The woman has been released without charges, but American Airlines has refused to fly her to New York. "The woman was being disruptive and was removed from the plane for interfering with the flight crew," said Kansas City International Airport spokesman Joe McBride. "There was a federal air marshal on the aircraft, who subdued the woman and put her in cuffs and removed her from the plane."

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FBI files spanning from 1988 to 1992 released Monday reveal both the obsessive fans Houston occasionally needed protection from — and, cryptically, the extortion plot that threatened to expose the details of the singer's "romantic relationships." The files have been heavily redacted, but they show that a person purporting to have "intimate details regarding Whitney Houston’s romantic relationships" threatened to reveal them "to several publications" unless she was paid $100,000. The sum was later "raised to $250,000. The person agreed to sign a confidentiality agreement once the amount was paid.

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The FBI file on the cases — which were opened at the pinnacle of the Grammy winner's career — was released through a Freedom of Information Act request, reports Reuters, documenting over a decade's worth of threats against the singer, from 1988 to 1999. The pages, however, are so heavily redacted — names and details — that they're nearly inscrutable.

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City attorney's spokesman Frank Mateljan (mah-tell-JIN') says Brown was sentenced Tuesday after pleading no contest to charges he was under the influence and driving on a suspended license when he was arrested in October.

Brown was on probation for another DUI case at the time.

The 44-year-old "New Edition" singer was ordered to report to jail March 20. He also was placed on four years of informal probation and will be required to complete an 18-month alcohol treatment program.

Brown's attorney Tiffany Feder had no immediate comment on the sentence.

The sentence was first reported by celebrity website TMZ.

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Davis, who has been married and divorced twice, writes that he met a man at Studio 54 and, under the influence, was "open to responding to his sexual overtures." He has, since his second divorce, been in two long-term relationships with men; his current relationship began in 2004.

The mogul, who ran Arista Records during the golden age of the music industry and carefully groomed a young Whitney Houston as she rose to fame, is a master of image (other stars he's worked with include Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys, both of whom rose to fame quickly but had sustained success over many years). He doesn't make mistakes -- and, indeed, though Houston was the subject of lesbian rumors throughout her career, Davis' management ensured that such whispers were quashed.

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But her family’s legacy would seem tarnished since her death after drowning in a hotel tub, following a drug-induced heart attack (Xanax, marijuana, and cocaine were found in her system), on Feb. 11, 2012 — and not by Whitney. Many of those who've survived her, including her mother, are commodifying their grief by doing so publicly: On Oct. 24, 2012, Lifetime premiered a reality show of the surviving family — “The Houstons”— and last night, Cissy had a sit-down with Oprah to promote her memoir, “Remembering Whitney,” which hits stores today.

And on that sit-down, Oprah gets what she comes for — or at least, this viewer got what she wanted to see — though it took about 20 minutes of warming up her guest. Oprah approaches Cissy cautiously at first, padding Whitney’s mother’s canned, succinct responses about their last encounters, with video footage from the late 1980s of her young daughter talking about how much she loved and treasured her mother, how she owed her everything.

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“The Houstons” features Bobbi Kristina, Whitney’s daughter with Bobbi Kristina Brown; Whitney’s brother Gary; his wife, Pat; their 14-year-old daughter Rayah; Bobbi Kristina’s controversial 23-year-old boyfriend and formerly adopted brother, Nick; and occasional appearances by Whitney’s mother, Cissy. The 19-year-old Bobbi Kristina — who goes by Krissi — introduces herself to the camera as the daughter of the “infamous badass” Bobby Brown and the “beautiful princess” Whitney Houston, which sums up the strange frequency the show’s participants are all operating on: both hyperaware of what “the world” thinks, and unaware ov how strange and removed describing one’s father as an “infamous badass” sounds.

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(The Enquirer isn't yet running the image on its website, but it does offer an "exclusive" from a woman who claims, "I did crack with Whitney!" Oh, National Enquirer, you're so predictable.)

Death voyeurism is nothing new for the Enquirer. In 1977, the tabloid famously splashed the image of Elvis Presley in his coffin on the front page. In 1980, it managed to go even grislier, devoting the front page to a murdered John Lennon in the morgue. Four years ago, it ran a "chilling final image" of what appeared to be the corpse of Anna Nicole Smith in a body bag, whose authenticity it then refused to verify.

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But while speakers talked movingly about her battles, mention of the word "addiction" was curiously scrubbed from the event.

It’s no surprise that the singer's death has struck such a chord in the country. Incredibly talented, beautiful and ambitious, Whitney Houston was a rare kind of legend who changed the face of American pop music. In her later life she also became an addict whose cruel struggle with the disease unfolded in full public view. That she lay dying for hours in a luxe bathroom suite while her bodyguards cooled their heels outside is a sad commentary on the state of modern celebrity. That it took less than 10 minutes for the press to begin broadcasting her death is an even more searing indictment of contemporary media culture.

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Is he, for instance, refreshingly authentic or just downright offensive? Is he regular-guy fat or too obese to be president? Is he a rare moderate Republican who is at least willing to discuss legalizing gay marriage or is he a standard GOP bigot who is deftly maneuvering to prevent such legalization?

How you answer all of these questions is a matter of political identity -- your answers all but determine where you fall on the larger political map, and in the process, highlight your assumptions about a whole host of issues.

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Grace, the woman who has made an entire cottage industry out of her indignation over Casey Anthony, who paints herself nightly as the avenging angel of poor dead Caylee, has never been one to trade in subtlety -- or, for that matter, facts. CNN had to settle a wrongful death suit after the mother of a missing child killed herself after being browbeaten on her show. (The parties agreed that Grace "engaged in no intentional wrongdoing.") She fearlessly championed the prosecution's side in the Duke lacrosse team rape case, blithely referring to "the victim," and went ballistic over the very notion that the accused might be innocent. (She then conveniently remained quiet on the subject after the case was dismissed.) This, folks, is a woman who has guilt-tripped abduction victim Elizabeth Smart for not playing along with her interview tactics. And even after a jury found Casey Anthony not guilty last summer, she has held on to the story like a dog with a bone, insisting that "I told the truth," luxuriating in descriptions of "the backdrop of 2-year-old Caylee's decomposing body just a few houses down from where Tot Mom put her pillow every night," and excoriating Anthony for – rich irony alert –"generating interest in herself."

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Just hours after the news of the singer's death, Bennett was at a Grammys event in the Beverly Hills Hilton – where Houston died just a few floors above – and said, "First it was Michael Jackson, then there was Amy Winehouse, and now the magnificent Whitney Houston. I’d like to have every gentleman and lady in this room commit themselves to get on government to legalize drugs ... Let's legalize drugs like they did in Amsterdam. No one's hiding or sneaking around corners to get it. They go to a doctor to get it."

Bennett knows plenty about drugs -- and the ravages of addiction. He's been upfront in the past about his own experience with drug abuse and his near fatal 1979 overdose on cocaine. In his 1998 memoir, "The Good Life," he wrote of passing out in a bathtub, an eerie foreshadowing of the discovery of Houston's body in her hotel tub. And on Sunday, he shared a Grammy win with the late Amy Winehouse for a duet on "Body and Soul."

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The song I loved the most on that tape was "Didn't We Almost Have It All." Fourth song, first side. I would perform the song to the wall, then rewind it and perform it again. Play, rewind, repeat. I can still hear the squiggle of the tape in my head as I pressed on the jam-box button just long enough to find the song's opening once more. This is a lost art in the age of the iPod, but back then, knowing how many seconds to rewind a cassette was a sign you truly understood its rhythms. You had literally learned the music backward and forward.

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The performance feels sickeningly eerie on the heels of Houston's death Saturday at 48. Both the song and her duet partner were links to the singer’s decorated past: Price featured on her Grammy-nominated 1999 single “Heartbreak Hotel” and a studio version of “Jesus Loves Me” appeared on the soundtrack of "The Bodyguard," the 1992 album which made Houston a megastar. What’s more, she looked healthy and sounded strong; there were no warning signs that the brief appearance would be her last. (Though the photos of her returning to the Beverly Hills Hotel on Friday night tell a different story.) Houston, whose reputation was marred by a turbulent marriage to R&B star Bobby Brown (and a disastrous reality show about their lives together) and well-publicized struggles with addiction, finally seemed well enough to reboot her singing career.

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Houston died Saturday in Beverly Hills, on the eve of the Grammy Awards. She was 48.

She sold 200 million records worldwide, won six Grammys, two Emmys and nearly two dozen American Music Awards. Hits like "How Will I Know," "Saving All My Love For You" and "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" ruled the pop charts -- and made her one of the few singers who could be identified by one name.

With royal music roots -- the daughter of gospel sensation Cissy Houston, the cousin of Dionne Warwick and the god-daughter of Aretha Franklin -- she seemed destined to become a pop queen. But drugs and erratic behavior helped tear her career down.

"The biggest devil is me. I'm either my best friend or my worst enemy," Houston told Diane Sawyer in a 2002 interview, with Brown by her side.

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The dim assessment came in response to tabloids that on March 29 printed photos of what is supposedly Houston’s Atlanta bathroom, littered with crack pipes, cocaine-coated spoons, cigarette butts, Budweiser cans and garbage. The photos were taken, and sold to the magazines, by Houston’s sister-in-law, who provided an accompanying tale of the singer’s cracked-out habits, from hallucinating violent demons, to biting and hitting herself, putting her hand through walls, and locking herself away to smoke rock cocaine and pleasure herself with an apparently prodigious collection of vibrators. Speaking about the mess on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Billboard executive editor Tamara Conniff said, “I think that she was a really well-manicured diva star and she just turned a little ghetto.”

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In the following clip, Houston rambles through her iconic "I Will Always Love You." It begins a bit too casually, with Houston chugging along in a raspy voice, straining to hit the notes as the crowd sings along. Two minutes in, when we reach that spine-chilling, key-change finale, there's a dramatic pause practically long enough for a bathroom break, as Houston psyches herself up for the epic burst: Will she be able to hit those notes? Can she do it? The moment is excruciating.

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Houston has again pushed back the European leg of her first tour in years on the advice of doctors who are encouraging her to take time to recover from a respiratory illness, according to a statement issued Wednesday.

The singer says it's not a relapse.

"I'm feeling great," she told PEOPLE magazine. "I'm just ready to move on and continue my world tour."

According to PEOPLE, Houston said such reports of relapse are "ridiculous."

"At this point, I just don't respond. I don't even read it," she told the magazine. 

Houston had already postponed the European kickoff, originally scheduled for Tuesday in Paris, because of illness. A statement from a representative said doctors advised Houston to reschedule concerts Thursday and Friday in Manchester, England, and a Sunday performance in Glasgow, Scotland.

All dates are being rescheduled, and the 46-year-old singer's tour is now supposed to start next Tuesday in Birmingham, England.

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But the last few weeks of media glad-handing have just been a warm-up to the big event -- a sit-down extravaganza with fellow powerhouse Oprah Winfrey. Part 1 of the interview kicked off Oprah’s season premiere Monday; the conclusion airs today.

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