward, overrunning the village of Konna. The French, who had earlier said they would not intervene militarily but only help African troops, took action in response to an appeal by the Malian president.

France, the United States and other Western nations have been increasingly anxious about the Islamists’ tightening grip on the north of the country, which they said was becoming a haven for militants, including those with links to Al Qaeda, who threaten not only their neighbors, but the West. On Saturday, Adm. Édouard Guillaud, the chief of staff of the French armed forces, said that French forces had no current plans to extend operations to northern areas controlled by the Islamists, but would expect to help African forces do the job when they arrive.

“The quicker the African mission is on the ground, the less we will need to help the Malian army,” Admiral Guillaud said. He said more military planes had been sent to Africa for possible use in Mali. “We are in the build-up phase of operations,” he said.

The United Nations Security Council had earlier agreed that troops from the 15-nation regional bloc known as Ecowas, the Economic Community of West African States, and European Union trainers would help the fragile government in Bamako win back the north of the country, where the Islamists have set up harsh rule under Sharia law in the nine months since the army fled the area. But both groups had been slow to deploy.

With the fall of Konna and the movement of the Islamist fighters south, the Ecowas commission president, Kadré Désiré Ouédraogo, said Saturday that the group had authorized an immediate deployment of troops “in light of the urgency of the situation,” according to news reports. But he did not specify how many troops would be sent to Mali or give a date for their deployment. Also on Saturday, the foreign minister of Mali’s neighbor, Niger, said that the country would send a battalion of 500 soldiers to fight alongside Ecowas troops.

In the fighting Friday, one French helicopter pilot, Lt. Damien Boiteux, died from small-arms fire, the French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said at a news conference. Mr. Le Drian said that French forces, led by helicopter gunships, had driven the Islamists back from Konna, but it remained unclear if Malian forces had established control. Konna is about 45 miles north of the major town of Mopti, a port city on the Niger River that the Mali government feels it cannot lose.

A spokesman for the Islamist group Ansar Dine told The Associated Press that he could not confirm if some of the group’s fighters were still in Konna. The spokesman, Sanda Ould Boumama, told Reuters that French intervention in Mali will have “consequences, not only for French hostages, but also for all French citizens wherever they find themselves in the Muslim world.”

Fear of those consequences, at least for several French hostages held in North Africa, may have been a motivation for a failed French rescue mission early on Saturday in Somalia, where French commandos tried to free a French intelligence agent held there since 2009.

Mr. Le Drian said that France needed to act in Mali to forestall the collapse of the government there and the establishment of another area controlled by radical Islamists with ties to terrorist groups. “The threat is the establishment of a terrorist state within range of Europe and of France,” he said. France is also acting because it has some 6,000 citizens in Mali, a former French colony. French troops have been moved into Bamako, the capital, to protect citizens there.

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Apple won't blindly pursue market share, Chinese paper reports

SAN FRANCISCO/BEIJING (Reuters) - In a revised version of an interview published Thursday in a Chinese newspaper, Apple Inc marketing chief Phil Schiller said the company would focus on making "the best products" for customers and "never blindly pursue market share".

On Thursday, the Shanghai Evening News had originally cited Schiller as saying that Apple would not develop a cheaper smartphone for the sake of expanding its market share.

That appeared to undermine other recent media reports indicating that Apple was working on a low-end smartphone, which would represent a significant shift in strategy for a company that has always focused on premium products.

But in a new version of the story published after the original, the Shanghai Evening News removed all references to cheaper smartphones, except for a mention of rumours of a "cheaper, low-end product".

It also amended its original headline from "Apple will not push a cheaper smartphone for the sake of market share", to "Apple wants to provide the best products, will not blindly pursue market share".

Apple confirmed the interview had taken place and that it had contacted the Chinese newspaper about amending its original article, but had no further comment and declined to provide a transcript of the interview.

A reporter at the Shanghai Evening News who identified himself as Huang Yinlong, whose byline appeared on the stories, said the paper had made some changes, as Schiller's remarks may not have been presented as clearly as possible.

As well as deleting references to cheap smartphones, paraphrased statements attributed to Schiller in the original version were replaced with direct quotations.

Asked if the paper had made the changes at Apple's request, Huang said that the paper had made the decision on its own.

"We deliberated about it, and wanted to reflect (Schiller's) meaning in the interview more accurately, so we made some adjustments", said Huang, adding the interview was conducted in Beijing on Tuesday.

The original story had quoted Schiller as saying that developing a cheaper smartphone to try and replace feature phones was not a direction in which the company wanted to head.

That comment was amended in the new version of the story, which now cites Schiller as saying that while some manufacturers are moving toward such cheaper smartphones, "Apple has always focused on providing the best products for its consumers, we've never blindly chased market share."

An operator at the Shanghai Evening News said the paper did not have a spokesperson. Queries for comment were referred to Editor-in-Chief Niu Yefang, whose phone went unanswered.

A spokeswoman for Apple in China could not be reached immediately.

Apple rarely addresses rumors about upcoming products, which often spur intense speculation. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal cited anonymous sources as saying Apple could release a cheaper iPhone as early as this year.

(Reporting by Edwin Chan and Wan Xu in San Francisco, and Terril Yue Jones in Beijing; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Jeremy Laurence)

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Obama won't support building 'Death Star'

WASHINGTON (AP) — A "Death Star" won't be a part of the U.S. military's arsenal any time soon.

More than 34,000 people have signed an online petition calling on the Obama administration to build the "Star Wars" inspired super-weapon to spur job growth and bolster national defense.

But in a posting Friday on the White House website, Paul Shawcross, an administration adviser on science and space, says a Death Star would cost too much to build — an estimated $850 quadrillion — at a time the White House is working to reduce the federal budget.

Besides, Shawcross says, the Obama administration "does not support blowing up planets."

The U.S., Shawcross points out, is already involved in several out-of-this-world projects, including the International Space Station, which is currently orbiting Earth with a half-dozen astronauts.

___

Online:

White House response to petition: http://tinyurl.com/asd565g

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Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases

A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.

The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.

“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”

Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.

So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.

The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.

However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”

She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”

Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.

If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.

Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.

“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.

A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.

Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.

Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.

“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”

The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.

But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”

“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”

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Business Briefing | Retailing: Best Buy Shares Rally on Improved Holiday Sales

The Best Buy Company had better-than-expected holiday sales, setting off a gain of $2, or 16.4 percent, in its stock price, to $14.21 a share on Friday. The holiday quarter accounted for about a third of Best Buy’s revenue last year. The chain said that revenue at stores open at least a year fell 1.4 percent for the nine weeks ended Jan. 5. The company’s performance in the United States was flat. The chief executive, Hubert Joly, said in a statement that the result was better than the last several quarters. A Morningstar analyst, R. J. Hottovy, said the results showed that some of Best Buy’s initiatives, like more employee training and online price matching helped increase sales.

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Palestinians Set Up Camp in Israeli-Occupied West Bank Territory

JERUSALEM — Adopting a tactic more commonly employed by Jewish settlers who establish wildcat outposts in the West Bank, scores of Palestinian activists and international supporters erected tents on Friday in a hotly contested piece of Israeli-occupied West Bank territory known as E1, and said they intended to stay put.

The Palestinians claim E1, just east of Jerusalem, as part of a future state. The protest comes six weeks after Israel announced that it was moving forward with plans for thousands of settlement homes in E1, stirring international outrage.

Israeli military authorities arrived on Friday and handed the protesters notices warning them that they were illegally trespassing and that they had to leave, according to a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld. Mr. Rosenfeld said he expected some movement “at some point,” with the protesters either leaving voluntarily or being removed by Israeli security forces.

But the protesters said that they had anticipated such action and that their lawyers had already gone to court in Israel to argue for a delay in any evacuation until the state details the grounds for such a move. Protest leaders said the court had given the state six days to respond.

About 200 activists began pitching tents on a hill in the barren, stony territory on Friday morning, and issued a statement announcing the establishment of a village named Bab Al Shams (Arabic for “gate of the sun”), after the title of a novel by a Lebanese writer, Elias Khoury, that portrays Palestinian yearnings through a metaphorical story of love for the land.

Israeli plans to build in E1 have been vehemently opposed for years by international players, including the United States, which say construction there would partially separate the northern and southern West Bank, harming the prospects of a viable contiguous Palestinian state in that territory. Israel announced its intention as a countermeasure after the United Nations General Assembly voted in November to upgrade the Palestinians’ status to that of a nonmember observer state.

Israel wants to create contiguity between East Jerusalem, which it has annexed, and the large urban settlement of Maale Adumim that lies beyond E1, and says that the future of the West Bank has to be settled in negotiations. In the meantime, critics say, Israel continues to establish facts on the ground.

“We are here as a response to the settlers and to the Israeli policy of settlement expansion,” said Muhammad Khatib, a veteran member of the grass-roots Palestinian Popular Struggle Coordination Committee and a resident of Bilin. That West Bank village became a symbol of Palestinian defiance after it held weekly protests and won a ruling in the Israeli Supreme Court in 2007 forcing Israel to reroute its West Bank barrier so as to take in less of the village’s agricultural land.

“Now I am one of the people of Baba Al Shams,” said Mr. Khatib, speaking by telephone from the protest site. “We want to stay here forever.”

Mr. Khatib said that the police were stopping people and supplies from entering the site, but that the campers had come prepared. He added that if the Israeli security forces came to evict the protesters, “we will resist in our nonviolent way.”

Israel says that most of the E1 area is Israeli land. Protest leaders said they had set up their encampment on a parcel of land owned by a Palestinian family from A-Tur, a neighborhood of East Jerusalem. They added that the landowners had given their full permission for the encampment and had joined the activists at the site.

About 25 tents were set up Friday, including one serving as a clinic and one for the “village administration,” according to Abir Kopty, a spokeswoman for the coordination committee, who also spoke by telephone from the encampment.

“We call this a village, not an outpost,” Ms. Kopty said, “because there is a huge difference between Palestinians living on their own land and settlers building illegally on our occupied land.”

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee, said in a statement: “This initiative is a highly creative and legitimate nonviolent tool to protect our land from Israeli colonial plans. We have the right to live anywhere in our state, and we call upon the international community to support such initiatives.”

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U.S. warns on Java software as security concerns escalate

(Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security urged computer users to disable Oracle Corp's Java software, amplifying security experts' prior warnings to hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses that use it to surf the Web.

Hackers have figured out how to exploit Java to install malicious software enabling them to commit crimes ranging from identity theft to making an infected computer part of an ad-hoc network of computers that can be used to attack websites.

"We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem," the Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team said in a posting on its website late on Thursday.

"This and previous Java vulnerabilities have been widely targeted by attackers, and new Java vulnerabilities are likely to be discovered," the agency said. "To defend against this and future Java vulnerabilities, disable Java in Web browsers."

Oracle declined to comment on the warning on Friday.

Java is a computer language that enables programmers to write software utilizing just one set of code that will run on virtually any type of computer, including ones that use Microsoft Corp's Windows, Apple Inc's OS X and Linux, an operating system widely employed by corporations.

Computer users access Java programs through modules, or plug-ins, that run Java software on top of browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The U.S. government's warning on Java came after security experts warned earlier on Thursday of the newly discovered flaw.

It is relatively rare for government agencies to advise computer users to completely disable software due to a security bug, particularly in the case of widely used programs such as Java. They typically recommend taking steps to mitigate the risk of attack while manufacturers prepare an update, or hold off on publicizing the problem until an update is prepared.

In September, the German government advised the public to temporarily stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to give it time to patch a security vulnerability that opened it to attacks.

The Department of Homeland Security said attackers could trick targets into visiting malicious websites that would infect their PCs with software capable of exploiting the bug in Java.

It said an attacker could also infect a legitimate website by uploading malicious software that would infect machines of computer users who trust that site because they have previously visited it without experiencing any problems.

They said developers of several popular tools, known as exploit kits, which criminal hackers use to attack PCs, have added software that allows hackers to exploit the newly discovered bug in Java to attack computers.

Security experts have been scrutinizing the safety of Java since a similar security scare in August, which prompted some of them to advise using the software only on an as-needed basis.

At the time they advised businesses to only allow their workers to use Java browser plug-ins when prompted for permission by trusted programs such as GoToMeeting, a Web-based collaboration tool from Citrix Systems Inc.

Adam Gowdiak, a researcher with Polish security firm Security Explorations, subsequently said he had found other security bugs in Java that continued to make computers vulnerable to attack.

Java suffered another setback in October when Apple began removing old versions of the software from Internet browsers of Mac computers when its customers installed new versions of its OS X operating system. Apple did not provide a reason for the change and both companies declined comment at the time.

(Editing by Scott Malone, Steve Orlofsky and Bernadette Baum)

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