Obituaries for 2025

[jmyrlefuller]

Lalo Schifrin, theme music composer extraordinaire, dies at 93

His "Tar Sequence" music from Cool Hand Luke became a TV news staple, while his theme from Mission: Impossible became the most famous melody ever composed in 5/4 time (with apologies to "Take Five").

https://variety.com/2025/music/news/lalo-schifrin-dead-mission-impossible-film-composer-1236442000/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bot7XxatiBE

[mountaineer]

Two "no comments."
Godspeed, Mr. Schifrin.

[rustynail]

Dave Parker dies at 74: Baseball Hall of Famer and seven-time All-Star played nearly two decades in the majors..

[Timber Rattler]

Longtime State Department spokesman, diplomat Richard Boucher, dies at 73

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/longtime-state-department-spokesman-diplomat-richard-boucher-dies-123310359

Richard Boucher, who served for more than a decade as the spokesman for the State Department and assistant secretary of state for public affairs, has died at age 73. He died Friday at his home in northern Virginia after a battle with spindle-cell sarcoma, an aggressive form of cancer, according to his son.

Boucher had been the face of U.S. foreign policy at the State Department podium across administrations throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, beginning in the George H.W. Bush presidency and continuing through Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s terms in office. Boucher served as the spokesman for secretaries of state James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

In a career that took him from the Peace Corps though Africa and Asia as well as in Washington, Boucher also served as U.S. Consul General Hong Kong during the 1997 handover of the territory from Britain to China, and later used the skills he learned there to help orchestrate an end to the U.S.-China spy plane crisis in early 2001.

After leaving the spokesman’s job, Boucher became assistant secretary of state for state for South and Central Asia and was then ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

[Timber Rattler]

Viktor Belenko, Who Defected to the West in a MiG-25 Foxbat Jet Fighter, has passed away

Viktor Belenko, the former Soviet Air Defence Forces pilot who defected to the West in 1976 in a MiG-25 high-speed interceptor, has passed away on Sep. 24, 2023 Alert 5 first noted.

He died in a nursing home in a small town in Southern Illinois on Sep. 24. However, journalists learned about his death only now. The New York Times quoted Belenko’s son, Paul Schmidt, on Nov. 20 as saying that his father had died after a brief, unspecified illness in a nursing home in Rosebud, Illinois.

Viktor Belenko was born into a simple family of Soviet workers on Feb. 15, 1947, in Nalchik. But he managed to build a military career, making his way into the elite USSR Air Defense Forces, which defended the country from a possible attack from the outside.

On Sep. 6, 1976, then Lt. Belenko flew his MiG-25P fighter to Hakodate Airport in Hokkaido Prefecture of Japan, as the photos in this post show. After circling Hakodate airport three times, Belenko landed at the airport with around 30 seconds of fuel remaining.

As explained by Yefim Gordon in his book Mig-25 ‘Foxbat’ Mig-31 ‘Foxhound’: Russia’s Defensive Front Line, it will probably never be known if Belenko contacted the US military intelligence on his own or was hired by them (there is even a theory that ‘V Belenko’ was just a cover name for a trained agent tasked with stealing the latest Soviet military hardware, shades of Clint Eastwood in Firefox). Investigators found out that the defection was not an impulsive action of a dissatisfied officer – Belenko was expected in Japan and made preparations for the flight. He high-tailed it to Japan the very first time he had a full fuel load, taking the classified technical manuals with him.

EXCERPT




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiRfMP4AVgI