Recibe el Cenart el “Live Performers Meeting” del 24 al 26 de enero

México, 22 Ene. (Notimex).- Del 24 al 26 de enero en el Centro Nacional de las Artes (Cenart) se llevará a cabo el “Live Performers Meeting” (LPM), el evento más importante a nivel mundial dedicado a la manipulación y mezcla de video en tiempo real.

Mediante un comunicado de la oficina de prensa del Cenart, se informó que el encuentro incluirá otras actividades en el Centro Cultural Border y la Fundación Alumnos47.

El LPM ofrece la oportunidad de experimentar tres días de actuaciones audiovisuales, talleres, mesas redondas, muestra de productos presentados por cientos de VJs, artistas audiovisuales, profesionales de los nuevos medios y pensadores de todo el mundo.

El evento promueve la práctica de las actuaciones de video en directo, gracias a un programa rico e impredecible que busca explorar temas diferentes a través de nuevos lenguajes audiovisuales, técnicas y tecnologías.

Las atracciones principales de la edición mexicana serán una gran variedad de presentaciones audiovisuales en vivo, talleres, showcases y sesiones de Djs con Vjs, así como un concurso internacional de video jockeys.

El público interesado encontrará espectáculos que van desde el live cinema, videodanza, interacción en vivo, videoarte, mapping, instalaciones multimedia, programación, arte generativo, live coding, danza y teatro con visuales, entre otras.

El LPM empezó en Italia hace ocho años y ha reunido a más de dos mil artistas de todo el mundo en sus 11 ediciones pasadas. Más de 50 mil personas han asistido a sus actividades ya que ofrece una gran gama de talleres y showcases gratuitos para el público en general, así como algunos de paga.

En esta edición en la Ciudad de México, más de 200 artistas provenientes de Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Canadá, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, España, Estados Unidos, Francia, Italia, México, Perú, Turquía, Reino Unido, Rusia, Uruguay y Venezuela, participarán en casi 100 presentaciones y talleres.

Las presentaciones audiovisuales se realizarán del 24 al 26 de enero, en el Centro Nacional de las Artes. Éstas que van desde el video teatro a la video danza, actuaciones de live cinema, visuales y música generativa, live coding, hasta las fiestas finales animadas por DJs y VJs internacionales.

El Cenart, el Centro Cultural Border y la Fundación Alumnos47 albergarán en un horario de 10:00 a 18:00 horas talleres y presentaciones dedicados a aprender y compartir, basándose en el tema de la cultura de video en vivo.

Se explorarán las teorías de producción de contenidos y el procesamiento de imágenes, además de estudiar y experimentar con nuevas tecnologías así como desarrollar debates sobre la cultura de prácticas libres y Open Source.

NTX/LGZ/MAG

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Walhberg: Boy band union is strong for summer tour

NEW YORK (AP) — For Donnie Wahlberg it's not a matter of why now, rather "why not?"

The recording artist-turned-actor was referring to the news of a major tour with his New Kids on the Block, who'll be joined this summer on "The Package Tour" by 98 Degrees and Boyz II Men.

"The state of the boy band union is strong," Wahlberg joked Tuesday. "Even though technically we're not really boy bands, but we're OK with that, so we'll accept it."

The three bands sold millions of records in the 1980s and '90s and helped usher in a wave of vocal groups that continues today.

The Boston-based NKOTB formed in 1984 and amassed ten Top 20 hits. They broke up in 1994 but got back together after a 14-year hiatus. Wahlberg said he feels the break coincided with the maturation of their fan base.

"They needed time to have families and husbands and children and get jobs and live their life," Wahlberg said.

But now he sees his band's music as a complement to the fans' adult lives.

"We created an outlet for them to feel good about themselves and tap into that youthfulness that had been put to bed for a long time ... you may be 40, but the euphoria of it makes you feel 14 all over again," Wahlberg said.

The band also announced a new single, "Remix (I Like The)," which will be released Jan. 28, and a new album, "10," which is out April 2.

That music will be a bit more mature than some of the band's previous material, member Joey McIntyre said.

"It is about the decisions that a grown man makes and goes through, as opposed to singing songs like 'Popsicle,'" he said.

Nathan Morris, one of the members of Boyz II Men, known since the early 1990s for such hits as "I'll Make Love to You" and "End of the Road," said the tour is going to be all about performing.

"If the boy band thing is attached, it's wonderful, but for all of us in here, we're ready to get out there and sing and perform," he said. "That's just what we do."

Though 98 Degrees is the youngest group on the bill, it has been apart the longest, 12 years.

"So we're excited to get back together and doing what we do," member Nick Lachey said. "We feel reinvigorated by our bond and by our group, so we're very excited by that."

Wahlberg, who stars as Detective Danny Reagan on the CBS television series "Blue Bloods," about several generations of a family of New York City police officers, said the boy bands' tour, kicking off May 31 in Uncasville, Connecticut, and continuing into July with more than 30 dates, is going to be "great."

"You have three acts that have lots of records, lots of fans," he said. "Fans that are anxious to sing those records and anxious to sing other bands' records, too."

___

John Carucci covers entertainment for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://www.twitter.com/jcarucci_ap

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Well: Is There an Ideal Running Form?

In recent years, many barefoot running enthusiasts have been saying that to reduce impact forces and injury risk, runners should land near the balls of their feet, not on their heels, a running style that has been thought to mimic that of our barefoot forebears and therefore represent the most natural way to run. But a new study of barefoot tribespeople in Kenya upends those ideas and, together with several other new running-related experiments, raises tantalizing questions about just how humans really are meant to move.

For the study, published this month in the journal PLoS One, a group of evolutionary anthropologists turned to the Daasanach, a pastoral tribe living in a remote section of northern Kenya. Unlike some Kenyan tribes, the Daasanach have no tradition of competitive distance running, although they are physically active. They also have no tradition of wearing shoes.

Humans have run barefoot, of course, for millennia, since footwear is quite a recent invention, in evolutionary terms. And modern running shoes, which typically feature well-cushioned heels that are higher than the front of the shoe, are newer still, having been introduced widely in the 1970s.

The thinking behind these shoes’ design was, in part, that they should reduce injuries. When someone runs in a shoe with a built-up heel, he or she generally hits the ground first with the heel. With so much padding beneath that portion of the foot, the thinking went, pounding would be reduced and, voila, runners wouldn’t get hurt.

But, as many researchers and runners have noted, running-related injuries have remained discouragingly common, with more than half of all runners typically being felled each year.

So, some runners and scientists began to speculate a few years ago that maybe modern running shoes are themselves the problem.

Their theory was buttressed by a influential study published in 2010 in Nature, in which Harvard scientists examined the running style of some lifelong barefoot runners who also happened to be from Kenya. Those runners were part of the Kalenjin tribe, who have a long and storied history of elite distance running. Some of the fastest marathoners in the world have been Kalenjin, and many of them grew up running without shoes.

Interestingly, when the Harvard scientists had the Kalenjin runners stride over a pressure-sensing pad, they found that, as a group, they almost all struck the ground near the front of their foot. Some were so-called midfoot strikers, meaning that their toes and heels struck the ground almost simultaneously, but many were forefoot strikers, meaning that they landed near the ball of their foot.

Almost none landed first on their heels.

What the finding seemed to imply was that runners who hadn’t grown up wearing shoes deployed a noticeably different running style than people who had always worn shoes.

And from that idea, it was easy to conjecture that this style must be better for you than heel-striking, since presumably it was more natural, echoing the style that early, shoeless cavemen would have used.

But the new study finds otherwise. When the researchers had the 38 Daasanach tribespeople run unshod along a track fitted, as in the Harvard study, with a pressure plate, they found that these traditionally barefoot adults almost all landed first with their heels, especially when they were asked to run at a comfortable, distance-running pace. For the group, that pace averaged about 8 minutes per mile, and 72 percent of the volunteers struck with their heels while achieving it. Another 24 percent struck with the midfoot. Only 4 percent were forefoot strikers.

When the Daasanach volunteers were asked to sprint along the track at a much faster speed, however, more of them landed near their toes with each stride, a change in form that is very common during sprints, even in people who wear running shoes. But even then, 43 percent still struck with their heels.

This finding adds to a growing lack of certainty about what makes for ideal running form. The forefoot- and midfoot-striking Kalenjin were enviably fast; during the Harvard experiment, their average pace was less than 5 minutes per mile.

But their example hasn’t been shown to translate to other runners. In a 2012 study of more than 2,000 racers at the Milwaukee Lakefront Marathon, 94 percent struck the ground with their heels, and that included many of the frontrunners.

Nor is it clear that changing running form reduces injuries. In a study published in October scientists asked heel-striking recreational runners to temporarily switch to forefoot striking, they found that greater forces began moving through the runners’ lower backs; the pounding had migrated from the runners’ legs to their lumbar spines, and the volunteers reported that this new running form was quite uncomfortable.

But the most provocative and wide-ranging implication of the new Kenyan study is that we don’t know what is natural for human runners. If, said Kevin G. Hatala, a graduate student in evolutionary anthropology at George Washington University who led the new study, ancient humans “regularly ran fast for sustained periods of time,” like Kalenjin runners do today, then they were likely forefoot or midfoot strikers.

But if their hunts and other activities were conducted at a more sedate pace, closer to that of the Daasanach, then our ancestors were quite likely heel strikers and, if that was the case, wearing shoes and striking with your heel doesn’t necessarily represent a warped running form.

At the moment, though, such speculation is just that, Mr. Hatala said. He and his colleagues plan to collaborate with the Harvard scientists in hopes of better understanding why the various Kenyan barefoot runners move so differently and what, if anything, their contrasting styles mean for the rest of us.

“Mostly what we’ve learned” with the new study, he said, “is how much still needs to be learned.”

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Japan's central bank pledges new stimulus to combat deflation

WASHINGTON — In unveiling a new stimulus plan, Japan's central bank for the first time set an ambitious inflation target aimed at breaking the nation out of its long deflationary trap and economic stagnation.

But many analysts and investors were disappointed with Tuesday's action.

They said the moves by the Bank of Japan, in response to relentless nagging by Japan's new prime minister to be more aggressive, fell far short of what was needed to put the world's third-largest economy on a path of sustained growth — offering little hope that Japan would provide a boost to the fragile global economy any time soon.

Japan's economy shrank in the third quarter amid weakening exports and consumer spending, and economists said it was likely to report a contraction for the fourth quarter, technically putting it in recession.

Deflation has long been a big part of Japan's economic woes. The trend of falling prices undermines growth by sapping consumers' spending and business profits, hurting jobs, wages and investment.

The country has been in a mild deflation in the last year. To combat that, the Bank of Japan adopted a 2% inflation target — double its previously stated goal of 1% and in line with other central banks in advanced economies, including the Federal Reserve in the U.S.

And much like the Fed, Japan's central bank pledged to pump more money into the financial system by buying government bonds indefinitely every month in a bid to meet its target.

Although the Fed's focus has been on bringing down America's stubbornly high unemployment rate, Japan's central bank is aiming to spur more consumer spending, in part by trying to create expectations that prices will rise, a strategy that not everyone agrees will work.

Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, praised the central bank's action, calling it "bold" and "epoch-making." The Bank of Japan's statement was issued jointly with Abe's government, which for its part pledged "all possible decisive policy actions" to grow the economy.

But the announcement was met with widespread skepticism from financial markets and experts. For one thing, the central bank's stepped-up buying of government bonds would amount to about 13 trillion yen a month, or about $147 billion, not nearly as much as analysts were expecting.

Furthermore, the Bank of Japan said it would not begin such purchases until early 2014, a delay that puzzled experts.

Takeo Hoshi, a finance professor at Stanford University, said it wasn't clear exactly why the central bank was delaying the expanded stimulus until next year. But he noted that the Bank of Japan is concerned about providing artificial support to unhealthy businesses and fostering undisciplined fiscal spending by buying government bonds and keeping interest rates low.

Hoshi said his bigger concern with Tuesday's joint statement was the lack of concrete steps that Abe's government said it would take to address long-running needs in the Japanese economy, such as deregulation and policies to strengthen competitiveness.

"The fundamental problem is that Japan's potential growth rate has declined over the last 20 years, and Japan hasn't done enough structural reforms to change that," said Hoshi, who directs the Japanese program at Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center.

The new 2% inflation-targeting strategy by itself won't drive more consumer spending, said Japanese economics expert Richard Katz, because "people keep expecting inflation and it never happens."

"When they expect more inflation, it actually causes them to spend less because prices go up, but people don't think wages will go up," said Katz, chief editor of the Oriental Economist Report, a monthly newsletter that specializes in Japan and U.S.-Japan relations.

The answer to Japan's economic problems, Katz said, was to provide stronger monetary stimulus and more efficient fiscal spending, along with a series of structural reforms that would enable Japan to become more productive in the face of a shrinking workforce and a population that is aging and saving less.

The Bank of Japan's action also drew criticism from Jens Weidmann, president of Germany's Bundesbank. He warned of government infringement in central bank authority and a resulting "politicized exchange rate" that could lead to currency wars as countries look to bolster economic growth through exports.

Japan, for decades an export powerhouse with perennial surpluses, has been running a trade deficit for the last two years. As prime minister, Abe has sought to devalue Japanese currency to help the country's export industries. The central bank's pledge to buy more bonds could help put further downward pressure on the yen.

Still, experts don't think that the yen will fall much further. Even if it dropped 10%, they said, it would probably have only a minor effect on the overall economy.

"I don't think trade surpluses will come back for Japan," Stanford's Hoshi said. "They need to come up with a new growth model."

don.lee@latimes.com

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In Obama's inaugural speech, a sweeping liberal vision

WASHINGTON — Allowing that "our journey is not complete," President Obama offered a robust liberal vision of America in his second inaugural address, embracing gay rights, action on climate change and a substantial role for government even as he acknowledged the challenges of a bitterly divided nation.

An ocean of American flags waved under overcast skies and hundreds of thousands of faces tilted up just before noon Monday as Obama stood on the Capitol's West Front and repeated the oath of office in America's 57th presidential inauguration.

Chants of "O-ba-ma" rose, echoing from a packed National Mall. The atmosphere was festive, but the fevered excitement that welcomed America's first African American president four years ago had been toned down. Still, though the crowd appeared smaller, it may rank as one of the largest for an inaugural celebration.

In an 18-minute speech, Obama paid tribute to the vast cultural, demographic and political changes that twice helped sweep him into office.

He also highlighted themes of national unity, borrowing language that even the most ardent tea party follower would endorse — praising "the patriots of 1776," describing freedom as "a gift from God," endorsing healthy skepticism of "central authority," and describing as "fiction" the notion that government can solve all ills.

But Obama made clear he views government as essential to fix the nation's problems and to guarantee the security of its citizens, reaffirming Democratic ideology stretching from the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

"Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative," he said. "They do not make us a nation of takers. They free us to take the risks that make this country great."

The remarks were an allusion to one of the fiercest arguments of the presidential campaign — when Republican nominee Mitt Romney described 47% of Americans, Obama supporters, as overly reliant on government — as well as to attacks on entitlement programs during recent budget battles in Congress.

Obama became the first president to use an inaugural address to call for an end to discrimination against gays and lesbians, equating it with landmark movements for women's suffrage and African American civil rights.

"Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law," Obama said as the crowd applauded.

Obama, who long said he was evolving on same-sex marriage, waited until his reelection campaign was in full swing last year before he announced his support.

Speaking on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday, Obama alluded to the slain civil rights leader after putting his hand on two Bibles — one owned by King, and the other used at the 1861 inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.

Obama first took the oath of office from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. at the White House on Sunday, when his term officially began. On Monday, Roberts administered the oath again, and the two men spoke slowly and carefully — unlike four years ago, when they mangled the text and had to arrange a private do-over at the White House.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, both Democrats, and their spouses were among the dignitaries who bundled up in heavy coats on a wintry gray morning to witness the public oath. The other living former presidents, Republicans George H.W. Bush, who was recently released from two months in the hospital, and his son, George W. Bush, were absent. Both issued warm statements of congratulations to the Obamas.

In his address, Obama offered an ideological primer on Democrats' beliefs, rather than specifics of the fights likely to dominate the upcoming session of Congress.

He cited Newtown, referring to the horrific elementary school shooting in Connecticut last month, but did not explicitly mention gun violence or firearms control.

He declared that the nation could not succeed "when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it," the kind of language that sparked Republican complaints during the presidential race that he was engaging in class warfare. But he did not say how he would rectify the disparity.

And while he emphasized the need to rise above "party or faction," he aimed a series of barely concealed zingers at his opponents, including those who deny climate change. He said failure to respond to that threat "would betray our children and future generations," but offered no clues of what he might do.

"We cannot mistake absolutism for principle," he said in another pointed passage, "or treat name-calling as reasoned debate."

Some Republicans said they searched in vain for olive branches. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who lost to Obama in 2008, said the president did not reach out to "those on the other side of the aisle in a plea to work together."

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Nearly 20,000 new BlackBerry 10 apps submitted this past weekend

Research in Motion (RIMM) held a “Port-A-Thon” earlier this month to boost developer interest in BlackBerry 10. The event ended up being a huge success for the company with more than 15,000 apps submitted to BlackBerry World in less than two days. In a last chance effort to increase its app count before the launch of its new operating system, RIM held a second event this past weekend and it was even bigger than the first one. Developers submitted 19,071 apps in 36 hours, bringing RIM closer to its goal of offering more than 70,000 apps at launch. RIM is scheduled to unveil BlackBerry 10 at a press event on January 30th.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 OS walkthrough, BlackBerry Z10 pricing]

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Beyonce, Hudson do star turns at inauguration

WASHINGTON (AP) — Beyonce drew a loud cheer at the inauguration Monday even before her impressive rendition of the national anthem. But in the role she played four years ago singing for the president and first lady at the inaugural ball was her "Dreamgirls" co-star Jennifer Hudson.

If President Barack Obama's first inaugural theme seemed to be summed up by Beyonce's "At Last," this time it was Hudson's version of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together."

Hudson was among the entertainment at Monday night's inaugural balls, joined by Stevie Wonder and Alicia Keys, who modified her hit "Girl on Fire" to sing "He's the president and he's on fire ... Obama's on fire. Obama's on fire."

The crowd at the official Inaugural Ball joined in with the Grammy-nominated fun. anthem "We Are Young."

And Wonder got small knots of dancers going with crowd-pleasers such as "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours."

Earlier in the day, the applause for Beyonce started when she took her place with Jay-Z at the Capitol to watch President Barack Obama take the oath for his second term in office. The two stopped to chat with the Rev. Al Sharpton.

James Taylor kicked off the musical performances, strumming his guitar and singing "America the Beautiful." Kelly Clarkson followed with a different arrangement of "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Then Beyonce was introduced and the crowd again roared its approval.

Beyonce had a definite fan in Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who applauded eagerly after she finished singing the national anthem. She offered R&B-esque vocal riffs as she sang on and the crowd seemed to love it, cheering loudly as she finished. Clarkson, too, hit high notes.

Beyonce may have been the star musical attraction, but she had plenty of company from Hollywood at the Capitol on Monday. Katy Perry and John Mayer sat side-by-side, with Perry in an orange-striped coat and wide hat, and Mayer in dark sunglasses. Singer-songwriter Ke$ha was there, too.

People flocked to the colorful pop star, snapping photos. And Perry did the same, taking shots of "Girls" actress and daughter of news anchor Brian Williams, Allison Williams.

Actress Eva Longoria was seated on the platform outside the Capitol after making an appearance at a Kennedy Center performance Sunday night. Perry sang at the children's concert the night before.

Former Boston Celtics great Bill Russell was in the crowd, too, along with actor Marlon Wayans.

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AP writers Donna Cassata, Darlene Superville, Josh Lederman and Jocelyn Noveck contributed to this report.

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Follow Mesfin Fekadu on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MusicMesfin

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The Week: A Roundup of This Week’s Science News

“Science,” a colleague once said at a meeting, “is a mighty enterprise, which is really rather quite topical.” He was so right: as we continue to enhance our coverage of the scientific world, we always aim to keep the latest news front and center.

His observation seemed like a nice way to introduce this column, which will highlight the week’s developments in health and science news and glance at what’s ahead. This past week, for instance, the mighty enterprise of science addressed itself to such newsy topics as the flu (there’s still time to get vaccinated!), and mental illness and gun control.

In addition to the big-headline stories that invite wisdom from scientists, each week there is a drumbeat of purely scientific and medical news that emerges from academic journals, fieldwork and elsewhere. These developments, from the quirky to the abstruse, often make their way into the daily news cycle, depending on the strength of the research behind them. (Well, that’s how we judge them, anyway.)

Many discoveries are hard to unravel. “In a way, science is antithetical to everything that has to do with a newspaper,” the same colleague observed. “You couldn’t imagine anything less consumer-friendly.”

Let’s aim to fix that. Below, a selection of the week’s stories.

DEVELOPMENTS

Health

Strange, but Effective

People with a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile — which kills 14,000 Americans a year — have a startling cure: a transplant of someone else’s feces into their digestive system, which introduces good bacteria that the gut needs to fight off the bad. For some people, antibiotics don’t fix this problem, but an infusion of diluted stool from a healthy person seems to do the trick.

Genetics

Dig We Must

Hillery Metz and Hopi Hoekstra/Harvard University

Evolutionary biologists at Harvard took a tiny species of deer mice, known for building elaborate burrows with long tunnels, and bred it with another species of deer mice, which builds short-tunneled burrows. Comparing the DNA of the original mice with their offspring, the biologists pinpointed four regions of genetic code that help tell the mice what kind of burrow to construct.

Aerospace

Launch, Then Inflate

Uncredited/Bigelow Aerospace, via Associated Press

NASA signed a contract for an inflatable space habitat — roughly pineapple-shaped, with walls of floppy cloth — that will ideally be appended to the International Space Station in 2015. NASA aims to use the pod to test inflatable technology in space, but the company that builds these things, Bigelow Aerospace, has bigger ambitions: think of a 12-person apartment and laboratory in the sky, with two months’ rent at north of $26 million.

Biology

What’s Green and Flies?

Jodi Rowley/Australian Museum

National Geographic reported on an Australian researcher working in Vietnam who discovered a great-looking new species of flying frog. Described as having flappy forearms (the better for gliding), the three-and-a-half-inch-long frog likes to “parachute” from tree to tree, Jodi Rowley, an amphibian biologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, told the magazine. She named it Helen’s Flying Frog, for her mother.

Privacy

That’s Joe’s DNA!

People who volunteer their genetic information for the betterment of science — and are assured anonymity — may find that their privacy is not a slam dunk. A researcher who set out to crack the identities of a few men whose genomes appeared in a public database was able to do so using genealogical Web sites (where people upload parts of their genomes to try to find relatives) as well as some simple search tools. He was trying to test the database’s security, but even he did not expect it to be so easy.

Genetics

An On/Off Switch for Disease

Geneticists have long puzzled over what it is that activates a disease in one person but not in another — even in identical twins. Now researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who studied people with rheumatoid arthritis have identified a pattern of chemical tags that tell genes whether to turn on or not. In rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system attacks the body, and it is thought the tags enable the attack.

Planetary Science

That Red Planet

Everybody loves Mars, and we’re all secretly hoping that NASA’s plucky little rover finds evidence of life there. Meanwhile, a separate NASA craft — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been looping the planet since 2006 — took some pictures of a huge crater that looks as if it once held a lake fed by groundwater. It is too soon to say if the lake held living things, but NASA’s news release did include the happy phrase “clues to subsurface habitability.”

COMING UP

Animal Testing

Retiring Chimps

Emily Wabitsch/European Pressphoto Agency

A lot of people have strong feelings about the use of chimpanzees in biomedical and behavioral experiments, and the National Institutes of Health has been listening. On Tuesday, the agency is to release its recommendations for curtailing chimp research in a big way. This will be but a single step in a long process and it will apply only to the chimps the agency owns, but it may well stir big reactions from many constituencies.

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Bank of Japan sets 2% inflation plan

TOKYO — Bowing to government pressure, Japan's central bank Tuesday pledged more aggressive action to boost the economy, including setting a 2% inflation target.

The Bank of Japan said it would conduct "open-ended" asset purchases to help achieve the goal of breaking out of a long spell of deflation.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had urged the central bank to ease monetary policy further to help the recession-struck economy escape from years of falling prices.

Whether the effort will succeed remains to be seen: the central bank has not achieved even its 1% inflation target, with price increases hovering below 0.5% for the past two years despite surges in energy costs.

The central bank described its inflation goal as a "price stability target."

"Under the price stability target, the bank will pursue monetary easing and aim to achieve this target at the earliest possible time," it said.

But it said it also would "ascertain whether there is any significant risk to the sustainability of economic growth, including from the accumulation of financial imbalances."

Among the risks are a ballooning public debt, already well over twice the size of Japan's gross domestic product.

Abe's government is seeking to spur growth both through heavy government spending on public works and other projects and through monetary easing. The announcement by the central bank Tuesday was in line with expectations.

The government was determined that the central bank set a 2% inflation target, trade minister Toshimitsu Motegi told reporters on Monday.

"We want a clear inflation target to aim for," Motegi said. "Other countries have inflation targets, and it's not just 1 percent. They are all at least 2%," he said.

Motegi said the monetary easing, which has involved tens of trillions of yen (hundreds of billions of dollars) in asset purchases and years of near-zero interest rates, so far has been "inadequate."

The Abe government is expected to nominate as Bank of Japan governor an expert known to favor its policies when the term of the current governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, ends this spring.

However, Motegi rejected accusations that the government's demands are meant to erode the central bank's independent status.

"We are not doing this to gang up and pick on Mr. Shirakawa," he said. But he said that "the policy of aiming to escape deflation will not change, not today, not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow."

Critics of the government's strategy of pushing for more inflation argue that it will do little to stimulate real demand in the economy if it pushes up prices without accompanying gains in purchasing power.

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Clara Jane Nixon dies at 93; sister-in-law of President Nixon

Her famous brother-in-law had not yet been elected president. But he already had been vice president, as well as a U.S. senator and a congressman from California, and Clara Jane Nixon wanted to preserve some of his family history.

So, beginning in 1967, the Newport Beach homemaker set out to track down and collect the furniture, books and other belongings that had filled the modest boyhood home of Richard M. Nixon. She hoped that one day the artifacts might be displayed in a museum.

With the help of other family members, the wife of F. Donald Nixon, a brother of the future president, found and preserved hundreds of items from his childhood home in Yorba Linda, including the piano on which he took lessons, the table where his family ate its meals and the china and crystal his parents received as wedding gifts.

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2012

She found the high chair he used as a toddler, the bed on which he was born and the quilt, dating from 1875, that had been used to cover it. The furnishings and other belongings of the Nixon family are displayed in the 900-square-foot farmhouse, a museum near the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda.

"Clara Jane was just essential to all those artifacts being saved," her brother-in-law Ed Nixon said in a phone interview Sunday. "We're very thankful she was there all these years and for everything she did to preserve the family history."

Clara Jane Nixon died Thursday at a convalescent facility in Irvine where she was receiving care after a recent fall at the home where she had moved after her husband's death in 1987, family members said. She was 93.

She was born Clara Jane Lemke on Nov. 16, 1919, in Westmoreland, a community in Imperial County where her parents were homesteading. She weighed in at less than five pounds, according to the scale — normally used for weighing chickens — that her father employed for the task, her daughter LawreneAnfinson said in a phone interview.

She grew up in Placentia, where her parents, Lawrence and Mae Lemke, were citrus farmers. After graduating from Fullerton High School, she attended Sawyer Business College in Westwood and later worked as a secretary at a law firm.

In 1940, when she was 20, she was introduced to F. Donald Nixon, who was her third cousin on her mother's side. They dated for just three weeks before he asked for her hand, and they were married on Aug. 9, 1942. They had three children: daughter Lawrene, who was named for her grandfather Lawrence, and sons Donald and Richard.

Their son Richard Calvert Nixon died in 2002. In addition to her daughter and her son Donald, Clara Nixon's survivors include six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

In later years, after President Nixon resigned in disgrace on Aug. 9, 1974, his youngest brother was often asked about the significance of the date.

"Whenever anyone asked me, I would say, 'Well, it was Don's and Clara Jane's 32nd anniversary,'" Ed Nixon said.

rebecca.trounson@latimes.com

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