the times | Friday March 6 2020 2GM 35
Wo r l d
It is difficult to persuade a paraplegic to
take up bobsledding. Some people with
permanent spine injuries worry about
riding at 70mph in a metal box down a
steep and swerving chute.
“They don’t want to further injure
themselves,” said Lonnie Bissonnette,
the world’s top para-bobsledder. “It’s
extremely hard to recruit people and
tell them: ‘You are going to go down a
frozen waterfall doing 130km/h
[81mph]. Are you in?’”
Mr Bissonnette, 55, a Canadian, was
unusually relaxed about the idea, but
then he had spent much of his earlier
life throwing himself from skyscrapers
and radio towers and aircraft with a
Serial killer
will plead
guilty to save
his own life
United States
Will Pavia New York
The former police officer suspected of
being the murderer and rapist known as
the Golden State Killer has offered to
plead guilty to 26 charges if prosecutors
do not seek the death penalty.
Joseph James DeAngelo Jr, 74, was
arrested in 2018 after a genetic profile
from a 1980 crime scene led investiga-
tors, via a genealogical database, to one
of his relatives. He was charged with 13
murders and 13 offences relating to kid-
nappings and sexual assaults. District
attorneys from six counties agreed to a
joint prosecution in Sacramento, in
what was described as the biggest
murder trial in California’s history.
The offer was made in papers filed
with a court by his lawyers.
In a statement, four of the counties
said that they had “unanimously con-
cluded to seek the death penalty”. A
spokeswoman for the Sacramentodistrict attorney’s office said yesterday
that “nothing has changed”.
While Mr DeAngelo’s lawyers seek to
challenge the procedure charging their
client in one county for crimes commit-
ted in others, prosecutors are continu-
ing their investigations.
In papers recently filed with the court
and obtained by the Sacramento Bee,
they allege a crime spree that began
with the murder of Claude Snelling, a
journalism professor, in 1975 and
includes “62 crime scenes across 13
counties... Some scenes involve
multiple victims, including young
children, and in total they comprise
well over 100 criminal acts.” These were
said to include burglary, assault, rape,
kidnapping and murder.
Victims of the Golden State Killer
have received a letter from his lawyers
seeking their opinion about whether
the case could be resolved without a
trial, according to the Los Angeles
Times. “I would be OK with that,” Kris
Pedretti, who was raped in 1976 at the
age of 15, told the paper. “But in
exchange we want answers.”Joseph James
DeAngelo Jr has
been charged
with 13 murdersA communist stands guard at the grave of Stalin during a ceremony to mark the 67th anniversary of the Soviet leader’s deathSwiss bank
told to look
into ‘Nazi
accounts’
Switzerland
Oliver Moody Berlin
Switzerland’s second-largest bank has
been asked to investigate whether it
holds money looted from Jews during
the Third Reich and allegedly laun-
dered through its accounts.
The claims emerged with the discov-
ery of papers naming 12,000 members
of an Argentine Nazi group from the
1930s, some of whom are said to have
transferred funds to Schweizerische
Kreditanstalt, a predecessor of Credit
Suisse.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre,
which has traced dozens of suspected
Nazi war criminals, urged the bank to
open up its archives to researchers.
Argentina became a centre of Nazi
activity under the pro-German presi-
dents José Félix Uriburu and Agustín
Pedro Justo: it is estimated that by 1938
about 1,400 members of the Nazi party
were in the country. A further 20,000
were affiliated to other Nazi groups.
Pedro Filipuzzi, an Argentinian
researcher, found the list at the party’s
former headquarters in Buenos Aires.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre checked
the names against a 1943 report on Nazi
financial activities and found that
several of them had sent money to the
Schweizerische Kreditanstalt.
The centre suspects that some of the
bank’s accounts may contain funds
confiscated from German Jews under
the Third Reich’s “racial hygiene” laws,
first enacted in 1935.
“We believe it very probable that
these dormant accounts hold monies
looted from Jewish victims, under the
Nuremberg Aryanisation laws of the
1930s,” it wrote in a letter to the bank.
Credit Suisse said that it had already
fully co-operated with an investigation
led by Paul Volcker, a former chairman
of the US Federal Reserve, in the late
1990s, that aimed to trace accounts that
belonged to the victims of Nazi perse-
cution. It added, however, that it would
“look into this affair again”.
Switzerland formally maintained
neutrality during the Second World
War but acted as a financial hub, a
source of credit and a gateway to inter-
national currency markets for Nazi
Germany. Swiss banks, including
Credit Suisse, have paid more than
£900 million to Holocaust victims and
their heirs under a 1998 settlement
agreed with the World Jewish Congress.
SERGEI ILNITSKY/EPAStalin’s death liberated us, say activists
Russia
Marc Bennetts Moscow
Activists who held a firework display in
the Ural region to celebrate the anni-
versary of Stalin’s death yesterday said
the date should be a national holiday.
Scores of people gathered to watch
the ten-minute display from an
embankment in Yekaterinburg,
Russia’s fourth-biggest city.
“The day of his death should become
a national holiday of liberation,” one of
the political activists behind the
67th anniversary show said. “The num-
ber of victims would have been far
greater [if he hadn’t died].”
The organisers insisted on remaining
anonymous for fear of retribution.
Although an estimated 20 million
people were killed during Stalin’s Great
Terror from 1936 to 1938, the Soviet
leader’s reputation has soared since
President Putin came to power in 2000.Busts and portraits of Stalin, once
taboo, have reappeared across the
country.
One onlooker told the Znak news
website that the fireworks were “unex-
pected but very beautiful”. The witness
added: “It was the right thing to do.”
Police questioned the organisers
before the show but nobody was
arrested. Yekaterinburg, almost 900
miles east of Moscow, is regarded as one
of Russia’s most liberal cities.
Yevgeny Kuyvashev, the regional
governor, said that he respected the
organisers behind the firework show
for having the courage to “openly voice
their opinions”.
“Some will always argue that it was
Stalin who led the country to victory in
the Second World War, took it over
with a plough and left it with the atomic
bomb,” Mr Kuyvashev, 48, wrote on
Instagram. “But others will never be
able to forgive him for the period ofmass repressions, when so many inno-
cent people died.”
Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union
for almost 30 years, died of a stroke at
home near Moscow on March 5, 1953.
The anniversary stirred different
emotions in Moscow, however, where
scores of communists marched to place
flowers at Stalin’s grave behind the
Kremlin. Memorial, Russia’s oldest
human rights group, was for the first
time barred from holding an event to
remember his victims. Officials said
that the application for the event had
been filed “incorrectly”.
A year ago Yevgeny Suchkov, an
activist, was detained by police and
fined for throwing flowers at the grave
while shouting: “Burn in hell, execu-
tioner of the people and murderer of
women and children.”
An opinion poll published in 2018
found that almost half of Russians aged
18 to 24 know nothing of Stalin’s purges.New thrill for Base jumper who broke spine
Canada
Will Pavia
parachute as a Base jumper and com-
petitive skydiver.
The first time he tried bobsledding, in
2013, he was amazed at how similar it
was to a skydive. Most races are about a
minute long — the same time as a sky-
dive — both involve split-second
adjustments, and both require you to
control your adrenaline “instead of
allowing it to control you,” he said. The
sled is controlled with ropes that re-
minded him of the cords of a parachute.
Mr Bissonnette was paralysed from
the chest down in 2004 after perform-
ing a quadruple backflip from a bridge.
One of his feet got caught in the para-
chute and it fluttered out behind him
“like a bedsheet, so it was doing nothing
except hanging me upside down”, he
said. “I hit the river head first, we figureI was doing about 120km/h.” Ten
months later, he began sky-
diving in a wheelchair,
performing his first
jump with his son.
Eleven months later
he did a Base jump
from an antenna.
Before the acci-
dent, he used to
time himself scal-
ing and jumping
from the same
mast. “The shortest
time I had done it was
about four minutes
and 40 seconds,” he said.This time he had to hoist himself up
with his arms. “It took me
three hours,” he said. He
was just as quick coming
down, though.
Once he began
bobsledding, in
2013, he thought
his skydiving
experience gave
him an unfair
advantage. He won
para-bobsledding’s
world cup in St Mor-
itz in Switzerland in
2016, while railing
against the obstacles that
wheelchair users faced in the
sport. Track operators were often
reluctant to allow them to use theirruns. “Last year, they wouldn’t let us
cripples go from the top,” he told the
Toronto Star that year. “This year they
said, you’re good to go.”
He also struggled to find sponsor-
ship. His son remortgaged his home to
help finance Mr Bissonnette’s four
world cup titles (he is also the favourite
to win the world championship in Nor-
way this month). However, he was dis-
mayed when the Paralympic commit-
tee cancelled plans to include it in 2022
saying they wanted to see more com-
petitors in all of the races.
Mr Bissonnette was hopeful that
bobsledding would be included in the
2026 games, but is not sure if he will
compete. “I will be 61 years old,” he told
an official from the sport’s federation.
“He was like: ‘Lonnie! Never say never’.”egan sky
lchair,
first
n.
ras
tes
said.with his arm
three ho
wasjus
down
O
bo
20
h
e
h
a
pa
wo
itz i
2016 ,
against t
wheelchair
sport. Track ope
lllhLonnie Bissonnette has won four
bobsledding world cup titles