The Times - UK (2022-01-19)

the times | Wednesday January 19 2022 2GM 29

Award-winning books are

banned as culture wars

enter US classrooms

Page 33

Perfume mogul’s lover

accuses his son of

trying to run her over

Page 31

She is a documentary producer in

Mexico City, and won awards for a 2014

film on the migrant crisis in Mexico.

She bears a striking resemblance to

her father, who is understood to have

supported her and bought her a house

in one of the richest areas of the city.

Known for his novels One Hundred

Gabriel García Márquez’s daughter,

Indira Cato, is now in her early thirties

After an old hospital in Philadelphia

went bankrupt, patients were dischar-

ged, medical waste was removed, doc-

tors and nurses found jobs elsewhere

and a once-busy casualty department

closed its doors for the last time.

But there was one piece of business

that was remained harder to settle. In

1975 a doctor at the hospital had im-

planted a plutonium-powered pace-

maker in a patient. That person was still

alive, walking about with a radioactive

substance in their chest, and the hospi-

tal still had a duty to monitor the device

until the patient died.

Then, under the terms of its “radioac-

tive materials licence”, it was obliged to

Fallout of patient’s nuclear pacemaker

ensure its removal and disposal. Law-

yers for the Hahnemann University

Hospital could not tell when that would

be. “Given the patient’s good health and

current age, the time for explantation

[removal] of the pacemaker is uncer-

tain,” they said, in a motion filed with a

bankruptcy court in Delaware.

Nuclear-powered pacemakers were

phased out in the 1980s. Radiation from

such devices amounts to no more than

a single dental x-ray, Duncan White, of

the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,

told The Wall Street Journal. In rare

cases people have been buried with

them, though the commission prefers

that they are removed, White said.

The Los Alamos National Laborato-

ry’s Off-Site Source Recovery Program,

which seeks to recover radioactive ma-

terial, says on its website that “there are

still a number of people in the US who

have nuclear-powered pacemakers”.

One of them is the unnamed patient

of Hahnemann hospital. Lawyers for

the hospital raised the matter during

bankruptcy proceedings. The patient

was only 23 when they received the im-

plant of a pacemaker, powered by plu-

tonium-238, the radioactive substance

sealed within a welded titanium case.

In 1995 they received a replacement,

powered by lithium batteries. The nu-

clear pacemaker was disconnected but

removing it would have required sur-

gery. Lawyers for the hospital have

gained approval to hire a company to

take over the management of the pace-

maker, for $48,644: a sum that covered

calls to the patient for the next 20 years.

United States

Will Pavia New York

West drops threat

to Russian banks

over Ukraine crisis

Ukraine

Oliver Moody Berlin

Marc Bennetts Moscow

Europe and the US have shelved a plan

to expel Russia from the world’s domi-

nant international payments system

if it invades Ukraine, it was reported

yesterday.

The rhetorical heat rose on both

sides of the stand-off yesterday as Jens

Stoltenberg, 62, the secretary-general

of Nato, warned of a “real danger” of

war in Europe, and Russia said it would

send more jet fighters, air-to-surface

missiles and anti-aircraft guns to the

alliance’s eastern frontiers for joint

exercises with Belarus.

Moscow has already stationed more

than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s

border, and one Russian minister said a

larger deployment in Belarus could not

be ruled out.

Jen Psaki, the White House press

secretary, described the Russian drills

in Belarus as presenting an extremely

dangerous situation. “We’re now at a

stage where Russia could at any point

launch an attack in Ukraine,”

she said.

So far all attempts at

diplomacy have failed,

though Antony Blinken,

59, the US secretary of

state, will travel to Kiev

today before visiting

Berlin tomorrow and

meeting Sergei Lavrov,

his Russian counterpart,

in Geneva on Friday. On

the Nato side there is little

agreement about how to punish

the Kremlin in the event of an attack on

Ukraine.

One “nuclear” option would be to

kick Russia out of the Swift network,

which handles transactions worth

nearly £100 trillion a week between

banks in more than 200 countries. This

would effectively cut Russian banks off

from the West overnight and starve the

Russian financial system of access to

dollar payments, as happened to Iran in

2018 and to North Korea the year

before that.

However, some western govern-

ments worry that it could do serious

damage to the economies of Germany

and other European Union members

that trade with Russia. A senior Russian

official said last year that excluding

Russia from Swift would be an act of

“self-castration” by the West.

It might also undermine Swift itself

by encouraging Russia and China to

develop rival networks for payments.

About 400 Russian banks and 20 per

cent of Russia’s internal payments have

already switched to Moscow’s own

system, known as SPFS, which was

created at the height of the last Ukraine

crisis in 2014. The Swift idea has now

been dropped in favour of targeted eco-

nomic sanctions against large Russian

banks, German officials told Handels-

blatt, a business newspaper. However,

the US National Security Council said

that “no option [was] off the table”.

Dmitry Peskov, 54, President

Putin’s chief spokesman,

claimed Swift had previ-

ously said disconnecting

Russia from its system

would be “virtually im-

possible”. It was un-

clear what statement

he was referring to.

Germany’s willing-

ness to respond decisive-

ly to any Russian aggres-

sion against Ukraine came

under the spotlight yesterday as

Annalena Baerbock, 41, the German

foreign minister, met Lavrov in

Moscow. Baerbock said it was “hard not

to interpret” the Russian troop move-

ments as a threat.

Berlin is under pressure from allies to

drop its refusal to deliver armaments to

Kiev. The UK flew two planeloads of

anti-tank weapons to Ukraine on

Monday.

Is Ukraine our 21st-century Poland?

Letters, page 26

homes and other

buildings flattened by the

resulting tsunami, or

cloaked with thick ash.

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga

Ha’apai volcanic island

itself has all but

disappeared after

Saturday’s blast, with only

a few patches now visible

above the waves. Aerial

photos have also revealed

the verdant Tongan

scenery transformed into

a grey moonscape.

Officials are scrambling

to ascertain the full scale

of the disaster, relying on

patchy phone links,

surveillance flights and

satellite images. A

communications blackout

caused by a severed

undersea cable has largely

cut off the population of

about 100,000 from the

rest of the world. It could

be weeks before the cable

is repaired. Such was the

force of the eruption that

two people drowned in

Peru, 6,000 miles away.

Tonga’s government has

confirmed three deaths,

among them that of a

British citizen named as

Angela Glover, 50, who

ran a dog rescue centre. It

is feared the true death

toll may be much higher.

The eruption generated

waves up to 15 metres

high, far bigger than was

previously thought,

officials added.

Evacuation of some

outlying islands has

begun. The Tongan navy

is delivering water and

other supplies, but rescue

efforts are being

hampered by the sheer

volume of ash clogging

runways and

contaminating water

conduits.

Relief efforts are being

made more difficult by

Tonga’s strict Covid rules.

So far the island nation

has avoided an outbreak;

many fear aid workers

and military personnel

will bring in the virus.

TONGA NOW; NEW ZEALAND DEFENCE FORCE/REUTERS

that Márquez left untold

Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of

Cholera, García Márquez died in 2014 in

Mexico City. His funeral was attended

by thousands of admirers who lined the

streets to pay their respects.

The Colombian paper El Universal

reported the secret on Sunday and two

of García Márquez’s relatives have

since confirmed the story.

Members of his family told El Univer-

sal that they had kept the secret out of

respect for his widow. One of his nieces,

Shani García Márquez, said she had

known for years but that her parents

had told her to be discreet.

A nephew said he had connected

with Indira Cato through social media

but had never met her. “My cousins

Rodrigo and Gonzalo told me about her

casually during a reunion,” he added.

kraine,

at

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Annalena Baerb

Annalena Baerbock, the German

foreign minister, was in Moscow

yesterday for talks about Ukraine

Pacific

Ocean

25 miles

TONGA

Nomuka

Eua

Hunga Tonga-Hunga

Ha’apai volcano

Mango Island

Fonoifua

Island

Atata

Island

Tongatapu

Huge waves generated by

the eruption inundated

parts of Nomuka, below,

and other islands,

destroying whole towns