Jack LaLanne, the fitness guru who inspired television viewers to trim down, eat well and pump iron for decades before diet and exercise became a national obsession, died Sunday. He was 96.

LaLanne died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia Sunday afternoon at his home in Morro Bay on California's central coast, his longtime agent Rick Hersh said.

Lalanne ate healthy and exercised every day of his life up until the end, Hersh said.

"I have not only lost my husband and a great American icon, but the best friend and most loving partner anyone could ever hope for," Elaine LaLanne, Lalanne's wife of 51 years and a frequent partner in his television appearances, said in a written statement.

Just before he had heart valve surgery in 2009 at age 95, Jack Lalanne told his family that dying would wreck his image, his publicist Ariel Hankin said at the time.

LaLanne may have been a showman, and a bit of a ham, but he was very serious about health and fitness:

In 1936 in his native Oakland, LaLanne opened a health studio that included weight-training for women and athletes. Those were revolutionary notions at the time, because of the theory that weight training made an athlete slow and "muscle bound" and made a woman look masculine.

"You have to understand that it was absolutely forbidden in those days for athletes to use weights," he once said. "It just wasn't done. We had athletes who used to sneak into the studio to work out.

"It was the same with women. Back then, women weren't supposed to use weights. I guess I was a pioneer," LaLanne said.

The son of poor French immigrants, he was born in 1914 and grew up to become a sugar addict, he said.

The turning point occurred one night when he heard a lecture by pioneering nutritionist Paul Bragg, who advocated the benefits of brown rice, whole wheat and a vegetarian diet.

"He got me so enthused," LaLanne said. "After the lecture I went to his dressing room and spent an hour and a half with him. He said, 'Jack, you're a walking garbage can.'"

Soon after, LaLanne constructed a makeshift gym in his back yard. "I had all these firemen and police working out there and I kind of used them as guinea pigs," he said.

He said his own daily routine usually consisted of two hours of weightlifting and an hour in the swimming pool.

"It's a lifestyle, it's something you do the rest of your life," LaLanne said. "How long are you going to keep breathing? How long do you keep eating? You just do it."

Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, died after a small plane carrying him and eight others crashed in a remote part of Alaska Monday.

Four others died with the former Alaska senator in the crash outside Dillingham, authorities said. Four survivors were transported to a hospital in Anchorage, about 330 miles northeast of the crash site.

Authorities said the others who died are the 62-year-old pilot, Terry Smith; and Bill Phillips, a former Senate aide to Mr. Stevens. Dana Tindall, 48, a vice president at GCI, the Anchorage telephone and cable company that owned the plane, died along with her 16-year-old daughter, Corey.

The survivors include Sean O'Keefe, the former National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief who is now head of European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co.'s North American unit, and his son Kevin. Mr. Phillips' 13-year-old son, Willy, and another former Senate aide, Jim Morhard, also survived.

A glad-handing force of nature to some and a press-savvy con artist to others, Christopher Janus cut a legendary swath through Chicago's art and business communities.

A big-picture guy in culture as in business, he led delegations of noteworthy Chicagoans to Athens for democracy conferences, to Persepolis in 1971 for the 2,500th anniversary of Iran's monarchy and to China shortly after it reopened to the West. Yet many detected something not quite straight about the Bache & Co. broker.

"We never knew what kind of stockbroker he was -- maybe he never actually was one. That would figure, too," says Universal Press Syndicate columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, a longtime friend. "I have myself always mistrusted people who don't have a touch of larceny."

In his perhaps most famous exploit, he undertook a globe-trotting detective mission to discover the whereabouts of Peking Man, fossils of primitive man discovered in China in the 1920s and 1930s. The fossils disappeared in mysterious circumstances during World War II, and Mr. Janus seemed hot on the trail. That was shortly before he was convicted of fraud for the loans he took out to finance the venture. The fossils remain at large.