Famed composer Lalo Schifrin, who created themes for a host of hit Hollywood films and television shows — including the instantly recognizable “Mission: Impossible” score — died Thursday aged 93, US media reported.Born in Argentina, Schifrin blended the influences of his classical and symphonic training with jazz and modern sounds in his diverse and vast oeuvre, which includes the scores for around 100 films, some of them the best-known of their generation.His death was confirmed by his son, Ryan Schifrin, to several entertainment trade publications.Schifrin’s work for film includes “The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and “Bullitt” (1968), both with Steve McQueen, Paul Newman’s “Cool Hand Luke” (1968), and Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” (1971).He also created the score to the 1960s “Mission: Impossible” television series, which inspired the theme of the massive film franchise starring Tom Cruise.A pipe-smoker in his younger years and bespectacled with a mane of silver hair later, he was also a highly respected international orchestra conductor and jazz pianist.Boris Claudio Schifrin was born in Buenos Aires on June 21, 1932 into a musical family, his father Luis Schifrin being the concert master of the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra for 25 years. He learned piano at a young age, developing an extensive knowledge of classical music.His introduction in his teens to jazz and the American sound — through its greats such as Charlie Parker, George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong — was like a conversion, he would say later, and set his life on a new course.After training in Paris, Schifrin returned to Buenos Aires and set up his own big band, with a performance notably impressing jazz legend trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.”So after we finished, Dizzy came to me and said, did you write all these charts? And I said, yes. Would you like to come to United States? I thought he was joking. He wasn’t,” Schifrin recounted to NPR in 2007.”I wouldn’t be here had it not been for that moment,” he told the US radio.Schifrin moved to the United States in 1958 and became a US citizen over a decade later.In Hollywood, television producer Bruce Geller asked him to create scores for his television series “Mission: Impossible” (1966) and “Mannix” (1969). Geller’s brief was for “a theme that’s exciting, promising, but not too heavy” and anticipates the action to follow, Schifrin told NPR in 2015.Geller said that when “people go to the kitchen and get a Coca-Cola, I want them to hear the theme and say, Oh, this is ‘Mission: Impossible’,” he recounted.The score he delivered earned Schifrin two Grammy music awards in 1967, adding to two for the albums “The Cat” (1964) and “Jazz Suite On The Mass Texts” (1965).Shifrin received several Academy Award nominations for his film work including for “Cool Hand Luke.”In 2018, he received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, presented by Eastwood.

US President Donald Trump made his final pitch at a White House event Thursday for his massive tax relief and spending cuts package as the Senate eyes a vote in the coming days. The so-called “One, Big Beautiful Bill” would extend Trump’s expiring first term tax cuts at a cost of $4.5 trillion — but strip health care from millions of the poorest Americans and add more than $3 trillion to deficits over a decade.Trump told officials and supporters the package was “one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of our country.” “And that’s everybody saying that — virtually everybody,” the Republican leader added. “The one big, beautiful bill (will) secure our borders, turbo charge our economy and bring back the American dream.”Senate Republicans want to begin a weekend of votes on the package — which Trump sees as crucial to his legacy — on Friday, with hopes of getting it to Trump’s desk by July 4.But those self-imposed deadlines look set to slip with deep divides over spending and debt dividing Republicans in both the Senate and the House.They are using a special process to avoid having to rely on votes from the minority Democrats but currently lack the support on their own side to get the package across the line.Independent analysis shows that the bill would pave the way for a significant redistribution of wealth from the poorest 10 percent of Americans to the richest.  It is deeply unpopular across multiple demographic, age and income groups, according to extensive recent polling. A handful of Senate Republicans are opposed to provisions that would gut the Medicaid health care program for low-income Americans and threaten scores of rural hospitals with closure. More than a dozen House Republicans have warned they won’t support the Medicaid cuts, yet lawmakers in both chambers have complained that the savings in the package don’t go far enough.  Although the House has already passed its own version, both chambers have to agree on the same text before it can be signed into law.Republican leaders were working Thursday to hammer out a version that can get a quick rubber-stamp in the House without returning to the negotiating table.Majority Leader John Thune can only lose three Senate Republicans on any vote, and the margin in the House — depending on attendance — is similar. Trump was joined in the White House by “everyday Americans” who would benefit from the bill, according to the White House, including waiters, food delivery drivers and border patrol agents. “We’re going to be celebrating for a long time, because we’re turning our country around,” Trump said. “We’re getting our country back, and we’re ruling with common sense.”

A medical panel appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voted Thursday to recommend a new preventive shot against RSV, a common respiratory illness that is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants in the United States.The vote marked the first by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) since Kennedy dismissed all members of the influential group of independent experts and replaced them with his own nominees, a move that made this decision a test of the new panel’s intentions.Clesrovimab was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a shot for newborns and young babies experiencing their first respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) season.Marketed under the name Enflonsia by its manufacturer Merck, the antibody immunization shot was shown in clinical trials to be safe and effective at significantly reducing RSV infections and hospitalizations among infants.The ACIP panel was asked to adjudicate the next step after approval — namely, whether it should now be recommended for infants under eight months old entering their first RSV season who are not already protected by an RSV vaccine administered to their mother during pregnancy.They voted 5-2 in favor.The two dissenters were Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at MIT who has questioned the safety of Covid-19 vaccines, and Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse and member of the anti-vaccine National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC).”I don’t feel this is ready to be administered to all healthy babies. I think we should take a more precautionary approach,” said Levi, explaining his “no” vote.Pebsworth did not offer comments, but the NVIC previously opposed the earlier-approved RSV antibody, nirsevimab.Kennedy — who spent decades spreading vaccine misinformation before becoming President Donald Trump’s top health official — abruptly fired all 17 members of the ACIP earlier this month, accusing them of conflicts of interest.