January 9 1975
A senior official of Boston’s Sidney Faber Cancer Centre said yesterday there was no truth to reports that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was to enter the hospital for treatment.
“The report is absolutely unfounded”, William Koster, Administrative Vice President said. “We haven’t been contacted at all”.
The Boston Globe said it had learned from a police source that the 68-year-old Soviet Communist Party chief would enter the cancer centre at the children’s hospital complex sometime later in the day.
In Moscow, the official Soviet news agency Tass said Brezhnev, his wife, their relatives and friends attended funeral services there for his mother yesterday.
The Boston office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state and local police all said they know nothing of the reported visit.
In Washington, State Department officials said they had “no evidence to support” the newspaper’s story.
Meanwhile Tass reported from Moscow yesterday that Mr Brezhnev was at the burial of his mother in snow-laden Novodevichy cemetery.
The Soviet news agency, said Brezhnev, other Soviet leaders, family and friends, were at the hall where the body of 87-year-old Natalya Brezhnev lay in state.
Western newsmen were not allowed inside the Academy of Sciences building where the body lay in state nor inside the cemetery gates.
But newsmen saw Brezhnev’s black limousine and those of Politburo members in the funeral procession and at the cemetery.
It later transpired that the Boston Globe was the victim of an elaborate hoax as Brezhnev never arrived at the hospital in Boston.
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Sinead de Valera dies at 97
Mrs Sinead de Valera, wife of Eamon de Valera died in a Dublin nursing home. She was 97.
Mrs de Valera entered the home a year ago.
Born in Balbriggan in 1878, Sinead O’Flanagan met her husband when he joined the class to which she was teaching Gaelic in 1909.
A year later they were married. Mr de Valera was himself a Professor of Mathematics at Drumcondra teachers’ training college at the time.
It was their shared interest in the revival of Gaelic that brought them together, and this proved to be a common bond throughout their married life.
A day short of their 65th wedding anniversary, teacher, folklorist and writer Sinéad de Valera (nee Flanagan) died. Éamon de Valera died months later in August 1975.
