“We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever,” a family statement said. “We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice.”

Kennedy, nicknamed “Ted,” was the younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy and New York Sen. Robert Kennedy, who was gunned down while seeking the White House in 1968. But his own presidential aspirations were hobbled by the controversy around a 1969 auto accident that left a young woman dead, and a 1980 primary challenge to then-President Jimmy Carter that ended in defeat.

But while the White House eluded his grasp, the longtime Massachusetts senator was considered one of the most effective legislators of the past few decades. Kennedy, who became known as the “lion of the Senate,” played major roles in passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, and was an outspoken liberal standard-bearer during a conservative-dominated era from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

“Senator Ted Kennedy’s legacy in the United States Senate is comparable and consistent with the legacy of his entire family for generations,” Kennedy’s biographer, Ted Sorensen, said.

Kennedy suffered a seizure in May 2008 at his home on Cape Cod. Shortly after, doctors diagnosed a brain tumor — a malignant glioma in his left parietal lobe.

Surgeons at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, removed as much of the tumor as possible the following month. Doctors considered the procedure a success, and Kennedy underwent follow-up radiation treatments and chemotherapy.

A few weeks later, he participated in a key vote in the Senate. And he insisted on making a brief but dramatic appearance at the 2008 Democratic convention, a poignant moment that brought the crowd to its feet and tears to many eyes.

“I have come here tonight to stand with you to change America, to restore its future, to rise to our best ideals and to elect Barack Obama president of the United States,” Kennedy told fellow Democrats in a strong voice.

Kennedy’s early support for Obama was considered a boon for the candidate, then a first-term senator from Illinois locked in a tough primary battle against former first lady Hillary Clinton. Kennedy predicted Obama’s victory and pledged to be in Washington in January when Obama assumed office — and he was, though he was hospitalized briefly after suffering a seizure during a post-inaugural luncheon.

Kennedy was one of only six senators in U.S. history to serve more than 40 years. He was elected to eight full terms to become the second most-senior senator, after West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd.

He launched his political career in 1962, when he was elected to finish the unexpired Senate term of his brother, who became president in 1960. He won his first full term in 1964.

He seemed to have a bright political future, and many Democratic eyes turned to him after the killings of his brothers. But a July 18, 1969, car wreck on Chappaquiddick Island virtually ended his ambitions.

After a party for women who had worked on his brother Robert’s presidential campaign, Kennedy drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick, off Cape Cod and across a narrow channel from Martha’s Vineyard. While Kennedy managed to escape, his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned.

In a coroner’s inquest, he denied having been drunk, and said he made “seven or eight” attempts to save Kopechne before exhaustion forced him to shore. And though he sought help from friends at the party, Kennedy did not report the accident to police until the following morning.

Kennedy eventually pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident. In a televised address to residents of his home state, Kennedy called his conduct in the hours following the accident “inexplicable” and called his failure to report the wreck immediately “indefensible.”

Despite the dent in his reputation and career, Kennedy remained in American politics and went on to win seven more terms in the Senate. Kennedy championed social causes and was the author of “In Critical Condition: The Crisis in America’s Health Care.” He served as chairman of the Judiciary and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committees and was the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary and Armed Services committees during periods when Republicans controlled the chamber.

Obama named Kennedy as one of 16 recipients of the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. A White House statement explained that the 2009 honorees “were chosen for their work as agents of change.”

“Senator Kennedy has dedicated his career to fighting for equal opportunity, fairness and justice for all Americans. He has worked tirelessly to ensure that every American has access to quality and affordable health care, and has succeeded in doing so for countless children, seniors, and Americans with disabilities. He has called health care reform the “cause of his life.”

Born in Boston on February 22, 1932, Edward Moore Kennedy was the last of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy, a prominent businessman and Democrat, and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Joseph Kennedy served as ambassador to Britain before World War II and pushed his sons to strive for the presidency, a burden “Teddy” bore for much of his life as the only surviving Kennedy son.

His oldest brother, Joe Jr., died in a plane crash during World War II when Kennedy was 12. John was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, and Robert was killed the night of the California primary in 1968.

Ted Kennedy delivered Robert’s eulogy, urging mourners to remember him as “a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it; who saw suffering and tried to heal it; who saw war and tried to stop it.”

The family was plagued with other tragedies as well. One sister, Kathleen, was killed in a plane crash in 1948. Another sister, Rosemary, was born mildly retarded, but was institutionalized after a botched lobotomy in 1941. She died in 1986 after more than 50 years in mental hospitals.

Joseph Kennedy was incapacitated by a stroke in 1961 and died in November 1969, leaving the youngest son as head of the family. He was 37.

“I can’t let go,” Kennedy once told an aide. “If I let go, Ethel (Robert’s widow) will let go, and my mother will let go, and all my sisters.”

Kennedy himself survived a 1964 plane crash that killed an aide, suffering a broken back in the accident. But he recovered to lead the seemingly ill-starred clan through a series of other tragedies: Robert Kennedy’s son David died of a drug overdose in a Florida hotel in 1984; another of Robert’s sons, Michael, was killed in a skiing accident in Colorado in 1997; and John’s son John Jr., his wife Carolyn and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette died in a 1999 plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard.

In addition, his son Edward Jr. lost a leg to cancer in the 1970s, and daughter Kara survived a bout with the disease in the early 2000s.

Kennedy was forced to testify about a bar-hopping weekend that led to sexual battery charges against his nephew, William Kennedy Smith. Smith was acquitted in 1991 of charges that he raped a woman he met while at a Florida nightclub with the senator and his son Patrick, now a Rhode Island congressman.

Like brothers John and Robert, Edward Kennedy attended Harvard. He studied in the Netherlands before earning a law degree from the University of Virginia Law School, and worked in the district attorney’s office in Boston before entering politics.

Kennedy is survived by his second wife, Victoria Ann Reggie Kennedy, whom he married in 1992; his first wife, Joan Bennett; and five children — Patrick, Kara and Edward Jr. from his first marriage, and Curran and Caroline Raclin from his second.

The 10-year deal announced Wednesday gives Microsoft access to the Internet’s second-largest search engine audience, beefing up the software maker’s arsenal as it tries to better confront Google, which is by far the leader in online search and advertising.

Microsoft didn’t have to give Yahoo an upfront payment to make it happen, as many Yahoo investors had been counting on ever since Microsoft dangled $1 billion last summer in an attempt to forge a search partnership then.

Google tried to stop Yahoo from falling into Microsoft’s camp. Last year it formed its own proposed search advertising deal with Yahoo, only to be forced to retreat from that alliance after U.S. antitrust officials threatened to sue.

Now the extended reach Microsoft is gaining will let it introduce its recently upgraded search engine, called Bing, to more people. The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker believes Bing is just as good, if not better, than Google’s search engine. Taking over search responsibilities on Yahoo’s popular site gives Microsoft a better chance to convert Web surfers who had been using Google by force of habit.

“Microsoft and Yahoo know there’s so much more that search could be,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. “This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”

Even with Yahoo’s help, Microsoft has its work cut out. Combined, Microsoft and Yahoo handle 28 percent of the Internet searches in the United States, well behind Google’s 65 percent, according to online measurement firm comScore Inc. Google is even more dominant in the rest of the world, with a global share of 67 percent compared to a combined 11 percent for Microsoft and Yahoo.

In return for turning the keys to its search engine over to Bing, Yahoo will keep 88 percent of the revenue from all ads that run alongside search requests on its site for the first five years of the deal. Yahoo also will have the right to sell search ads on some Microsoft sites.

Yahoo estimated the deal will boost its annual operating profit by $500 million and save the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company about $200 million on annual capital expenditures because it won’t have to invest as much in its own search technology. An unspecified number of Yahoo engineers will lose their jobs as the company scales back, Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz told analysts in a Wednesday conference call.

The deal isn’t expected to close until early next year, and then it could take another two years before all the pieces of the partnership are in place. The companies first will give antitrust regulators time to review the possible effects on the Internet ad market. Then they will need time to stitch together their different technologies.

Shares of Yahoo plunged $1.84, or 10.7 percent, to $15.38 in afternoon trading, as investors expressed disappointment over the fact that the company won’t be getting an immediate windfall. Microsoft shares edged up 3 cents to $23.50 while Google shares shed $5.16, or 1.2 percent, to $434.69.

“I think the market hasn’t figured out that there’s not much I can do with an upfront payment,” Bartz said in a Wednesday interview.

“It’s very clear that (in this deal) I get virtually all my revenue at no cost. That’s what’s important on an ongoing basis. A one-time upfront payment, what am I going to with it? Collect interest on it every year? That doesn’t help me with” Yahoo’s finances.

The alliance could give Yahoo a chance to recoup some of the money it squandered in May 2008, when it turned down a chance to sell the entire company to Microsoft for $47.5 billion. Yahoo’s market value currently stands at about $22 billion, and the company, while profitable, is coming off a quarter in which revenue slid 13 percent.

The two rivals began talking about a possible partnership as far back as 2005 before Microsoft intensified the courtship with last year’s attempt to buy Yahoo.

It took Bartz just six months to strike a deal with Microsoft — something that neither of her predecessors, Terry Semel and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, seemed interested in doing.

Shortly after her arrival, Bartz made it clear she was willing to farm out Yahoo’s search engine for “boatloads of money” as long as she as thought the company would still receive adequate information about its users’ interests. Although Yahoo won’t get any immediate cash, Bartz predicted the deal will still be a boon for the company.

“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo, our users, and the industry,” Bartz said.

Under the agreement, Yahoo will have limited access to the data on users’ searches — which yield insights that can be used to pick out ads more likely to pique a person’s interest. The value of that information is why Microsoft wants to process more search requests.

Like Yahoo, Microsoft has invested billions in its search technology during the past decade, yet remained a distant third in market share while its online losses piled up. The company’s Internet services division lost $2.3 billion in the fiscal year ending in June, nearly doubling from the previous year.

Microsoft is counting on Bing, unveiled last month, to turn things around.

Bing has been getting mostly positive reviews and picking up slightly more traffic with the help of a $100 million marketing campaign. Analysts believe Bing’s successful debut pushed Microsoft to reopen negotiations so it could expose its search engine improvements to a wider audience more quickly.

“The reason the deal happened now is the recent success of Bing. I think it put pressure on Yahoo, as well as Yahoo not being able to turn it around on its own,” said Gartner Inc. analyst Neil MacDonald.

Microsoft and Yahoo are bracing for scrutiny into whether the combination would have an adverse effect on competition in the online ad market.

The U.S. Justice Department spent five months dissecting last year’s proposed search advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo before concluding that it would give Google too much control over the market. And under the Obama administration, the Justice Department is promising to pore over deals more rigorously than it did when the proposed Google-Yahoo partnership came up.

Microsoft used its lobbying muscle to spearhead the campaign against Google teaming up with Yahoo, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if Google turned the tables.

“There has traditionally been a lot of competition online, and our experience is that competition brings about great things for users,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said. “We’re interested to learn more about the deal.”

A key lawmaker on antitrust issues said the Yahoo-Microsoft plan “warrants our careful scrutiny.” Sen. Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, said the Senate antitrust subcommittee he chairs will review the deal “because of the potentially far-reaching consequences for consumers and advertisers and our concern about dampening the innovation we have come to expect from a competitive high-tech industry.”

Peter Kaplan, a spokesman for the Federal Trade Commission, declined to comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman couldn’t immediately be reached.

Ballmer expects that support from online advertisers and Web publishers who would like a stronger rival to Google will eclipse any objections that Google might raise.

“We think this is one of these cases where the coming together will produce more effective market competition, not less,” he told analysts in Wednesday’s conference call.

Microsoft is doubling down on Internet search at the same time Google is attacking Microsoft’s bread-and-butter business of software for personal computers.

Google is working on a free operating system for inexpensive PCs in a move that could threaten Microsoft’s Windows franchise. If it gains traction, Google’s alternative, called Chrome OS, could divert revenue from Microsoft while the software maker is trying to grab more money pouring into search advertising.

Chrome OS isn’t supposed to hit the market until the second half of next year. That means Microsoft could get a head start on Google in the duel to steal each other’s financial thunder.

___

Microsoft will not pay an upfront fee to Yahoo, and the focus of the deal is on sharing revenue between the two companies, said the source, who did not want to be identified because a formal announcement has not been made.

The news was first reported by the AllThingsDigital blog.

Microsoft and Yahoo declined comment. The two companies have talked for months about cooperating in the online advertising market, dominated by Google Inc.

Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo last year but its $47.5 billion bid was rebuffed and Yahoo’s attempt to seal a search advertising deal with Google Inc fell apart under regulatory scrutiny.

Shares of Yahoo rose 1.6 percent in after-hours trading to $17.50 while shares of Microsoft were roughly flat at $23.45, compared with their close of $23.47.

Facebook has been in the hot seat this past week over claims that the social network has been letting third-party advertisers post people’s photos without permission, causing a flurry of conversation among confused users on both its site and Twitter. The buzz caught Facebook’s eye and prompted the company to put up a blog post this afternoon. According to Facebook:

The advertisements that started these rumors were not from Facebook but placed within applications by third parties. Those ads violated our policies by misusing profile photos, and we already required the removal of those deceptive ads from third-party applications before this rumor began spreading.

The post also went on to note how Facebook had banned two advertising networks that violated the social network’s advertising policies. Indeed, after Beacon, Facebook needs to be extra vigilant about addressing the privacy concerns of its users.

Bankrate also runs Interest.com, Mortgage-calc.com, Savingforcollege.com, CreditCardGuide.com, and Bankaholic.com which it acquired last year.

Apax Partners is a private equity and VC group based in the UK. Apax is the seventh largest private equity firm globally. Apax will acquire all common stock of Bankrate for $28.50 per share. The acquisition price is a premium over 15.8 percent of Bankrate’s market value as of yesterday.

This is however excellent news for Google. Android phones have not caught on mainly because of hardware issues. Consumers are eager to see more Android phones coming out.

During the Apple earnings call, Cook also said that one of the issues of the App Store is that developers are not sure how to price their applications. And customers do not have enough information to tell whether an application is worth buying.

He said that the popularity of $0.99 cent apps has created a wasteland of mediocre applications.

“In some respects, the App Store has taken its place alongside YouTube, where poor taste is the defining metric, More ominously. it has led to a deterioration of the entire pricing structure for iPhone applications. The risk is that developers who hope to build quality applications that have a long shelf life may be discouraged from doing so because prospective development costs exceed the revenues they expect to earn on the applications. In short, this race to the bottom has the potential to degrade the overall equality of the applications sold at the App Store.”

The App Store is now 1 year old. Its popularity is a key driving factor in iPhone sales.

“Gogo Inflight Internet will allow our customers to make the most of their flying time by catching up on work or relaxing and surfing the Internet. This is an exciting new option for our passengers that we believe will enhance their travel experience,” stated Andrew Nocella, SVP of Marketing and Planning at U.S. Airways.

The original books are contained within the U of M Library.  ”This agreement means that titles that have been generally unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time,” stated U of M librarian and dean of libraries Paul N. Courant.

The reprint program includes books that have been digitized by the U of M book scanning partnership with Google.  Over 400,000 books across 200 languages have been scanned so far.  U of M will be setting the prices of the reprints and the university will be sharing revenue with BookSurge.