Oprah Winfrey

The queen of television is expanding her empire. Oprah Winfrey and Discovery Communications Inc. said Tuesday that they were forming a company with a flagship cable channel to be called OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. The channel is expected to debut in mid-2009, taking the place of the underperforming Discovery Health Channel. The venture could be Winfrey's encore once she exits daytime television.

Let's get it out of the way up front: I absolutely cried. Twice. Of all its potential uses, television's ability to emotionally manipulate is one of its most underused. It has frequently entertained, sometimes shocked, and maybe not-quite-often-enough educated. But for the medium to blatantly abuse the goodwill of its viewers, to demand full-throated feeling above and beyond intellectual engagement, is a recent innovation. Thanks to her daily talk show, Oprah Winfrey was key to this development.

Most of the attention on the effect of Double O -- Obama and Oprah -- has been focused on how much the daytime television diva helped her home-state senator by endorsing him and appearing at all those rallies in Iowa and South Carolina with him. The 54-year-old Chicago TV hostess also helped raise a hefty chunk of change by loaning out her Montecito estate for that Barack Obama fundraiser last summer.

Oprah Winfrey opened a school Tuesday for disadvantaged girls, fulfilling a promise she made to former President Nelson Mandela six years ago and giving more than 150 students a chance for a better future. "I wanted to give this opportunity to girls who had a light so bright that not even poverty could dim that light," Winfrey said at a news conference.

Talk show mogul Oprah Winfrey opened her girls' school in South Africa on Tuesday, and details about the lavishness of the 28-building campus have poured in from various media reports. The $40-million Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls is spread over 52 acres outside Johannesburg. In addition to computer-filled classrooms and residence halls, there are indoor and outdoor theaters, original works of art, a yoga studio and a ... beauty salon.

A suburban Atlanta man has been charged with trying to extort $1.5 million from Oprah Winfrey by threatening to release tape recordings he claimed would hurt her reputation. Keifer Bonvillain, 36, was arrested Dec. 15, a day after a Winfrey representative, working with the FBI, wired him $3,000, according to court records. A criminal complaint lodged in Chicago's federal court last month identified Winfrey only as Individual A, "a public figure and the owner of a Chicago-based company."

I was bent over a food processor at a Saturday afternoon cooking class in Hartford, Conn., a few weeks ago, toiling on my assigned recipe of baba ghanouj, when a fellow student came up behind me and asked: "You really like Oprah Winfrey, huh?" How, I wondered, did this woman know? Could she see inside my soul? Was it written on my forehead? Close. It was written on my back.

Surprise, surprise. Grass is green, the world is round and Oprah Winfrey is the richest woman in entertainment. The talk-show titan, who has amassed $1.5 billion over the course of her career, has bested "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling and lifestyle guru Martha Stewart to take the No. 1 spot on Forbes.com's list of "The 20 Richest Women in Entertainment." Rowling, who is finishing the seventh and final installment in her boy wizard series, ranks second with $1 billion.

Oprah Winfrey turned to an old acquaintance for her first new book club choice since the James Frey scandal a year ago, announcing Friday that she had selected Sidney Poitier's "The Measure of a Man."

Oprah Winfrey is the lone living entertainer to make the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual list of the 60 most generous Americans. Winfrey, ranked 35th, gave $58.3 million in 2006, according to the Chronicle, all but $2.4 million of it going to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy Foundation and Oprah's Angel Network. It was her fourth consecutive showing on the list.