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British Police Hold 5 on Terror Charges as Pope Visits As Pope Benedict XVI embarked on some of the most symbolic overtures of his state visit to London, the British police arrested five men early Friday on terrorism charges related to his stay here but gave no specific details of any threat against him.

On a day when Benedict became the first pope to set foot on some of the most hallowed ground of the Anglican Church and British secular authority, the police and the Vatican said he would not change his long-planned itinerary because of the arrest of what the municipal authorities in central London described as five street cleaners. News reports said they were Algerians working in an area the pope was set to visit.
After the arrests, the British police were “satisfied that our current policing plan is appropriate” to ensure the pope’s safety, a police spokeswoman said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of police rules. Britain’s broader terrorism threat assessment level was not increased.
On the second day of a four-day visit partly overshadowed by the sexual abuse crisis enfolding the Roman Catholic Church and partly evoking the Vatican’s historically troubled relationship with the Church of England, the pope visited with Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the Anglican Communion that grew from the 16th-century schism when Henry VIII broke with Rome. The meeting took place at Lambeth Palace, the archbishop’s official seat.
Speaking alongside the archbishop, the pope renewed criticism of increasing secularism, saying “the surrounding culture is growing ever more distant from its Christian roots, despite a deep and widespread hunger for spiritual nourishment.”
Later, Benedict was to address a panoply of the nation’s political leaders — including former Prime Minister Tony Blair, a high-profile convert to Catholicism — in the ornate chamber of Westminster Hall within the Houses of Parliament.
Historically, the vaulted, medieval hall carries heady symbolism. It was there that Sir Thomas More, a Catholic, was tried and convicted of treason in 1535. He was subsequently executed. In 1935, Pope Pius XI canonized him on the 400th anniversary of his death.
Later on Friday, the pope and the archbishop planned to mark a moment of ecumenical symbolism, praying together in a display of unity at Westminster Abbey, the spiritual heart of the Church of England. But the arrests seemed to inject a jarring note into a day planned as a display of harmony and reconciliation.
The police spokeswoman said that counterterrorism officers raided offices in central London at 5:45 a.m. and that five men, between 26 and 50 years old, were in custody “on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.” It was not clear if the arrests were precautionary or related to a conspiracy actually under way.
Police officers subsequently searched offices and homes in north and east London, but no “hazardous materials” were reported to have been found.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told reporters that the pope had been informed of the threat while meeting Catholic schoolchildren at Saint Mary’s University chapel at Twickenham, in southwest London, on Friday morning.
“We have complete trust in the police,” Father Lombardi said. “The police are taking the necessary measures, there is no need to change plans.”
He added: “The situation is not particularly dangerous. The pope is happy about this trip, and calm.”
Concern about papal security has persisted since a Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, tried to kill Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, in St. Peter’s Square in Rome in May 1981. Since then, the pope has traveled with a significant security detail, protected by bulletproof glass on his “popemobile” and by bodyguards alongside it. His convoy was escorted on Friday by a about dozen motorcycle outriders. For all that, Benedict mingled openly with schoolchildren when he arrived in southwest London on Friday.
In April, Reuters reported, two Moroccan students deported from Italy were suspected of plotting to assassinate the pope, strengthening suspicions that affiliates of Al Qaeda in North Africa were seeking potential recruits in Italy and arranging financing for attacks elsewhere in Europe.
Britain is currently assessing the threats to its security, according to a speech on Thursday by Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, the domestic security service. Britain has frequently been on high terror alerts since July 2005, when four suicide bombers killed 52 people in attacks on the London transit system.
In the speech, Mr. Evans said that the authorities had revised an earlier view that dissident groups in Northern Ireland would present an increasingly feeble threat as peace takes root in the British province.
“On the contrary, we have seen a persistent rise in terrorist activity and ambition in Northern Ireland over the last three years,” he said.
He also said that of all conspiracies against Britain, the proportion emanating from Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas had fallen to around 50 percent from around 75 percent three years ago as the authorities have detected increased terrorist activity among Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen.
There was no indication, however, that those remarks directly presaged the reported threat to the pope.
While the police said that Benedict’s itinerary had not been disrupted, reporters on the ground said his schedule seemed to have slipped somewhat with unusual, if brief, delays after word of the arrests emerged.
The pope arrived in London late Thursday after flying from Rome, then went to Scotland. Speaking to reporters on his plane, he said that church leaders had not been “sufficiently vigilant” or “sufficiently swift and decisive” in cracking down on sexual abusers.
Benedict’s is the first state visit to Britain by a pope in which he met with the queen and political establishment as a fellow head of state. In 1982, John Paul II paid a pastoral visit to Britain but did not meet Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and was received by the queen privately.

Google’s Chief on Social, Mobile and Conflict

Lately, stories about Google often seem to be stories about conflict — Google knocking heads with China or the Justice Department or Facebook.
For Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, that is a good sign. “This is winning,” he said this week, speaking to a group of reporters at Google’s Zeitgeist conference in Arizona. “If we were losing, we would not have these problems.”
Mr. Schmidt gave a few updates on those conflicts and rivalries, as well as some others. Expect to see social tools from Google this fall, he said, but do not expect a brand new social network. Instead, Google will add social components to its core products.
He and other Google executives were not shy about needling Facebook for making it difficult for Google to import social information. Upon signing up for Facebook, people can import their Google contacts, but it does not work the other way around, Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management, noted.
“The best thing that would happen is Facebook would open up its network and we’d use that information to improve our ads and our search,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Failing that, there are other ways in which we can get that information, which is what we’re working on.”
He described another rivalry — the one between Google and Apple over mobile phones — as different than the one with Facebook. By increasing competition, that rivalry benefits both companies and both can do well, he said.
Google’s Android business is flourishing, he said, despite the fact that Google makes no money on it because it gives the mobile operating system away for free.
“I have been surprised at how important Android is for our business,” Mr. Schmidt said. “It’s fundamentally because Android is seen as representative of the new model of computing, and people are dying to put their best applications on an open platform.”
The situation in China is stable, after Google temporarily shut down its search engine in response to assaults from hackers and now redirects users to the Hong Kong site. But the Chinese government could change that arrangement at any minute, Mr. Schmidt said.
He also spoke about another government-related conflict: the Texas attorney general’s investigation into Google’s search results and whether Google unfairly favors its own services over other Web sites.
Google does not promise that it will treat all Web sites neutrally, he said. “What we promise is the best answer that we can come up with, as judged by the end user.”
Sometimes that is a Google site and sometimes it is not, he said. “There is not a deliberate favoritism from a business perspective. There is a favoritism from what end users prefer, and we have ways to measure that.”
Regarding the Department of Justice review of Google’s acquisition of ITA, the flight software company, Mr. Schmidt said he expects the deal to go through.
Google, which has been on a shopping spree lately and particularly interested in buying social networking and advertising start-ups, has picked up the pace of acquisitions and plans to keep it that way, Mr. Schmidt said.
But do not expect to see all the start-ups’ products live on, branded with Google. “Most of the acquisitions that we are doing are focused primarily on technical talent,” Mr. Rosenberg said.

Verizon leads carriers in customer satisfaction

Verizon's customers are a happy lot. AT&T's? Not so much, still.
At least those are the findings of a survey (PDF) released last week by ChangeWave Research that found Verizon tops among cell phone users for customer satisfaction and fewer dropped calls.
Of the 4,040 wireless subscribers questioned for the survey in March, 49 percent of Verizon's customers said they were very satisfied with their service. In second place was Sprint Nextel with a 35 percent satisfaction rate. T-Mobile and AT&T both tied for last with only 23 percent of their customers who said there were very satisfied.

(Credit: ChangeWave)

Verizon also came out top in the fewest number of dropped calls, with its customers reporting only 1.5 percent of their calls lost over the prior three months. The dropped call rates were 2.4 percent for Sprint and 2.8 percent for T-Mobile, while AT&T was at the bottom with customers reporting 4.5 percent of their calls being lost. The dropped call rates marked Verizon's best since September 2008 and AT&T's worst over the same time frame.

(Credit: ChangeWave)

Customer loyalty, specifically churn rate, was another factor measured in the survey. But here Verizon and AT&T both fared well, with 7 percent of Verizon customers saying they plan to switch to another carrier over the next three months, and 8 percent of AT&T customers saying the same. The churn rate was 10 percent for Sprint and 14 percent for T-Mobile at the bottom.
Though AT&T's other grades were poor, ChangeWave believes its churn rate is relatively low thanks to its deal with Apple as the only U.S. supplier of the iPhone. In total, only 8 percent of all the people surveyed said they plan to switch carriers, the lowest level ever recorded by ChangeWave.
For those customers who do plan to switch, where will they go? The popularity of the Motorola Droid led to a big jump in the number of people who said they'd switch to Verizon, according to ChangeWave's December survey results. The number has gone down 4 percentage points since, according to the most recent results, but is still the highest of the four carriers, with 27 percent of people who plan to switch reporting they'll jump to Verizon.
Among other subscribers looking for a change, 18 percent said they're switching to AT&T. That was the second-highest rank in the current survey but 3 percentage points lower for AT&T than in the December survey and 19 points lower than it was in the September 2008 survey.
Only 7 percent of those switching say they'll move to Sprint, while 5 percent indicated a leap to T-Mobile, however, those numbers do show an improvement over the last several quarters. In the case of Sprint, ChangeWave believes the boost is due to the carrier's new 4G wireless plan and its lower prices but is uncertain whether or not this trend will continue.
Finally, how might a non-AT&T iPhone shake up the cellular landscape? The news would certainly be good for Apple.
Among Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile subscribers in general, 49 percent said they'd be very or somewhat likely to buy an iPhone if their carrier offered it. But among specific carriers, 53 percent of Verizon customers said they'd be very or somewhat likely to buy the iPhone, 44 percent of Sprint customers said the same, and 39 percent of T-Mobile customers would likely jump to an iPhone.

(Credit: ChangeWave)

But with Verizon typically the most rumored carrier that would get an iPhone if and when AT&T's exclusive contract ends, ChangeWave sees a huge demand for it among Verizon customers and believes such a move could have a "profound and likely transformational impact on the industry."

Weisz: No competition with Katie

Rachel Weisz has brushed off any talk of competition between her and Katie Holmes, who are both playing Jackie Kennedy in two different projects.
The Oscar-winning star will portray the former First Lady in a biopic directed by her fiance Darren Aronofsky, while Katie will play her in a TV mini-series, The Kennedys, to be shown on the History Channel.
"She's a fantastic actress, she will be fabulous - it's not a competition," Rachel told People.com.
She added: "I'm surprised more people haven't played her thus far. It seems strange there hasn't been many versions, but it's great she has the opportunity to play her as well."
Rachel is keen to jump into the stylish shoes of Jackie Kennedy.
"It's extremely exciting and scary at the same time. She's American royalty, so there's some fear," she said.
"I haven't really got deep into it yet, but of course she's one of the 20th century's greatest and most fabulous fashion icons. I'm thrilled."

Favreau reveals Iron Man 3 plot

Director Jon Favreau has revealed his plans for Iron Man 3.
With Iron Man 2 currently topping the box office, the actor and director told MTV he wants the villain in his next movie to be Marvel character the Mandarin, a martial-arts expert who has superhuman powers that can tear apart Iron Man's suit with his bare hands.
Jon said: "You've got to do the Mandarin - the problem with the Mandarin is that the way it's depicted in the comic books, you don't want to see that."
He continued: "He has 10 magical rings - that just doesn't feel right for our [franchise]. So it's either tech-based, or the rings are not really rings. But maybe with Thor and all those others, you'll introduce magic to that world and it won't seem so out of place."
But while Jon said he is keen to make Iron Man a trilogy he admits all the other planned Marvel movies, with overlapping stories and characters, will affect his film
He said: "Iron Man 3 to pay it off, there's so much left to understand about what the world is going to be like then. You've got Thor, Captain America, Avengers all happening with different directors before Iron Man 3, and that's all going to affect Iron Man 3.
"And what's going to have happened by then?
"With Thor, you're going to have all this supernatural stuff happening, and magic. There's a lot of stuff going on in the world, if it's going to match the comic book, it's going to be incredibly complex for a film. I'm curious to see how they handle all that stuff."

PM Gordon Brown ‘on brink of standing down

Speculation is increasing that Gordon Brown could tender his resignation as leader of the Labour Party as early as tomorrow.
Senior party figures yesterday urged Mr Brown to face up to the reality of the election result and stand down as soon as possible to enable the party to rebuild in opposition.
He could use a meeting of the party's ruling National Executive Committee to announce that he will stand down. Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader, would take over as interim leader.
Last night allies of Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, refused to deny reports that he would stand for the leadership — even though his older brother, David, is also a likely contender for the post. Other likely candidates are Ed Balls, Alan Johnson and Ms Harman herself.
While the focus is on the formal Tory-Liberal Democrat talks, informal contacts were being maintained over the weekend between Labour and Nick Clegg's party through “back channels”.
Ministers insist they have far more common ground with the Liberal Democrats — notably over electoral reform and reviving the economy — than the Tories have.
Several ministers believe that Mr Brown's continuing presence in Downing Street is undermining the party's fading chances of negotiating a deal with the Liberal Democrats.
Mr Brown, who remains Prime Minister, met ministers and Labour officials to discuss the party's next steps. They included Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, Ms Harman, Ed Miliband, author of the Labour manifesto, and Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former press secretary.
Despite the apparent progress between the Tories and Liberal Democrats, Labour is keeping alive the prospect of an anti-Tory “progressive alliance”, including Scottish and Welsh nationalists, as well as Northern Ireland MPs.
Labour says Mr Brown is ready to negotiate with Mr Clegg if his talks with David Cameron collapse, offering him immediate legislation to hold a referendum on changing the voting system.
However, they acknowledge that his presence at the table could prove a stumbling block for Mr Clegg, who has made clear he would not prop up Mr Brown as Prime Minister.

Jessica Taylor welcomes baby boy

Jessica Taylor and her husband, England cricketer Kevin Pietersen, have become parents to a baby boy.
The baby - the couple's first - was born today (Monday) after Kevin jetted from Barbados, where he has been playing in the World Twenty20, to be by the former Liberty X singer's side.
A spokesperson said the baby, whose name has not yet been announced, was born without complication and that the new addition to the Pietersen family and his mother are doing well.
Kevin, 29, said: "This really is the most amazing experience of my life."
The cricketer plans to stay with his 29-year-old wife, a Dancing On Ice finalist, for a couple of days before flying to the West Indies to continue the tournament.
The spokesperson added that the couple, who married in 2008, would like to spend time on their own to enjoy the new arrival.

Betty White hits a homerun on 'Saturday Night Live'

Betty White fans have another reason to appreciate Facebook. Not only did it provide the platform to petition for the TV icon to host "Saturday Night Live," it became a hilarious punch line in her opening monologue.
"When I first heard about the campaign to get me to host 'Saturday Night Live,' I didn't know what Facebook was," White said. "And now that I do know what it is, I have to say it sounds like a huge waste of time."
The jokes continued -- "When I was young we didn't have Facebook, we had phone book," she said, "but you wouldn't waste an afternoon with it" -- but White's Facebook fans can rest assured their online effort wasn't a waste. In fact, the actress, who appeared in every skit, is getting rave reviews.
"All it took to reinvigorate a 35-year-old comedy show was the presence of an 88-year-old woman," writes Dave Itzoff of the New York Times. "The only real disappointment of the night was when the clock struck 1 a.m. and Ms. White and the cast had to step on stage to wave their goodbyes."
Whether singing her muffins' praises on NPR or donning a black ski mask for a hardcore version of The Golden Girls theme song, White shined on a night when SNL welcomed back many of its female heavy hitters, including Molly Shannon,Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch and Ana Gasteyer.
"Her comic delivery is still formidable," says the Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan. "The show would be smart to extend an open invitation to White to return as host any time, but given how in demand she is, who knows if she'd be able to make it back?"
And even musical guest Jay-Z seemed in awe of White. After his second song, "Young Forever," he dedicated the performance to "the most incredible Betty White."

Will.i.am: I'm Cheryl's knight

Will.i.am has apparently claimed he could ride to Cheryl Cole's aid as her knight in shining armour.
The Black Eyed Peas frontman has shown his soft spot for the X Factor judge, who announced she was splitting from footballer husband Ashley following reports he had been unfaithful, and reckons he's man enough to be her protector.
"She needs rescuing after all she's been through and I'm the man to do it - whenever she needs me, she knows I'm straight there, no excuses," he told the Daily Star.
"The way Ashley treated her was just stupid and she knows I will always be there for her now."
Will, who first worked with Cheryl in 2008 when he asked her to sing on his single Heartbreaker, said he would drop everything for the Girls Aloud star, who is supporting the Black Eyed Peas on their UK tour.
"If she's in New York, I will get a flight straight away to see her. If she's in LA, I'll get on a flight there. I'll even come to London if she wants me to. I'd move to anywhere if it meant being with her," he added.

Singing legend Lena Horne dies at age 92

She started out as a 16-year-old dancer at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and later won two Grammys

Lena Horne, the silky-voiced singing legend who shattered Hollywood stereotypes of African Americans on screen in the 1940s as a symbol of glamour whose signature song was "Stormy Weather," died Sunday. She was 92
Horne died at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, a spokeswoman said. No cause of death was given.
Beginning as a 16-year-old chorus girl at the fabled Cotton Club in Harlem in 1933, Horne launched a more than six-decade career that spanned films, radio, television, recording, nightclubs, concert halls and Broadway.
As a singer, Horne had a voice that jazz critic Don Heckman described in a 1997 profile in the Los Angeles Times as "smooth, almost caressing, with its warm timbre and seductive drawl _ honey and bourbon with a teasing trace of lemon."
She was, Heckman wrote, "one of the legendary divas of popular music" _ a singer who "belonged in the pantheon of great female artists that includes Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae."
Horne, 80 at the time and cutting a new album, took a different view.
"Oh, please," she said. "I'm really not Miss Pretentious. I'm just a survivor. Just being myself."
When Horne first began dancing in the chorus at the Cotton Club _ three shows a night, seven nights a week for $25 a week _ she did so to help out her family's troubled finances during the Depression.
By the time she arrived in Hollywood for a nightclub job in 1941, she had been a vocalist for the Noble Sissle and Charlie Barnet orchestras, had done some recording and was a cabaret sensation at the prestigious Cafe Society Downtown club in New York's Greenwich Village.
She created a similar response performing at the Little Troc, a small club on the Sunset Strip, where, according to one news account, "she has knocked the movie population bowlegged and is up to her ears in offers."
Signed by MGM to a seven-year contract in an era when no other blacks were under long-term contracts at the major movie studios, Horne went on to become one of the best-known African-American performers in the country.
With her copper-toned skin, strong cheekbones and dazzling smile, she was a breakthrough on the silver screen _ "Hollywood's first black beauty, sex symbol, singing star," as Vogue magazine put it decades later.
"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," Horne once said. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."
Refusing to play maids and other stereotypical roles offered to black actors at the time, Horne appeared in a nonspeaking role as a singer in her first MGM movie, "Panama Hattie," a 1942 comedy musical starring Red Skelton and Ann Sothern.
That set the tone for most of her screen appearances in the '40s, a time in which she appeared in more than a dozen movies, including "I Dood It," "Swing Fever," "Broadway Rhythm" and "Ziegfeld Follies."
In most of them, she had only cameos as a singer, who was typically clad in a glamorous evening gown and singing while leaning against a pillar. It became her on-screen trademark.
"They didn't make me into a maid, but they didn't make me into anything else either," she wrote in "Lena," her 1965 autobiography. "I became a butterfly pinned to a column singing away in Movieland."
Horne's musical numbers usually were shot independent of the films' narratives, making them easy to be deleted when screened in the Jim Crow South.
Two exceptions were the all-black musicals in which she was one of the stars: "Cabin in the Sky" and "Stormy "Weather," both released in 1943.
Her memorable rendition of Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather" in the movie became a hit recording for Horne, as well as becoming her signature song.
A World War II pinup girl, the glamorous Horne in 1944 became the first black to appear on the cover of a movie magazine, Motion Picture.
"Anybody who was not madly in love with Lena Horne should report to his undertaker immediately and turn himself in," actor and friend Ossie Davis said on "Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice," a 1996 installment of PBS' "American Masters" biography series.
"In the history of American popular entertainment, no woman had ever looked like Lena Horne. Nor had any other black woman had looks considered as 'safe' and non-threatening," Donald Bogle wrote in his book "Brown Sugar: Over One Hundred Years of America's Black Superstars."
"The Horne demeanor _ distant and aloof _ suggested that she was a woman off somewhere in a world of her own .... who appeared as if all her life she had been placed on a pedestal and everything had come easily to her. That was the way she appeared to be. ... The reality was another matter."
She was born Lena Mary Calhoun Horne on June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Her family lived in the home of her father's middle-class parents in Brooklyn, where Horne's grandmother was active in the Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the women's suffrage movement.
Horne's father left his wife and daughter when Horne was 3. And her mother, unhappy living with her strong-willed mother-in-law, soon moved out to pursue an acting career with a Harlem-based black stock company.
That left young Lena in the care of her grandparents until she joined her mother on the road in the South a few years later.
Horne was living in Harlem with her mother and her out-of-work stepfather when she left school at 16 and joined the chorus at the Cotton Club in 1933.
While continuing to work at the club, she made her Broadway debut in 1934 with a small role in "Dance With Your Gods," an all-black drama that ran only nine performances.
Leaving the Cotton Club in 1935, she became a featured singer in the all-black Noble Sissle Society Orchestra but quit two years later to marry Louis Jones, a Pittsburgh friend of her father's who was some nine years her senior.
At 19, she settled into domestic life in Pittsburgh and gave birth to her two children, Gail and Teddy. But she and her husband separated in 1940 and were divorced in 1944.
Although Horne gave up show business when she married Jones, money problems during the marriage prompted her to accept the co-starring role in "The Duke Is Tops," a low-budget, 1938 black movie musical shot in 10 days.
She also appeared in "Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939," a Broadway revue that had only nine performances.
Moving back to New York after her marriage broke up, Horne was hired as a vocalist with the Barnet Orchestra, becoming one of the first black performers to sing with a major white band, with whom she had a hit record, "Good for Nothing Joe."
After leaving the Barnet band in 1941, Horne began an extended engagement at Cafe Society Downtown, where she first met and became friends with singer-actor and political activist Paul Robeson.
While under contract to MGM in the '40s, Horne met Lennie Hayton, a white staff composer and arranger at the studio who became her second husband.
Fearing public reaction when they married in Paris in 1947, they did not announce their marriage until three years later.
Horne later said she initially became involved with Hayton because she thought he could be useful to her career.
"He could get me into places no black manager could," she told The New York Times in 1981. "It was wrong of me, but as a black woman, I knew what I had against me." But, she said, "because he was a nice man and because he was in my corner, I began to love him."
But being married to a white man, whom she once said "taught me everything I know musically," took a toll _ from her impatience with black critics who questioned the marriage to her sometimes using her husband as a "whipping boy" and making him "pay for everything the whites had done to us."
Horne's last film for MGM _ a singing cameo in the musical "Duchess of Idaho," starring Esther Williams and Van Johnson _ was released in 1950, the same year she triumphantly appeared at the London Palladium.
Primarily due to her friendship with Robeson and her involvement with the Council for African Affairs and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee to the Arts, Science and Professions, both of which were named as Communist fronts, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to appear on radio and television in the early '50s.
But the cabaret business remained untouched by the blacklist, and she focused on her critically acclaimed nightclub/cabaret act.
Her "Lena Horne at the Waldorf Astoria" became RCA Victor's biggest-selling album by a female vocalist in 1957.
Horne, who was able to resume appearing on television in 1956, also starred in the hit Broadway musical "Jamaica," which ran from 1957 to '59 and earned her a Tony Award nomination.
Unable to stay in many of the hotels she performed in because she was black, Horne developed what she later described as "a toughness, a way of isolating" herself from the audience as a performer.
"There was no cuteness or coyness about her," comedian Alan King said of Horne on "Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice." "Lena came out there and stuck it right in their face _ boom! She was radiantly and subtly brazen, saying to herself, 'You want to take me to bed, but you won't let me come in the front door.' "
Throughout her early career, Horne experienced the injustices suffered by African Americans at the time.
While touring with the USO during World War II, she was expected to entertain the white soldiers before the blacks.
A day after performing for white soldiers in a large auditorium at Fort Riley, Kan., she returned to entertain black troops in the black mess hall.
But when she discovered that the whites seated in the front rows were German prisoners of war, she became furious. Marching off the platform, she turned her back on the POWs and sang to the black soldiers in the back of the hall.
Horne's long-suppressed anger over the treatment of blacks in white society erupted in 1960 when she overheard a drunken white man at the Luau restaurant in Beverly Hills refer to her as "just another nigger."
Jumping up, she threw an ashtray, a table lamp and several glasses at him, cutting the man's forehead.
When reports of her outburst appeared in newspapers around the country, Horne was surprised at the positive response, mostly from African Americans.
"Phone calls and telegrams came in from all over," she told the Christian Science Monitor in 1984. "It was the first time it struck me that black people related to each other in bigger ways than I realized."
In the early '60s, Horne became more active in the civil-rights movement, participating in a meeting with prominent blacks in 1963 with then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the wake of violence in Birmingham, Ala., and singing at civil rights rallies.
In the early '70s, Horne faced three personal blows within an 18-month period: In 1970, the same year her father died, her son died of kidney disease; and her husband died of a heart attack in 1971.
Horne later said she "stayed in the house grieving" until Alan King "bullied" her out of her depression, and she returned to singing and recording.
She also toured with Tony Bennett, as well as doing 37 performances on Broadway of "Tony & Lena Sing" in 1974. And she played Glinda, the Good Witch in "The Wiz," the 1978 movie musical directed by Sidney Lumet, her then-son-in-law.
Then, in 1981, she made a triumphant return to Broadway in the hit "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music."
Then 63, Horne went on to win the Drama Desk Award and a special Tony Award for her autobiographical show that ran on Broadway for more than a year and led to a Grammy Award-winning soundtrack album and a cross-country
Her rendition of "Stormy Weather" was, naturally, a show stopper.
She actually sang the song twice, first as she had in the movie when she was in her 20s and, she said in an interview, she couldn't sing it "worth a toot."
Then, at the end of the show, she electrified her audience by singing it again from the perspective of a woman in her 60s, who had experienced a lifetime of love and misery.
As Horne said in the documentary "Lena Horne: In Her Own Voice": "My life has been about surviving. Along the way I also became an artist. It's been an interesting journey. One in which music became first my refuge and then my salvation."
Horne was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient in 1984, and she received a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 1998.

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She started out as a 16-year-old dancer at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and later won two Grammys

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