IHT Rendezvous: Britons Promised Vote on Europe, Again

LONDON — A British political leader faces dissent within his own party over the country’s membership in Europe. He promises to renegotiate the terms and to hold a referendum on the issue if he wins the next election.

That was Harold Wilson, the Labour Party leader, who as prime minister in 1975 fulfilled an election pledge to hold a nationwide vote on Britain’s continued membership in what was then the European Economic Community.

Plus ça change, as the French would say.

David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister who was 8 at the time of Britain’s first and only referendum, has now promised a rerun, announcing on Wednesday in a long-anticipated speech:

“It is time for the British people to have their say. It is time to settle this European question in British politics.”

There seemed little doubt that he had been pushed to the decision by Euro-skeptic sentiment in his own party and the emerging electoral challenge from the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party, which is threatening to capture Tory votes.

Divisions over Europe used to be the Labour Party disease. The left of the party viewed the E.C.C. as a club for the rich that had more to do with enhancing the profits of transnational business than enhancing the lot of the common man.

“The development of the Community since its inception has been largely directed to business rather than social goals,” the Trades Union Congress, the umbrella group for British labor unions, argued at the time. “The effect has been to increase the mobility of capital . . . enabling business to avoid more easily its obligations to employees.”

The split continued to dog the Labour Party, in and out of government, long after two-thirds of voters opted in 1975 to remain in Europe.

These days, labor union spokesmen are as likely to argue that Europe has been good for workers in terms of Continent-wide rights and protections.

But Euro-skepticism was never confined to the Labour Party. For the Conservatives, it was and remains a divisive issue between a broadly pro-European mainstream and right wingers who rail at loss of sovereignty and an overweening Brussels bureaucracy.

Harold Wilson’s 1975 referendum was a gamble that paid off. He supported Britain’s continued membership in the face of opponents who included members of his own cabinet.

Will David Cameron’s own “dangerous gamble” silence Conservative dissent? Or will Britain end up sleepwalking out of Europe, as some have warned?

Peter Kellner, a veteran political commentator, says there’s an “uncanny resemblance” between public opinion in 1975 and today.

So, if there is a referendum in which Britons again opt to stay in, will that be the end of the argument?

Tell us what you think. Is David Cameron playing domestic politics over Europe and, if so, what are the risks? And, if you’re British, which way would you vote?

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Google Wants to Own the Airwaves, Now

As if Google‘s launching a free Wi-Fi network in New York City earlier this month wasn’t curious enough, now the search giant is asking the Federal Communications Commission for a license to create an “experimental radio service.” What’s an experimental radio service, you ask? Well, Google won’t say exactly what its doing with the air above its Mountain View, California headquarters, but the details of the FCC application suggest it’s trying to build its own proprietary wireless network.

RELATED: Who’s Winning the Facebook-Google Tech War

Oh, so this must have something to do with Google Fiber and Google‘s becoming an Internet service provider, offering insanely fast Internet, right? Again, not exactly. “Google‘s small-scale wireless network would use frequencies that wouldn’t be compatible with nearly any of the consumer mobile devices that exist today, such as Apple’s iPad or iPhone or most devices powered by Google‘s Android operating system,” explain The Wall Street Journal‘s Amir Efrati and Anton Troianovski. “The network would only provide coverage for devices built to access certain frequencies, from 2524 to 2625 megahertz.” However, networks using those frequencies are under construction in Asia, just waiting for devices that support them. And last year, Google purchased Motorola Mobility, a mobile phone manufacturer that could ostensibly manufacture such devices. This is starting to sound sort of shady.

RELATED: You Were Right to Delete Your Google History

While it’s too soon to understand the extent of the company’s plans, it certainly looks like Google actually wants to own the airwaves now. Could we see a Google phone that works on a custom built Wi-Fi network, one that nobody else can use? It’s very possible. For now, Google‘s official answer to that line of questioning is that the company experiments all the time with all kinds of things. But according to Steven Crowley, a wireless engineer who first spotted the FCC application, ”The only reason to use these frequencies is if you have business designs on some mobile service.” 

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Nicki Minaj Storms Off American Idol Set in Charlotte, N.C.

TV Watch

American Idol

By Jamie Bufalino

01/23/2013 at 10:50 PM EST

From left: Randy Jackson, Mariah Carey, Ryan Seacrest, Nicki Minaj and Keith Urban

Michael Becker/FOX.

As American Idol's talent search headed to Charlotte, N.C., on Wednesday, the already-tense relationship between judges Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj went even further south.

Things got so heated that the production had to shut down for a bit, leaving a speedway full of aspiring singers sitting idle. The cause of the friction? Disagreements over the judges' varying styles of critique – particularly when it came to 20-year-old Summer Cunningham.

"Why are we picking her apart?" Minaj asked after Carey questioned whether the contestant's voice was best-suited for country music.

"Really? Is that what I did?" responded Carey. "We're trying to help her as opposed to just talk about her outfit."

That retort caused Minaj to throw a fit. "Oh, you're right. I'm sorry I can't help her. Maybe I should just get off the [BLEEP] panel," she said before walking off the set.

As Minaj left, Carey got in one more shot: Referring to Minaj storming off, she said, "I was going to do that the next time she ragged on me."

But the judging panel – including Keith Urban and Randy Jackson – also had plenty moments of togetherness in Charlotte. They gave unanimous thumbs up to Brian Rittenberry, 27 – a dad from Jasper, Ga., whose wife bounced back from battling cancer – for belting out "Let It Be" with a big booming voice.

They also swooned over 16-year-old Isabel Gonzalez, who Jackson plucked out of a high school class to audition for Idol as part of this season's new nomination segments. And they were all in agreement that 20-year-old Joel Nemoyer from Carlisle, Pa., should try a different line of work after he tried crooning a Michael Bublé song while lying flat on his back.

Even without the histrionics, Minaj proved to be the most entertaining of the judges. Between her ongoing habit of assigning nicknames to all the contestants – she dubbed singers everything from "collard greens" to "Jumanji" – Minaj also managed to ask hilariously bizarre questions ("Have you ever lived in Tokyo?") and put new and sometimes creepy twists on her positive critiques. "I want to skin you and wear you," she told one girl she was particularly fond of.

Even with the short interruption due to the judges' kerfuffle, the Idol gang managed to find 36 contestants to put through to Hollywood.

And they'll be back for more auditions in Baton Rouge, La., on Thursday.

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Women have caught up to men on lung cancer risk

Smoke like a man, die like a man.

U.S. women who smoke today have a much greater risk of dying from lung cancer than they did decades ago, partly because they are starting younger and smoking more — that is, they are lighting up like men, new research shows.

Women also have caught up with men in their risk of dying from smoking-related illnesses. Lung cancer risk leveled off in the 1980s for men but is still rising for women.

"It's a massive failure in prevention," said one study leader, Dr. Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society. And it's likely to repeat itself in places like China and Indonesia where smoking is growing, he said. About 1.3 billion people worldwide smoke.

The research is in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. It is one of the most comprehensive looks ever at long-term trends in the effects of smoking and includes the first generation of U.S. women who started early in life and continued for decades, long enough for health effects to show up.

The U.S. has more than 35 million smokers — about 20 percent of men and 18 percent of women. The percentage of people who smoke is far lower than it used to be; rates peaked around 1960 in men and two decades later in women.

Researchers wanted to know if smoking is still as deadly as it was in the 1980s, given that cigarettes have changed (less tar), many smokers have quit, and treatments for many smoking-related diseases have improved.

They also wanted to know more about smoking and women. The famous surgeon general's report in 1964 said smoking could cause lung cancer in men, but evidence was lacking in women at the time since relatively few of them had smoked long enough.

One study, led by Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto, looked at about 217,000 Americans in federal health surveys between 1997 and 2004.

A second study, led by Thun, tracked smoking-related deaths through three periods — 1959-65, 1982-88 and 2000-10 — using seven large population health surveys covering more than 2.2 million people.

Among the findings:

— The risk of dying of lung cancer was more than 25 times higher for female smokers in recent years than for women who never smoked. In the 1960s, it was only three times higher. One reason: After World War II, women started taking up the habit at a younger age and began smoking more.

—A person who never smoked was about twice as likely as a current smoker to live to age 80. For women, the chances of surviving that long were 70 percent for those who never smoked and 38 percent for smokers. In men, the numbers were 61 percent and 26 percent.

—Smokers in the U.S. are three times more likely to die between ages 25 and 79 than non-smokers are. About 60 percent of those deaths are attributable to smoking.

—Women are far less likely to quit smoking than men are. Among people 65 to 69, the ratio of former to current smokers is 4-to-1 for men and 2-to-1 for women.

—Smoking shaves more than 10 years off the average life span, but quitting at any age buys time. Quitting by age 40 avoids nearly all the excess risk of death from smoking. Men and women who quit when they were 25 to 34 years old gained 10 years; stopping at ages 35 to 44 gained 9 years; at ages 45 to 54, six years; at ages 55 to 64, four years.

—The risk of dying from other lung diseases such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis is rising in men and women, and the rise in men is a surprise because their lung cancer risk leveled off in 1980s.

Changes in cigarettes since the 1960s are a "plausible explanation" for the rise in non-cancer lung deaths, researchers write. Most smokers switched to cigarettes that were lower in tar and nicotine as measured by tests with machines, "but smokers inhaled more deeply to get the nicotine they were used to," Thun said. Deeper inhalation is consistent with the kind of lung damage seen in the illnesses that are rising, he said.

Scientists have made scant progress against lung cancer compared with other forms of the disease, and it remains the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. More than 160,000 people die of it in the U.S. each year.

The federal government, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the cancer society and several universities paid for the new studies. Thun testified against tobacco companies in class-action lawsuits challenging the supposed benefits of cigarettes with reduced tar and nicotine, but he donated his payment to the cancer society.

Smoking needs more attention as a health hazard, Dr. Steven A. Schroeder of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a commentary in the journal.

"More women die of lung cancer than of breast cancer. But there is no 'race for the cure' for lung cancer, no brown ribbon" or high-profile advocacy groups for lung cancer, he wrote.

Kathy DeJoseph, 62, of suburban Atlanta, finally quit smoking after 40 years — to qualify for lung cancer surgery last year.

"I tried everything that came along, I just never could do it," even while having chemotherapy, she said.

It's a powerful addiction, she said: "I still every day have to resist wanting to go buy a pack."

___

Online:

American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org

National Cancer Institute: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/tobacco/smoking and http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/lung

Medical journal: http://www.nejm.org

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Asian shares retreat, Nikkei hit hard as yen stays firm

TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares retreated from multi-month highs on Wednesday amid caution as the earnings season gathers pace, with Tokyo stocks falling to three-week closing lows in response to a firm yen.

"Asian markets have been climbing steadily and it's natural for investors to want to book profits as the region's earnings season begins in full force later this month," said Hirokazu Yuihama, a senior strategist at Daiwa Securities in Tokyo.

"The uptrend remains intact given improving fundamentals globally, so selling like this is a healthy correction that may lead to putting a solid floor to prices," he said.

The MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.miapj0000pus> fell 0.3 percent after earlier reaching a 17-1/2-month high. The index has risen nearly 30 percent since a low touched in June, 2012.

The yen held firm against the dollar and the euro as monetary easing announced on Tuesday by the Bank of Japan failed to provide an immediate stimulus as some had hoped, though many analysts acknowledged the BOJ's resolve to tackle Japan's stubborn deflation and economic stagnation.

The stronger yen hurt Japanese exporters, dragging the benchmark Nikkei average <.n225> down 2.1 percent to a three-week closing low. The yen has weakened by around 12 percent since mid-November against the dollar, and boosted the Nikkei by more than 20 percent as a weaker yen improved exporters' earnings outlook. <.t/>

The BOJ on Tuesday doubled its inflation target to 2 percent and adopted an open-ended commitment to buy assets starting 2014, sparking an unwinding of yen short positions from speculators looking for more immediate easing step.

The dollar fell 0.6 percent to 88.20 yen while the euro slid 0.7 percent to 117.45 yen. The dollar hit a 2-1/2-year high of 90.25 yen on Monday.

Many still believe the yen will resume its recent downtrend, seeing the latest rebound in the Japanese currency as a correction to its rapid and sharp decline.

With the BOJ joining the continued push by global central banks to support growth, Morgan Stanley said in a research note that policy easing by central banks was positive for emerging markets, with more bond portfolio inflows increasingly towards local markets.

"Our key themes for 2013 are rebalancing and reflation, with both prevalent so far this year. Even given a migration towards global equities and away from fixed income, emerging market fixed income remains well-placed," it said.

Elsewhere, Hong Kong and Chinese shares were among the hardest hit as investors took profits from recent gains, with indexes faltering at technical resistances. Hong Kong <.hsi> shares slipped from a 19-1/2-month high and were down 0.4 percent while Shanghai shares <.ssec> fell 0.5 percent, moving further away from a 7-1/2 month high.

"We have risen by quite a bit in a very short time, so investors have been taking some profit in the last week or so, looking for new ideas to rotate into," said Larry Jiang, chief strategist at Guotai Junan International Securities.

Australian shares <.axjo> bucked the trend to edge up 0.2 percent to their highest close in almost 21 months after miner BHP Billiton gained after reporting a rise in quarterly iron ore production.

BETTER ENVIRONMENT

European markets are seen rising, with financial spread-betters predicting London's FTSE 100 <.ftse>, Paris's CAC-40 <.fchi> and Frankfurt's DAX <.gdaxi> would open as much as 0.4 percent higher. U.S. stock futures were down 0.2 percent, pointing to a softer Wall Street start. <.l><.eu><.n/>

On Tuesday, hopes of an improvement in the global economy led the Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> to a five-year high.

Investors were also cheered by easing worries over the U.S. budget crisis.

Republican leaders in the House of Representatives said they aim to pass on Wednesday a nearly four-month extension of the U.S. debt limit to May 19.

U.S. crude was down 0.1 percent to $96.59 a barrel and Brent eased 0.2 percent to $112.23.

Spot gold was at $1,692.66 an ounce, near Tuesday's one-month high of $1,695.76, while London copper traded down 0.3 percent at $8,107 a metric ton but clinging near a one-week high of $$8,144.50 hit on Tuesday.

(Additional reporting by Clement Tan in Hong Kong; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

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India Ink: At This Year's Jaipur Lit Fest, Feminism, the Dalai Lama and Cricket

NEW DELHI —– It is that time of year again when the pink city of Jaipur in Rajasthan State warms up to host a carefully curated panel of literary greats from across the globe for the Jaipur Literature Festival, South Asia’s biggest annual literary event. In its sixth year now, the five-day event will kick off on Thursday at the majestic Diggi Palace, where 283 writers will appear before an audience of several thousand people and engage them through conversations and book readings.

The runup to the festival has not been without controversy. The Hindu right-wing group RSS and the national opposition Bharatiya Janata Party are demanding a ban on the participation of Pakistani writers in the wake of the recent skirmish along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan. And Muslim clerics have threatened to agitate if any of the four authors who last year read out excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s banned book ‘The Satanic Verses’ are seen at this year’s festival. Of the four, only the novelist Jeet Thayil is on the speaker’s list this time.

Organizers said that these threats would not affect the festival’s schedule.

“The media should not give space to this kind of rabble-rousing,” said Sanjoy K. Roy, the festival’s producer.  He said the venue was already secure, with more than 200 security personnel, and added that there was no need for any additional security.

A day ahead of the official opening, on Wednesday, an unlikely marriage of cricket and literature is culminating in a friendly game between authors and cricket players on the home turf of one of India’s premier league teams, the Rajasthan Royals. It will be ‘Royals XI’ versus ‘Authors XI’.

This year the festival is more “multilingual and multivocal” than the previous editions, said Namita Gokhale, one of the directors of the festival.

Writings in 17 Indian languages, including Bangla, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Tamil and Kashmiri, will be showcased at the multilingual sessions that will offer a flavor of regional literary history as well as folk literature. Santhali, a language spoken in India’s east coast, will be represented at the festival for the first time. There will also be readings of literature in several foreign languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, as well as in Sinhala, spoken by the ethnic Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka and in Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan.

The idea of the festival is to show “India to the world and the world to India,” said William Dalrymple, the festival’s co-director.

The overarching theme of this year’s festival, which features 174 sessions, is Buddha in literature.

Spirituality has been central to literature in India, said Mr. Dalrymple, adding, “Buddhist literature has influenced so much of Asian literature.”

Complementing the theme, the big surprise guest this year is his holiness the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan leader, who is living in exile in India, will hold a conversation with the British-born novelist Pico Iyer on Thursday afternoon in a session titled “Kinships of Faiths.”

After the brouhaha last year over Oprah Winfrey’s star-spangled reception, the selection of this year’s chief guest seems to have been tempered on purpose.

“Oprah’s appearance sucked the oxygen from the other sessions,” Mr. Dalrymple said. “She took so much press.” Some of the other big names like Tom Stoppard, “one of the best playwrights” did not get the attention that he should have received last year.

Nonetheless, he said this year’s guest list is still spectacular.

Among those appearing are several award-winning authors, including the Commonwealth Prize Winner Aminatta Forna from Sierra Leone, Howard Jacobson, a Booker Prize winning author, and Andrew Solomon, a Pulitzer winner.

The historical novelist Lawrence Norfolk will be introduced to Indian book lovers for the first time along with other popular British writers including Sebastian Faulks and Deborah Moggach.

Mr. Dalrymple pointed out that several prominent authors from the Arab world are participating in the festival, including the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif and the Moroccon writer Tahar Ben Jalloun.

An emphasis on feminist writing and featuring women’s voices would seem to be a natural choice for the organizers after the recent spate of protests against sexual harassment of women in India.

“It wasn’t by design, but by instinct,” Ms. Gokhale said, noting planning for the event began in March last year.

Mahasweta Devi, an octogenarian Bengali writer and social activist, who will make her first appearance at the festival, has been on the organizers’ wish list for each of the past few years. A Tamil feminist writer who writes under the pseudonym Ambai will also be making her first appearance.

Diana L. Eck, a religious scholar form Harvard, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a postmodern and postcolonial theorist from Columbia, are among the distinguished women scholars scheduled to speak at the festival.

“The strand of sessions on ‘The Buddha in Literature’ examines the role of women in the Buddhist theology and hierarchy,” Ms. Gokhale explained. Other session including “Imagine: Resistance, Protest, Assertion” emphasize the “inspirational surge of women’s solidarity,” she said.

The phenomenal growth of the festival over the years has led the organizers to add another venue, the Char Bagh to the existing venues at the Diggi Palace to accommodate the crowds. Mr. Roy, the festival producer, said that 22,000 people can be accommodated per hour, up from 14,000 last year. A total of 122,000 people attended last year.

The festival organizers have spent an estimated 56 million rupees (about $1 million) this year. While Teamwork Productions, which is overseeing the event, is struggling to break even, the event will continue to be egalitarian and open to all without an admission fee, said Mr. Roy, who is also the managing director of the company. “Arts create wealth in a different way,” he said.

Chiki Sarkar, the publisher of Penguin Books India, uses the annual festival to launch a featured new book or talent. This year will see the launch of Anjan Sundaram, the author of “Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo.”

“Very often projects that I have been thinking about for a while get crystallized in Jaipur,” she said.

Festival regulars say that much of the magic of the Jaipur Literature Festival takes place outside the sessions themselves. “The best thing is the surprise element, the random encounter that can result in something completely unexpected, new, and sometimes wonderful,” said Urvashi Butalia, a publisher and writer who is the co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house and the director of Zubaan, an imprint of Kali.

At least 20 parties will be hosted during the festival and 145 artists are expected to perform through the course of the five-day event, including Indian folk artists and Spanish performers.

(Neha Thirani contributed reporting.)

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FTC study taking aim at online marketing of booze and kids

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plans this summer to recommend ways that the alcoholic beverage industry can better protect underage viewers from seeing its advertisements online.

Distillers, brewers and wineries pour millions of dollars into brand promotion on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and industry critics contend they are not doing enough to prevent young consumers from receiving these messages.

“We’re doing a deep dive on how they’re using the Internet and social media,” said Janet Evans, a lawyer with the FTC, which is conducting a year-long study due to be released by early summer. “We’re focusing on underage exposure.”

She would not elaborate on any potential recommendations that might come out of the study, which began in April 2012.

The FTC is reviewing data from 14 big producers, Evans said, including Beam Inc, the maker of Jim Beam, Diageo Plc, home to Johnnie Walker, and Constellation Brands Inc, which makes Robert Mondavi and Ravenswood wines.

The FTC report “is something we take seriously and place at high priority,” said Karena Breslin, director for digital marketing at Constellation.

The FTC has made two requests for information since the study began, she said.

The regulatory agency has not said it intends to impose restrictions on liquor company social media advertising but it can make recommendations to the industry.

The FTC is empowered to file suit to ensure consumers are protected from deceptive marketing practices, Evans said, but she stressed that studies of this nature are meant to promote better self-regulation, not provide a basis for a case.

Executives say alcohol makers and distributors voluntarily adhere to the same industry-set standard for marketing to underage viewers on social media sites that the industry set for its ads on TV and other medium. That requires that at least 71.6 percent of an audience consists of adults 21 and older.

“No one in their right mind would want to advertise to people who can’t legally buy their product,” said Frank Coleman, senior vice president for Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS), the trade group that sets the industry’s advertising codes.

In June 2011, DISCUS revised its code upwards to 71.6 percent from 70 percent, after the FTC recommended it review the standard to better reflect U.S. Census population data.

Industry critics, including David Jernigen, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Johns Hopkins University, and Sarah Mart, research director of the advocacy group Alcohol Justice, contend the industry didn’t go far enough and should raise the standard further.

Jernigen says it needs to be at least 85 percent to effectively protect youth, so there would be no more than 15 percent exposure to the underage drinking population.

“The industry says its self-regulating but it’s ineffective and social media opens up a whole new set of problems because their ads are everywhere,” said Sarah Mart, research director for the San Rafael, Calif.-based group Alcohol Justice.

The industry group’s Coleman said the group now requires members to install age-checking tools via instant-messaging as a gateway to Twitter feeds and other branded Web platforms that ask the user for a birth date before admitting them.

In the first nine months of 2012, beer, wine and spirits manufacturers’ spent an estimated $ 35 million for paid Web display advertising, but industry executives estimate many millions more were spent on Web site creation, video production for platforms like Google’s YouTube and social media marketing efforts.

“We’ve significantly adjusted more money to digital for online video, Web sites, Facebook and Twitter content,” said Kevin George, global chief marketing officer for Jim Beam, which he says spends 30 percent of its media spend for online outlets, up from 10 percent in 2008.

Many companies are expanding their digital staff. Wine maker Constellation hired Breslin three years ago to initiate digital marketing and now has a team of five reporting to her.

Many alcoholic beverage companies flocked to Facebook because it requires users to post their birth dates when signing up. Last year Twitter partnered with Buddy Media to offer a more effective screening tool that sends a direct message to fans who click on a brand. The message sends the fan a link to a site that asks for date of birth, which has allowed Twitter to grab some more of the sector marketing. Salesforce.com bought Buddy Media last June, which is now folding the platform into its marketing cloud portfolio.

Health advocates and industry critics are crying foul. “Facebook and other interactive platforms are poorly monitored and not well age protected,” said Jernigen of Johns Hopkins University. “Anyone can say they’re 21 and click yes.”

(Reporting By Susan Zeidler; Editing by Ron Grover and Alden Bentley)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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PEOPLE's Music Critic: Why We're Upset About Beyoncé's Lip-Synching Drama

By Chuck Arnold

01/22/2013 at 08:40 PM EST

Did she lip-synch or didn't she?

That's the question surrounding Beyoncé after reports surfaced that she didn't sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" live at yesterday's presidential inauguration.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Marine Band, which backed the pop diva at the ceremony, said Tuesday that Mrs. Jay-Z decided to use a previously recorded vocal track before delivering the national anthem, but later on another spokesperson, this one for the Pentagon, said there was no way of knowing whether the 16-time Grammy winner was guilty of lip-synching or not.

Should it matter? Let's remember that Whitney Houston, in what is widely considered one of the best renditions of "The Star-Spangled Banner" of all time, didn't sing it live either at the 1991 Super Bowl.

There are all sorts of technical reasons why it can be challenging to perform a song as difficult as this on such a large scale, and there are many extenuating circumstances that could have played a role in any decision to lip-synch. Certainly no one is questioning whether Beyoncé – who, in removing her earpiece midway through, may have been experiencing audio problems – has the chops to sing it.

Lip-synching – or at least singing over pre-recorded vocal tracks – has long been acceptable for dance-driven artists like Madonna, Janet Jackson and Britney Spears, whose emphasis on intense, intricate choreography makes it hard to execute the moves fans have come to expect while also singing live. Huffing and puffing into the microphone or barely projecting for the sake of keeping it real just isn't gonna cut it. Of course, there have been other instances – such as Ashlee Simpson's 2004 Saturday Night Live debacle – where faking it crossed the line.

Surely there wouldn't be the same controversy about Beyoncé had she been hoofing across the stage performing "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" on one of her tour stops. But this was the presidential inauguration, the national anthem, and there was no choreography involved.

Some things have to remain sacred, and for "the land of the free and the home of the brave," this was one of them.

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Asian shares rise; BOJ easing spurs volatile yen, Nikkei trading

TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares rose on Tuesday amid optimism over the global growth outlook, but bold easing measures from the Bank of Japan failed to lift Tokyo equities and the yen rebounded from a brief sell-off as investors digested the central bank's actions.

The MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.miapj0000pus> rose 0.4 percent to a fresh 17-1/2-month high, while Australian shares <.axjo> ended little changed after touching a 20-month high earlier in the session. Hong Kong shares <.hsi> hovered around a 19-1/2-month peak and onshore China markets were on track to gain for a fourth-straight day.

The spotlight in Asia fell on the BOJ, which on Tuesday doubled its inflation target to 2 percent and adopted an open-ended commitment to buy assets, surprising markets that had expected another incremental increase in its 101 trillion yen ($1.12 trillion) asset-buying and lending program.

"A stronger Japan is good for the global economy," said Jeremy Friesen, a commodities strategist at Societe Generale in Hong Kong. He added the stimulus plan will be more positive for base metals than energy as Japan will be building infrastructure that will boost demand for metals such as zinc and copper.

The reaction in Japanese markets, however, reinforced market perceptions that the BOJ could have done more.

The yen rebounded from brief losses and the Nikkei turned down from an initial surge as investors digested the details, including the fact that the new scheme for additional purchases will only come into effect next year. Several analysts were also of the opinion the BOJ could have taken more steps, such as scrapping the 0.1 percent floor for short-term interest rates and extending the duration of bonds the central bank buys.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei average <.n225> surged as much as 0.8 percent before giving up all gains to end down 0.4 percent. Tokyo shares have been rising in tandem with the yen's slide against major currencies on expectations for bolder BOJ steps. The Nikkei tumbled 1.5 percent on Monday after investors booked profits from the index's 2.9 percent rally on Friday. <.t/>

The dollar rose as high as 90.18 yen, but was last trading down 0.6 percent at 89.09 yen. It touched a fresh 2-1/2-year high of 90.25 on Monday. The euro rose to 120.18, before falling 0.5 percent to 118.88 yen. The euro hit its peak since May 2011 of 120.73 on Friday.

"The BOJ increase in asset purchases is only commencing in 2014. So no strong immediate increase in easing," said Jeffrey Halley, FX trader for Saxo Capital Markets in Singapore, noting stop-loss selling under 89.50 yen added to the dollar's drop.

Hiroshi Maeba, head of FX trading Japan at UBS in Tokyo, said: "It was more or less within market expectations and was not disappointing. But it also didn't top expectations because there was speculation that the BOJ would do all it can, including removing the 0.1 percent floor on short term interest rates."

Still, there is a perception in markets that even if investors rooting for much bolder BOJ steps cut their yen short positions in disappointment over the outcome, the yen's rebound was likely to be limited relative to its 13 percent decline against the dollar and a 20 percent drop versus the euro over the past two months. Such views were fed by expectations the BOJ will continue to aggressively ease monetary policy to drive Japan out of years of deflation and support the economy.

Brent crude rose 0.3 percent to $112.07 a barrel as the BOJ's latest easing action added to the recent positive data from the United States and China, while growing confidence in the strength of China's economic recovery pushed London copper up 0.7 percent to $8,111.75 a metric ton.

European markets are seen subdued, with financial spread-betters predicting London's FTSE 100 <.ftse>, Paris's CAC-40 <.fchi> and Frankfurt's DAX <.gdaxi> would open flat to down as much as 0.1 percent. U.S. stock futures were up 0.2 percent, pointing to a firm Wall Street start. <.l><.eu><.n/>

General market sentiment was also supported by signs of a compromise to avert a U.S. fiscal crisis.

Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives have scheduled a vote on Wednesday on a nearly four-month extension of U.S. borrowing capacity, aimed at avoiding a fight over the looming federal debt ceiling and shifting their negotiating leverage for spending cuts to other fiscal deadlines.

Gold was up 0.2 percent at $1,693.31 an ounce on the fresh round of easing from the BOJ.

($1 = 89.7950 Japanese yen)

(Additional reporting by Masayuki Kitano and Florence Tan in Singapore; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

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IHT Rendezvous: IHT Quick Read: Jan. 22

NEWS Barack Hussein Obama ceremonially opened his second term on Monday with an assertive Inaugural Address that offered a robust articulation of modern liberalism in America, arguing that “preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” Peter Baker reports from Washington. The President made addressing climate change the most prominent policy vow of his second Inaugural Address, setting in motion what Democrats say will be a deliberately paced but aggressive campaign built around the use of his executive powers to sidestep Congressional opposition. Richard W. Stevenson and John M. Broder report.

As the death toll from the crisis in the Sahara rose sharply to 37, Algeria’s prime minister said that the hostage takers intended to kill all their captives and that the army saved many by attacking. Adam Nossiter reports from Algiers and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

Malian and French troops appeared to recapture two important central Malian towns on Monday, pushing back an advance by Islamist militants who have overrun the country’s northern half. Lydia Polgreen reports from Segou, Mali, and Peter Tinti reports from Diabaly.

A report from the International Labor Organization predicted jobless levels to rise to 202 million worldwide this year, and said that government budget-balancing was hurting employment. David Jolly reports from Paris.

Europe’s political leaders have taken important steps to improve spending discipline among euro members, but have yet to address some serious flaws in the structure of the euro zone. Liz Alderman reports from Paris and Jack Ewing from Frankfurt.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s main rivals eked out a one-seat majority that will usher the opposition Social Democrats into power in the state of Lower Saxony. Melissa Eddy and Nicholas Kulish report from Berlin.

ARTS The Neues Museum in Berlin is celebrating a bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti that “fell” into its hands 100 years ago. Melissa Eddy reports.

FASHION Raf Simons sent out a Dior summer couture collection rooted in reality — note the model’s wash-’n'-go hair — but full of flowers and the beauty of nature. Suzy Menkes writes from Paris.

SPORTS Sloane Stephens’s reward for reaching her first Grand Slam quarterfinal will be a match against a friend and fellow American, Serena Williams. Christopher Clarey reports from Melbourne.

Golfers will be able to express their opinions during Tuesday’s PGA Tour players’ meeting on the proposed ban of the anchored putting stroke. Karen Crouse reports from San Diego.

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