Cell Phone Savvy

More and more girls carry cell phones, and with Cell Phone Savvy they can personalize their phones to make them stand out from the crowd of black and gray look-alikes. This hip little kit provides a cute dangling charm on a cord, rhinestone stickers, and a booklet of fun cell phone hints and text messaging tricks.

Cameron is urged again to go it alone: Now senior backbenchers follow Tebbit's call not to give in to LibDem demands

David Cameron has been urged to go it alone and lead a minority government by one of his senior backbench MPs.

Graham Brady, who is tipped to be the new chairman of the powerful Conservative backbench 1922 Committee, insisted there was little enthusiasm among his colleagues for a full-blown coalition deal with the LibDems.

The Tory Right has also told David Cameron to give Iain Duncan Smith a Cabinet job and hand more ministerial posts to Right-wingers if he wants a deal with Lib Dems.

In return he may be able to match Labour's offer to Nick Clegg for a referendum on changing the electoral system, Tories told The Times.

Graham Brady told the BBC's Politics Show: 'My inclination is more towards seeking to operate as a minority government bringing in the support of others where it exists and where there is a consensus that can created '.

'I think that is probably, generally, the mood of colleagues. But we, I think, do need to see a far more inclusive approach inevitably in these circumstances. I think if you don't have an overall majority you need to make sure you take people with you.'

His words came on a day in which Mr Cameron was warned not to give too much ground to the LibDems or face open revolt from the Tory Right.

Senior figures said he should attempt to lead a minority government, even if it meant a second election within weeks or months, rather than compromise over voting reform as the price of Nick Clegg's support.

Former Tory chairman Lord Tebbit said that any deal which did more than throw the Liberal Democrats 'a few crumbs' would be a mistake.

DENIED BY 16,000 VOTERS

David Cameron has been kept out of moving straight into Number 10 by the will of just 16,000 voters.

The Tories' ability to form a majority government was thwarted by just 0.06 per cent of the voting public.

The way Britain was plunged into the uncertain scenario of a hung parliament was uncovered by researchers at Plymouth University who pointed to the Tories missing out in just 19 target constituencies.

Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher said Mr Cameron came tantalisingly close to forming a government. The directors at the university's elections' centre wrote: 'Cameron came so near and yet so far. Just 16,000 extra votes for the Tories, distributed in the 19 constituencies in which the party came closest to winning, would have spared us a weekend of negotiation and speculation.'

The figures show however that if there is another election in the next few months, a small push could deliver the majority that Mr Cameron wants.

He also insisted that the Conservatives should instead try to form a minority government, essentially daring the opposition to vote their proposals down.

Last night there was speculation that a senior figure from the Tory Right - probably former leader Iain Duncan Smith, who championed plans to offer tax breaks for married couples - would be offered a Cabinet job in a Lib-Con coalition to reassure that wing of the party.

Despite the biggest Tory advance since 1931, some MPs are privately critical of the party's election campaign, particularly Mr Cameron's 'big society' message which they say was launched too late to engage voters.

They are also calling for the Conservative leader to adopt a more collegiate leadership style amid concern that key decisions have been taken by a tight inner circle.

One senior backbench MP said:

'If David is now going to deal with the Liberals, then he is also going to have to start dealing with the rest of us.'

Mr Cameron is understood to have phoned key Right-wing MPs over the weekend to sound them out about the prospects of a deal.

Last night he arrived at his Commons office and invited any concerned MPs or shadow ministers to speak to him about his power-sharing offer to the LibDems.

He will hold a crunch meeting with MPs to outline the terms of a potential deal tonight.

Mr Cameron's former leadership rival David Davis said: 'Whether it's LibDem Cabinet ministers or a much more simple arrangement, I'm comfortable with anything on that spectrum.

'But it is a fact of political life that David will have to carry the party with him. I am quite certain that he is as aware as anybody that proportional representation is anathema to the majority of the party.'

One Tory frontbencher said: 'He is going to need to broaden his Cabinet and adopt a much more collegiate style of leadership if he thinks he can pull this off.'

But in a sign that the Tory Right is split over how to react, Euro MP Daniel Hannan said Mr Cameron was right to try to ensure a stable coalition government, adding: 'It would be irresponsible of David Cameron not to seek to maximise support for an austerity administration.'

Curse of the Tatler ToriesThey were dubbed the 'Tatler Tories'. These five Conservative candidates were confident enough about their election prospects to pose for pictures for the glossy style magazine in 2008.

Two years on, the humbled quintet - who were part of the much-criticised Tory 'A-list' - are licking their wounds after failing to be elected.

Their defeats have prompted serious soul searching inside the Tory camp about whether the tactic of imposing handpicked candidates on local associations was the right one.

In 2006, Mr Cameron had promised to 'change the face of the Conservative Party by changing the faces of the Conservative Party'.

The Tatler Tories who are licking their wounds after failing to be elected: (From left to right): Shaun Bailey, Mark Clarke, Joanne Cash, Annunziata Rees-Mogg and Peter Lyburn

His A-list was to contain 50 per cent women, and a 'significant' number of ethnic minorities and the disabled. Of the original 100 A-list candidates favoured by the Tory leader, 38 ended up being elected to Parliament.

Here the Mail profiles the Tatler five:

1 SHAUN BAILEY He was standing in Hammersmith, West London, and won a swing of only 0.5 per cent - resulting in a 3,549 majority for Labour. Despite being hailed as a living embodiment of the 'Big Society', the black youth worker was hit by questions over his My Generation charity's accounts.

2 MARK CLARKE Hoping to take Tooting in South London, he attracted a 3.6 per cent swing but saw Labour transport minister Sadiq Khan hold the seat with a majority of 2,524.

Mr Clarke ran a 'model' campaign and used techniques learned on leadership courses in America, but claims from a former girlfriend and Labour's insistence that Lord Ashcroft had helped bankroll his bid both hurt him.

3 JOANNE CASH Standing in Westminster North, she won a tiny swing of 0.6 per cent, which meant that Labour's Karen Buck held on to the seat with a majority of 2,126.

Miss Cash claims it was because of a media agenda against her. But insiders say it was her decision to quit as a candidate halfway through the campaign over an internal row and then be reinstated after an intervention from Mr Cameron's office that did for her.

4 ANNUNZIATA REES-MOGG Fighting the Somerton and Frome constituency in Somerset, she actually produced a 0.9 per cent swing away from the Tories. LibDem frontbencher David Heath held on by 1,817.

She fought hard, but rejected Mr Cameron's advice to 'de-toff' herself by changing her name to Nancy Mogg, allowing Mr Heath to portray her as posh. To rub salt in the wound, her brother Jacob won North-East Somerset with fewer votes.

5 PETER LYBURN In Perth and Perthshire North he too saw a swing away from the Tories, one of 2.9 per cent, with the result that the SNP's Pete Wishart, former keyboardist in the band Runrig, increased his majority to 4,379.

Scotland resoundingly rejected the Tories at all costs, actually shoring up Labour's vote in most seats and voting for the Tories' nearest rivals in all but one seat.

Tory Jo Johnson is 1 of 20 ex-Etonians in parliament

New boys fuel the private school ParliamentBritain has elected its most socially elite Parliament for 13 years following an influx of privately educated Tory MPs, a study has found.

Fee-paying schools educate only 7 per cent of the pupil population but they produced 54 per cent of Tory MPs, 40 per cent of LibDems and 15 per cent of Labour.

Overall, 37 per cent of MPs from the three main parties elected last week were privately schooled - up from 34 per cent in 2005 and 30 per cent in 1997.

The study, by the Sutton Trust educational charity, suggests that David Cameron's bid to create a diverse base of Tory MPs has flopped.

There are 20 Old Etonians in Parliament - five more than in 2005 - the study found, with 19 of them Tory and one LibDem. All six Eton-educated candidates standing for election for the first time this year won their seats, including Boris Johnson's brother Jo in Orpington, Kent.

The authors said the findings confirmed fears over poor social mobility in Britain. Parliament must not be composed of an 'elite cadre of schools largely serving the affluent', they said.

The breakdown will deepen fears over standards in state comprehensives. Just 41 per cent of MPs from the main parties attended a nonselective state secondary school, with 23 per cent having been to grammars and the rest independent schools.

Thirteen schools - 12 of which are private --produced a tenth of all MPs in the new Parliament. The public schools Highgate, Millfield, Westminster and Nottingham High produced several MPs each, as did Reading School, a state grammar.

The study also found that serving as an MP has largely become a graduate profession. Nine in ten MPs in 2010 went to university - by far the highest proportion of any Parliament to date.

Just under three in ten - 29 per cent - went to Oxford or Cambridge.

James Chapman

OIL FUTURES: Crude Rises After IMF Approves Loan To Greece

SINGAPORE (Dow Jones)--Crude oil futures in Asia rose sharply Monday after the International Monetary Fund approved a $38 billon loan package for Greece to help prevent its debt problems from spreading to the rest of Europe's economy.

The loan, which was approved Sunday, is the largest financial commitment the IMF has ever made to one country and triggered a sharp rise in the euro against the U.S. dollar, making commodities priced in dollars such as oil cheaper for investors.

The IMF's move also made investors more optimistic about the region's economic recovery and future demand for oil.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in June traded at $77.23 a barrel at 0705 GMT, up $2.12 in the Globex electronic session. June Brent crude on London's ICE Futures exchange rose $1.79 to $80.06 a barrel.

"Concerns that Greece's issue would lead to a contagion in Europe were challenging the market's thinking of economic recovery," said David Moore, a commodities strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

In the coming days investors will be scrutinizing the loan package to determine whether it is adequate or aggressive enough on key issues, he added. "The markets will still be very focused on developments in Europe."

However, not all traders were convinced the loan package would support higher oil prices.

"In the short run crude should be strong because of a stronger euro," said Clarence Chu, a trader at Hudson Capital Energy in Singapore. "But if you ask me, I don't think the package solves the problem, it merely postpones it."

Chu added that there might be political obstacles that may prevent European countries from contributing the funds necessary to pull Greece out from its crisis.

Nymex reformulated gasoline blendstock for June--the benchmark gasoline contract--rose 496 points to $2.1747 a gallon, while June heating oil traded at $2.1202, 407 points higher.

ICE gasoil for May changed hands at $668.75 a metric ton, up $11.00 from Friday's settlement.

By Wayne Ma

New Tiger looks nothing like the old 1

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Even at his worst, Tiger Woods has never looked this bad.

It was only a month ago that Woods returned to golf with a performance that satisfied everyone but him. He tied for fourth in the Masters, his first competition in five months. And while his personal life was a mess, it appeared his golf game wasn't about to suffer.

So much has changed in such a short time.

Woods looked lost on the golf course in missing the cut at Quail Hollow last week with the highest 36-hole score of his career. He looked even more distant as he sat in front of his locker Sunday at the TPC Sawgrass with his head bowed, elbows resting on his knees. He failed to finish another tournament, this time because of a sore neck that forced him to withdraw after six holes.

It was the first time Woods, with more than $93 million in career earnings, has gone consecutive weeks without making a dime.

"It's early," Paul Goydos said. "What he's going through is unprecedented. We don't know what's going on. At some point, his life will normalize, as normal as Tiger's life ever gets. And then we'll see."

When he looked up to take a few questions, Woods leaned against his locker with his eyes closed as if he were not listening. At one point, he slammed his shoe to the floor.

Three months ago in the same clubhouse at the TPC Sawgrass — down the hallway and up a flight of stairs — Woods appeared in public for the first time to read a statement about the extramarital affairs that shattered his image and fractured his family.

He wore a dark suit then, his Sunday red shirt now.

In both cases, his aura of invincibility was missing.

It is too early to judge how Woods will recover from this scandal, and it doesn't help that Woods is no more forthcoming about his game or his health than he was even in good times.

Only at the Masters did he reveal he had a torn Achilles' during 2009. And while he said Friday that his rebuilt left knee was 100 percent, he never said anything about his neck until Sunday, when he mentioned that it had been bothering him before the Masters.

Who knew?

He has received warm receptions, though the praise is not universal. One woman in Charlotte, N.C., gave a thumbs-down when Woods walked by on his way to the tee. The low point might have come Saturday, when a young boy with an autograph from Phil Mickelson yelled out to Woods, "Tiger, say so long to No. 1. Kiss it goodbye."

Mickelson, who could have replaced Woods at No. 1 with a victory Sunday, was standing only a few feet away.

"He got heckled by a 7-year-old," Goydos said with wonder. "That's brutal. He's got to get used to that. He's got a lot on his head and the game is hard. And it's hard for everybody. He made it look so easy, so when he's not making it look easy, we wonder what's wrong. He's going through a tough patch. If he has 80 percent of the people completely idolizing him, that's still a big drop.

"He hasn't been playing, and he's not playing well," Goydos said. "And he's never been under a microscope like this before."

Woods bristled at the media for making a big deal about hitting five balls in the water during nine holes of practice Tuesday. He said he was working on his swing, not overly concerned with the results when he wasn't keeping score. But when the tournament began, there were shots that didn't belong to the No. 1 player — or any PGA Tour player.

Woods twice popped up a tee shot so badly that he had to hit 5-wood for his second shot into a par. Another went 45 degrees to the right and landed in the pond on an adjacent hole.

Even the shots that stayed inside the gallery looked ordinary. This hardly looked like the guy who collected his 82nd title worldwide in Australia six months ago, or who has 14 majors going into a year in which he is expected to resume his pursuit of Jack Nicklaus.

The U.S. Open next month is at Pebble Beach, where Woods won by 15 shots. Then comes the British Open at St. Andrews, where he already has won twice by a combined 13 shots.

"His history is particularly good at those golf courses, "Goydos said. "If he goes through all those places and is not competitive, then you can ask questions."

So many questions still remain.

Woods will not delve into family matters, although a divorce seems imminent. He spent some of his time at The Players Championship denying speculation that he is about to leave Hank Haney, his swing coach since 2004.

Haney said he had been paid last week for work in the next quarter. Woods followed by confirming that he was still working with Haney, although he didn't go into specifics and spoke throughout the week about changes to his swing.

Meanwhile, it already is May and Woods is No. 122 on the PGA Tour money list. He is tied for 147th in the FedEx Cup standings. He will stay No. 1 in the world for the next two weeks, at least until Mickelson next plays at the Colonial and gets another shot at him.

Above all, he does not look like the same Tiger — and he's certainly not playing like him.

"Tiger is facing his greatest challenge," Hal Sutton said earlier in the week. "Tiger meets every challenge with his head held high and knowing that he will overcome. He's had better control of his mind than almost any player I've ever watched play the game.

"You know, I'm sure Tiger will figure that out," he said. "He's figured everything else out."

Wayne Rooney shows off baby son Kai to Manchester United fans at Old Trafford

Roo cheered by baby

Wayne Rooney is cheered up with a cuddle from son Kai yesterday after Man United were pipped to the Premier League title by Chelsea.

The England striker, 24, beamed with pride as he carried the sixmonth-old round Old Trafford in an end-of-season lap of honour.

Kai showed a few dribbling skills of his own - blowing bubbles and smiling as he was shown off in front of more than 75,000 fans after the 4-0 victory over Stoke City.

Down in London it was another family affair after Chelsea clinched the title with an 8-0 thrashing of Wigan at Stamford Bridge.

Love rat captain John Terry paraded round the pitch holding the trophy with wife Toni and their children Georgie and Summer dressed in Blues kit. And hat-trick hero Didier Drogba grabbed an Ivory Coast flag to celebrate with sons Joel and Freddy.

England boss Fabio Capello - who announces his provisional 30-man World Cup squad on Tuesday - will be nervously waiting to hear if Rooney has aggravated his groin injury. He limped off the pitch. But United boss Alex Ferguson said: "He'll be OK. I don't think it's serious."

Despite all the smiles on the last day of the season, there were angry scenes as angry United fans held protests against the club's American owners, the Glazers.

Earlier, the club store was closed after a smoke bomb went off.

Hundreds of fans, wearing green and gold in protest, chanted at the directors' box and one group apparently tried to storm the entrance to the lounge. Fan John Corless, 39, said: "They were furious."

Paul Byrne

Prader-Willi Syndrome

May is Prader-Willi Syndrome awareness month and we would like to help spread its awareness. Prader-Willi Syndrome or PWS is an uncommon genetic disorder that can be present since birth. The common symptom is overeating that do not stop even when the person is already full, other symptoms include muscle weakness and behavioral problems. This rare disease and its symptoms are currently observed to be shown by 40 people in Uruguay.

The rare chronic disease is very hard to fight as only little information is known on how to treat and support the patients and their families. This was the case for Maria Ines Fonseca whose daughter was diagnosed with the Prader-Willi Syndrome recently after birth.

Doctors say that the disease has different symptoms that can be observed the same way or same intensity for each case of the Prader-Willi Syndrome. To add with muscle weakness and other disabilities, an insatiable appetite which leads to obesity can be observed on all cases.

The rare disease which is not hereditary records only one case per 15,000 births. It is first observed in 1956 by Swiss Doctors Andrea Prader, Alexis Labhart and Heinrich Willi where the disease got its name. The doctors observed that nine patients are showing the same symptoms of obesity, short stature, muscle weakness, and other physical and intellectual disabilities.

Lena Horne, Singer and Actress, Dies at 92

Lena Horne, who was the first black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She was 92 and lived in Manhattan.

Lena Horne appeared in “Jamaica,” a musical that ran on Broadway from 1957 to 1959.
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Ms. Horne and Cab Calloway in “Stormy Weather.” The title song became one of her signatures.

Her death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley.

Ms. Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”

Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.

“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.

But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in 1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who did not do her own singing. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography, “Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously considered for the part.) And in 1947, when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”

Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”

She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil. (One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.)

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program “Command Performance.”

“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”

Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. “So the U.S.O. got mad,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl.”

Ms. Horne later claimed that for this and other reasons, including her friendship with leftists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, she was blacklisted and “unable to do films or television for the next seven years” after her tenure with MGM ended in 1950.

This was not quite true: as Mr. Gavin has documented, she appeared frequently on “Your Show of Shows” and other television shows in the 1950s, and in fact “found more acceptance” on television “than almost any other black performer.” And Mr. Gavin and others have suggested that there were other factors in addition to politics or race involved in her lack of film work

Although absent from the screen, she found success in nightclubs and on records. “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria,” recorded during a well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor’s history.

In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests.

In 1969, she returned briefly to films, playing the love interest of a white actor, Richard Widmark, in “Death of a Gunfighter.”

She was to act in only one other movie: In 1978 she played Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wiz,” the film version of the all-black Broadway musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” But she never stopped singing.

Ms. Horne in 1981 after she won two Grammy awards for “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music.”

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.She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and other labels, notably United Artists and Blue Note. And she conquered Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony Award.

Ms. Horne’s voice was not particularly powerful, but it was extremely expressive. She reached her listeners emotionally by acting as well as singing the romantic standards like “The Man I Love” and “Moon River” that dominated her repertory. The person she always credited as her main influence was not another singer but a pianist and composer, Duke Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn.

“I wasn’t born a singer,” she told Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hajdu. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally.” Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and, she said, “taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”

Strayhorn was also, she said, “the only man I ever loved,” but Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr. Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.”

Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl for the organization’s monthly bulletin.

By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history, “The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.

When she was 16, her mother abruptly pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife. Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits with his mother.

In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a grander scale.

She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms. Horne said. “When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”

Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc (the war had scaled Mr. Young’s ambitions down to a small club with a gambling den on the second floor). He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM.

The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated that contract as a weapon in its war to get better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too. In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.’ ”

Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. Her husband died in 1971; her son died of kidney failure the same year.

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

ALJEAN HARMETZ

Nash, Suns Finally Get Past Their Rivals

SAN ANTONIO -- It didn't matter that Two-Time, as teammates call Steve Nash because of those two MVP trophies back home, was down to one functioning eye.

It didn't matter that the Phoenix Suns' double-digit lead vanished almost as soon as Nash left the floor to get six stitches to close a deep cut.

It didn't matter that the San Antonio Spurs would also hit the Suns with a four-point play in the final minute, which only added to the here-we-go-again dread that even Nash couldn't completely fend off -- when he wasn't arching his eyebrows as high as he could during stoppages in play in an unsuccessful attempt to keep that right eye open.

Nash and the Suns survived it all on this bloody Sunday night. They weathered Tim Duncan's inadvertent elbow to Nash's face on a drive and every last ounce of the San Antonio's old desert-haunting mojo, pulling out a 107-101 victory in a sweep-sealing Game 4 that somehow generated the tension of a Game 7.

When he finally made it to the postgame podium, with his eye swollen completely shut and his eyelid unmistakably (and fittingly) purple once you got up close to him, Nash cracked: "Do we need to even say anything?"

The implication was clear. Nash couldn't see his audience too well, but he figured everyone in the room had a fair idea of what it meant for the Suns to complete a 4-0 brooming of their longtime playoff tormentors, after San Antonio KO'd Phoenix from the postseason four times in a six-season span from 2003-08.

You've also surely heard that six of Nash's previous 13 seasons ended with a loss to the hosts. That should help explain why Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, Duncan and finally Spurs legend David Robinson, spilling onto the floor from his courtside seat, looked legitimately happy for Nash during the postgame exchange of hugs.

"I couldn't be happier for a class, class, class guy," Popovich said. "I hate him, but he's classy."

Said Nash: "Fortunately someone was smiling on us tonight."

That's true to some degree. Unlike the unforgettably bloody nose he suffered in crunch time of Game 1 of the teams' 2007 epic series, Nash had the good sense to get nailed in the third quarter this time, giving the Suns' training staff sufficient time to sew up this gash and set him up to return for the whole fourth quarter.

In this series, though, these Suns consistently earned a good slice of their fortune, repeatedly proving -- despite the absence of injured center Robin Lopez -- that they're tougher, deeper and more legit defensively than any of the teams San Antonio tortured throughout the previous decade. Phoenix failed to score 20 points in the first quarter in both games in San Antonio and still managed to creep past 100 in both cases, finishing off this improbable sweep of a team that had just dumped No. 2-seeded Dallas with a vintage display of two-man dominance from the Suns' longest sufferers.

Nash (10 points, five assists) and Stoudemire (12 points) combined for 22 of the Suns' 35 points in the final period, despite vintage San Antonio pressure on the ball in the backcourt and the rather limited peripheral vision that admittedly had Nash "pretty worried" when he first went back in. It was the famously steady Duncan, meanwhile, who committed a bad fifth foul out of frustration with nearly six minutes to play in regulation and finished a fatal 16-for-34 from the free-throw line for the series.

Stoudemire wound up with 29 points, Nash totaled 20 points and nine assists and Jared Dudley emerged as the latest difference-maker off the Phoenix bench, contributing 16 points and six boards on near-perfect shooting.

"As you can see," Dudley said, "it's a different [Suns] team and a different year."

Nash believes it, too, but admits that his confidence was briefly shaken after taking the hit from Duncan with 5:52 to go in the third, after which Phoenix quickly surrendered the final seven points of its seemingly comfortable 64-53 lead.

"We'd gone 3 1/2 games with clear sailing," Nash said, explaining why he initially assumed the worst while being worked on in the Suns' locker room.

Then Nash caught himself, realizing he was falling prey to "something always happens against San Antonio" thinking that could easily spread to less-experienced teammates.

Here-we-go-again pity, Nash concluded, is "just a self-fulfilling prophecy."

So he came back and flourished, offering up a decent facsimile of the 36-year-old who shredded the Spurs for 33 points and 10 assists in a tone-setting Game 1. The Spurs responded with plenty of their trademark toughness -- Tony Parker, for example, had to get a pre-game painkiller shot in his posterior to deal with his sore shoulder and back after multiple falls in Game 3 -- but couldn't prevent their 15th successive loss in the playoffs when surrendering 100 points.

"It just hard to guard those guys -- for us to guard them -- for 48 minutes," Popovich said. "You have to be pretty perfect. We have to be pretty perfect."

It proved too much to ask. The Spurs quietly managed to hold Jason Richardson under 20 points for the third successive game -- well aware that Phoenix is 30-4 this season when Richardson gets to 20 -- and still couldn't avoid the sight of a joyous Stoudemire, walking off the podium as Nash was heading for the microphone, to make a giddy joke about his own eye issues last season.

"Two-Time with the Stoudemire vision," Amare said to his point guard.

For once they're leaving this town with a laugh ... along with an endorsement from Duncan about their chances of surprising the mighty Lakers next.

None of this was expected back in October when the Suns convened for training camp, or even as recently as February when Stoudemire was nearly dealt before the trading deadline. Now?

The Suns are on a 36-9 roll since Jan. 26. And it certainly can't hurt Nash, Lopez or Grant Hill -- reincarnated at 37 as a defensive stopper -- that the Suns' trip to the conference finals probably won't start for another week.

"The way they're playing," Duncan said, "they have a chance against anyone."

By Marc Stein

Malik Sealy’s Death Remembered by Kevin Garnett

Malik Sealy (February 1, 1970 – May 20, 2000) was a professional American basketball player who was active from 1992 until his death in 2000. He was Kevin Garnett’s most admired player and also his close friend.

Malik Sealy was first seen as a college varsity player for St. John’s College. In that college, Malik caught the eye of the young ‘Kid’, Kevin Garnett. Kevin Garnett also had the same team number as Malik, 21. At the year 1999, they became team mates under the team of the Timberwolves.
During their reign in the NBA arena, Sealy and Garnett were inseparable due to their bond together as close friends, but at the date of May 19, 2000, Sealy went with KG to a party to celebrate Garnett’s 24 birthday.
As Sealy went home at the morning of May 20, 2000, he had a car collision which caused his death.

Now, as Kevin Garnett celebrates his 34 birthday, he remembers the death of his team mate, and close friend, Malik Sealy.


Einsel Davenport