The entertainer, whose incredible talent was discovered at an early age, was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m. (6:55 p.m. ET) at the Beverly Hilton hotel despite resuscitation efforts, a police spokesman said.

Beverly Hills Police Lt. Mark Rosen said there were “no obvious signs of criminal intent” and that the cause of her death is being investigated.

Houston’s bodyguard found her body, said Courtney Barnes, publicist for hip-hop artist Ray J, who was dating the pop diva.

According to her official website, Houston sold more than 170 million albums, singles and videos. But she also struggled with addiction problems over the years.

Houston, whose hits included “The Greatest Love of All,” died on the eve of the 54th annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. She had performed as late as Thursday night at a pre-Grammy event in the area.

Music producer Jimmy Jam, after conversations with those heading up to Sunday’s night show, told CNN that he believes the event will change significantly — including a tribute to the singer.

Houston was set to appear in this year’s “Sparkle,” a remake of the 1976 hit, which was loosely based on the story of The Supremes. It was her first movie role since 1996′s “The Preacher’s Wife.”

News of her death elicited a flood of reaction on social media, from fans and fellow celebrities alike.

Music producer Russell Simmons wrote he was “deeply saddened by the death of Whitney Houston.”

Dolly Parton, who wrote “I Will Always Love You,” said, “mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston. I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‘Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.’”

Another entertainment legend, Quincy Jones, said he was “absolutely heartbroken” by the news. “She was a true original and a talent beyond compare,” he said.

Houston’s body of work includes seven straight Billboard No. 1 hits in the 1980s, including “Saving All My Love for You,” “How Will I Know,” “The Greatest Love of All,” “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me.)”

Billboard put her soundtrack to the 1992 movie “The Bodyguard” as one of the top 10 biggest-selling albums of all time. She also starred in the film with Kevin Costner. The soundtrack included the hit,”I Will Always Love You.”

The daughter of singer Cissy Houston, Whitney was born on August 9, 1963, in Newark, New Jersey.

Famed music producer Clive Davis reportedly spotted Houston 20 years later in a New York nightclub, signing her on the spot, according to her website. Davis steered Houston’s career for more than 25 years, also serving as a mentor.

Just Thursday, Davis told CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” that, with Houston, “I saw a depth and a range and soul … that rarely ranks at the top level. And that’s why we’ve been working together ever since.”

The singer’s rendition of the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl, days into the first Persian Gulf War, earned raves and cemented her place in the American musical landscape.

After “The Bodyguard,” Houston went on to appear in several more films in the 1990s, including “Waiting to Exhale.”

In 2000, Houston earned her sixth Grammy for best female R&B performance and, a month later, she was named female artist of the decade at the “Soul Train” Music Awards.

Her career stalled, however, in subsequent years as she entered rehab for addiction problems.

Houston took a hiatus for several years before releasing her first album in seven years, “I Look to You,” in 2009.

“I just took a break, which sometimes you have to,” said Houston. “You have to know when to slow that train down and kind of just sit back and relax for a minute.”

In May 2011, Houston got help for her much-publicized struggle with drugs and alcohol, her representative said at the time.

In a 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Houston recalled how her mother arrived one day at her doorstep at her daughter’s house with sheriff’s officers and a court order in a drug intervention. She talked about doing cocaine and smoking marijuana.

“(My mother) says, ‘I have a court (injunction) here,’” Houston said. “Either you do it my way, or we’re just not going to do this at all. We are both going to go on TV, and you’re going to retire.’”

Houston had a high-profile and tumultuous marriage to Bobby Brown, a former “New Edition” star who has had multiple brushes with the law.

The couple appeared together in the mid-2000s on the reality show “Being Bobby Brown.” They had one child together, Bobbi Kristina.

Houston was the cousin of Dionne Warwick, another acclaimed performer.

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The corporation – once a Web powerhouse but now agonizing over a range of options to revive flagging growth – on Tuesday said it appointed former Rovi Corp CEO and International Business Machines Corp veteran Alfred Amoroso and ex-eBay COO Maynard Webb as independent directors.

Yahoo’s board has come under fire from investors impatient with the company’s persistent inability to effect a turnaround, and frustrated with the apparent indecisiveness of stakeholders over how to handle its investments in Alibaba and other prized Asian assets.

“We have engaged with potential investors and reviewed proposals concerning an equity investment in the company, although at this time there have not been any proposals which have been deemed by the committee to be attractive to our shareholders,” Bostock said in a letter to shareholders released on Tuesday.

“We are also in active discussions with our partners in Asia regarding the possibility of restructuring our holdings in Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan. The complexity and unique nature of these transactions is significant,” the letter said.

Bostock, who joined Yahoo’s board in 2003, was a lightning rod for Yahoo shareholders upset about the company’s fall from grace and the string of struggles that defined the company during his tenure. Shareholders blamed Bostock, along with Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, for turning down a rich acquisition offer by Microsoft Corp in 2008 near the height of Yahoo’s valuation.

Yang resigned from Yahoo last month. The 71 year-old Bostock, who also serves as vice chairman of the board of Delta Air Lines and who fired Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz over the phone in September, announced his plans to leave Yahoo shortly after the appointment of former PayPal President Scott Thompson to the CEO Post.

Bostock will remain chairman until the company’s annual meeting, expected in the next few months. Yahoo’s new board will decide on a new chairman at the appropriate time, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A Web pioneer, Yahoo has seen its revenue growth stall in recent years as rivals Facebook and Google Inc have increased their share of online advertising spending.

Thompson, credited with driving growth at eBay’s online payments division PayPal, joins Yahoo during a period of turmoil, as the company plows ahead with a strategic review in which discussions have included the possibility of being sold, taken private or broken up.

Many investors hope Yahoo will sell or spin off its Asian assets, with some speculating that Thompson may focus on developing Yahoo’s core online media business.

But one of Yahoo’s major institutional investors described the company’s efforts at striking a deal to spin off its Asian assets as “painfully slow.”

While the shareholder said the departure of Bostock was “monstrously overdue,” he noted that the changes to the board would not necessarily accelerate the dealmaking process or bolster his confidence in the company.

“I’m not highly confident about anything given that group, and now I don’t know who the group is,” said the shareholder, who wished to remain anonymous. “I have a choice of uncertainty or almost a certainty that they’ll make a bad decision. It’s like the lesser of two evils.”

Bostock and fellow board members Vyomesh Joshi, Gary Wilson and Arthur Kern will not stand for re-election at the next shareholders’ meeting, Bostock said in Tuesday’s letter.

The changes come a few weeks before dissident shareholders can nominate rival directors to Yahoo’s board. In November, activist hedge fund manager and Yahoo shareholder Dan Loeb, of Third Point LLC, called for Bostock and Yang to resign from the board and demanded the right to appoint two of his own directors to the board.

Third Point did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Shares of Yahoo were up one penny at $15.83 in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

“A lot of this change was expected. That’s why you’re not seeing as big a reaction to the stock,” said Herman Leung, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group.

“Most investors are getting a little numb on the corporate governance that’s going on. At this point it’s either get your head down and focus on the business or get something sold,” he said.

Under a “cash rich split” plan being discussed, Yahoo would effectively transfer most of its 40 percent slice of Alibaba back to the Chinese company and all of its stake in Yahoo Japan to Softbank Corp in return for cash and assets, sources have told Reuters.

Yahoo had also entertained separate proposals from private equity firms TPG and Silver Lake about minority investments in the company, but those offers fell short of Yahoo’s expectations.

“Those talks are pretty much done,” said a person familiar with the matter.

The person added that Yahoo had not received any offers to purchase the entire company in the five months since it undertook a broad “strategic review” of its business.

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“Let me say something about the row over bonuses and pay,” Osborne said in a speech to the Federation of Small Businesses.

“Of course rewards for failure are unacceptable — and those who believe in the free market are the first to say so. But a strong, free market economy must be built on rewards for success.”

The Labour Party has heaped pressure on the ruling coalition to curb excessive pay for top executives, using a House of Commons debate to demand the return of a tax on bankers’ bonuses.

“There are those who are trying to create an anti-business culture in Britain — and we have to stop them,” said Osborne.

His comments came as Stephen Hester, chief executive of the state-rescued Royal Bank of Scotland, broke his silence over his decision last month to give up a bonus of almost £1 million in shares.

Hester made his first comments on the furore in a memo to RBS staff, having bowed to intense political pressure and waived his annual bonus of shares worth £963,000 on top of his £1.2 million salary.

In a letter to employees of the bank, 82 percent of which is owned by the British taxpayer after a massive bailout, Hester said press coverage had been “discomforting to say the least”.

The huge bonus had sparked outrage amid government calls for pay restraint, ongoing austerity and economic gloom. Former RBS chief executive Fred Goodwin was also stripped of his knighthood last month.

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“We’ll continue to make steady and determined efforts to move ahead with negotiations,” Noda said, stressing the need to sign a peace treaty with Russia.

The four islands – which Russia calls the Southern Kurils and Japan calls the Northern Territories – has been the subject of a territorial dispute between the two nations since the end of World War II. Because of it, the countries have also not yet signed a peace treaty to end the war.

Last year, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sparked a diplomatic row with Tokyo by making the first ever visit by a Russian leader to the islands. He later said Russia would increase its military presence there.

Japan’s then prime minister Naoto Kan called Medvedev’s visit an “inexcusable rudeness.”

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In October, an Italian appeals court overturned the young Seattle woman’s murder conviction in the 2007 death of her British roommate in Perugia. But the same court upheld Knox’s conviction for slander — for falsely accusing bar owner Diya “Patrick” Lumumba of involvement in the slaying.

Lumumba was freed after two weeks in prison for lack of evidence.

Knox later said she was “manipulated” during her lengthy police interrogation.

An appeal of the slander conviction was filed Monday, Knox family spokesman Dave Marriott confirmed. He doesn’t know when the Italian court might consider it.

Knox returned to Seattle after her murder conviction was overturned. The former exchange student had been in custody since 2007.

In its ruling last fall, the Italian appeals court also acquitted Knox’s then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, in the murder of Meredith Kercher.

A third defendant, Ivory Coast-born drifter Rudy Guede, was convicted in a separate trial of sexually assaulting and stabbing Kercher. His 16-year prison sentence — reduced on appeal from an initial 30 years — was upheld by Italy’s highest court in 2010.

In a lengthy court document explaining the ruling that cleared Knox and Sollecito, presiding appeals court Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann wrote that Knox implicated Lumumba after hours of intense police questioning because “she was convinced that was what the police wanted her to do; to name a guilty person.”

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The NS and ProRail assumed on Thursday of last week that there would be three to five centimetres of snow. When the forecast was increased on Friday morning to between 10 and 15 centimetres, it was too late to change the timetables automatically, Schultz van Haegen told parliament.

Drivers and conductors had to be told about the changes individually which cost time and delayed the availability of information to passengers, she said.

Once the new schedule was up and running, it did provide ‘a predictable and reliable service’ from Sunday onwards, the Volkskrant quotes the minister as saying.

Schultz van Haegen says she will be consulting ‘experts’ from countries with experience of extreme weather conditions to find solutions to the chaos on the railways whenever it snows.

But she also says the railways will remain ‘vulnerable’ because of the ‘intensive use of the trains and track’.

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Kroes, a member of the Dutch ruling right-wing Liberal party VVD, is not a supporter of Greece exchanging the euro for the drachma, but says: ‘It is absolutely not a case of man overboard if someone leaves the eurozone.’

The commissioner is very critical of the new Greek government and says they are not fulfilling their promises. ‘Too few spending cuts, too little restructuring,’ she says.

She says the Greeks should follow the example of Italy where the new prime minister Mario Monti is taking ‘dynamic action’.

‘And it is creating just as much pain in Rome as it is in Athens,’ Kroes told the Volkskrant.

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Santorum largely bypassed Florida and Nevada to blanket the two caucus states with criticism of Romney and lay the groundwork among conservatives who have great sway in the process. RivalNewt Gingrich praised Santorum’s strategy as shrewd even as he signaled he had no interest in exiting the four-way race, which also includes Ron Paul.

“I think that Santorum’s going to have a pretty good day,” Gingrich told reporters on the eve of the caucuses. “He targeted differently than I did. I stayed in Florida to fight it out. … He took the same amount of time and energy and he came to Minnesota and Missouriand Colorado. For him, that was the right decision.”

Missouri’s GOP primary, also scheduled for Tuesday, promised Republicans a chance to show their allegiance to a candidate, but the effort is largely for show. No delegates will be awarded based on the outcome of the primary vote. Instead, Missouri will select delegates through a system of GOP caucuses and conventions that starts with local caucuses in mid-March. Moreover, Gingrich failed to get on the ballot in Missouri, which meant the vote there couldn’t be read as a referendum on the former House speaker’s viability.

Santorum, who for weeks has hammered Romney and Gingrich, seemed optimistic at his final campaign event before the contests got under way.

“This is a big day for us to see whether all the work that we put in in the past few weeks, when not so much attention was paid here as to Florida and Nevada, pays off,” Santorum said at a Denver rally.

Santorum seemed to spare Gingrich after the former House speaker suffered back-to-back losses to Romney in Florida and Nevada. With stepped-up intensity, Santorum castigated Romney as an unfit candidate and warned that Republicans were heading toward defeat if Romney were the nominee.

“A Romney nomination would not be in the best interest of us wining the general election and we need to have a conservative alternative. And my feeling is that Speaker Gingrich sort of had his chance in the arena and came up short in Florida and Nevada,” Santorum told reporters in Golden on Monday. “And now it’s our turn hopefully to get a one-on-one in Missouri.”

Romney sensed a possible threat from Santorum on Monday and went after Santorum’s time in the Senate as “not effective” because of his past support for spending on pork-barrel projects. Santorum flatly countered that Romney was “uniquely unqualified.”

Clearly mindful of the late shift in the race, Santorum has been working aggressively in Minnesota and in conservative areas of Colorado in the past two weeks while Romney campaigned in Florida and Nevada. It was clear Monday that Santorum saw an opportunity to rise in the GOP race.

But he was also facing coordinated criticism from Romney’s headquarters for the first time.

“Any time someone challenges Gov. Romney, Gov. Romney goes out and instead of talking about what he’s for … he just simply goes out and attacks and tries to destroy,” Santorum said.

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Glencore, the world’s largest diversified commodities tradinghouse, will issue 2.8 new shares for each Xstrata share in a deal they said was a “merger of equals.”

The ratio is a 15.2 percent premium to Xstrata shareholders compared with its share price last Wednesday before word leaked out about the merger talks, a joint statement said.

“A merger between Glencore and Xstrata offers a unique opportunity to create a new business model in our industry to respond to a changing environment. It is the logical next step for two complementary businesses,” said Xstrata chief executive Mick Davis, who will be CEO of the enlarged Glencore.

Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg will be deputy CEO and Xstrata chairman John Bond will retain his post.

Xstrata shareholders other than Glencore, which already has a 34 percent stake in the mining group, will hold 45 percent of the new group.

Bringing together Xstrata, the world’s fourth-biggest diversified miner, and Glencore will create a group looking to ride an extended surge in demand in coming years for commodities from China and other emerging nations.

As the world’s biggest exporter of coal for power plants and a top copper producer, the combined firm aims to have the bulk to compete with mining sector leaders BHP Billiton, Vale and Rio Tinto.

On Monday, Xstrata shares closed down 1.7 percent while Glencore declined 4.5 percent, against a 1.0 percent fall in the sector, with both still above the level they were at before the potential deal was announced.

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Polls suggest he should triumph easily in the western US state — where he scored 60 percent in 2008 — although there is a tighter race in Minnesota, where last-placed Rick Santorum is hoping to snatch a win.

Romney’s main rival, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, is battling to stay in the race after two heavy losses in a row to the former Massachusetts governor, who won in Florida last week and Nevada over the weekend.

Romney is on a roll in his bid to become the Republican Party’s nominee to take on President Barack Obama in the general election in November, having taken three of the five state polls so far.

His financial and campaigning muscle were on display on the eve of Tuesday’s caucuses, when he held a rally in a packed school sports hall.

“Mitt, Mitt, Mitt!” chanted several thousand supporters packed into the Arapahoe High School hall, with others forced to listen through loudspeakers in a neighboring hall as Romney gave a cheer-buoyed version of his stump address.

By contrast Gingrich spoke to a few hundred supporters in a barely half-full hotel ballroom in Golden, west of Denver, drawing cheers with an attack on a Romney gaffe from last week about poor Americans.

“He said last week that he didn’t really worry very much about the very poor because after all they had a safety net,” Gingrich said, calling Romney’s verbal stumble “backwards” in terms of traditional conservative thinking.

The candidates are battling for the biggest share of the 1,144 delegates at the Republican Party’s convention in Tampa, Florida, in August. With Nevada, Romney has 99, against 33 for Gingrich, 15 for Paul and 11 for Santorum.

Tuesday’s non-binding caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota will be the last contests before Maine’s week-long straw poll begins on February 11 and Michigan Republicans vote in a February 28 primary.

The caucuses begin at 7 pm (0100 GMT in Minnesota and 0200 GMT in Colorado) and results may not immediately be available.

Full results for Nevada published on Monday gave Romney 50 percent of the vote, more than twice his nearest rival Gingrich, with 21 percent. Paul came in third with 19 followed by Santorum with 10.

In Colorado Romney’s win might not be that crushing, but should still be comfortable: a Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey on Sunday put Romney at 40 percent, Santorum at 26, Gingrich at 18 and Paul at 12.

While the Colorado result is barely in doubt, Romney could see his momentum slowed by a narrow victory — or even a loss — in the heartland state of Minnesota.

He was in a statistical tie with conservative darling Santorum, who is hoping to carry Minnesota’s caucuses on Tuesday with the help of the state’s large base of evangelical Christian and ultraconservative Tea Party voters.

Santorum, who has seen his campaign flag after scoring an early victory in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus, is hoping for another upset in Minnesota’s non-binding caucus, where turnout is expected to be low.

Romney — who carried Minnesota in 2008 with 41 percent of the vote — has not returned to the midwestern state since last week, relying instead on former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to press his cause.

“The only candidate in the race who hasn’t spent the bulk of his adult life either in Washington, DC or in a parasitic relationship with Washington, DC is Mitt Romney,” Pawlenty told a group of around 40 supporters gathered at Romney’s suburban Minnesota headquarters.

While the Republicans slug it out on the ground, Obama saw his approval rating soar Monday to the 50-percent mark, with a solid lead over Romney, seen as his likely Republican opponent in November.

Obama leads Romney 52 to 43 percent among all Americans, and a narrower 51 to 45 percent among registered voters, according to a poll by the Washington Post and ABC television.

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