>Tranniness is a mental disorder. We should be working on a cure, not indulging their delusions.
Religious fervor is a mental disorder. We should be working on a cure for that too, not indulging their delusions.
The semi tractor (Volvo… now Chinese) pulling the trailer wherein 53 illegal immigrants died has a red/black color scheme, the Satanic colors.
Sacrifice to Satan?
Dr Ramesh denied any knowledge of babies being sacrificed for stem cells. He said he had faith in the Institute of Cryobiology in Kharkiv, the source of the stem cells used by the Barbados clinic, but added that "maybe in the future we will go and check it out".
I decided to travel to the Ukraine myself to see what sort of guarantee the Institute could offer about the source of its stem cells.
Once there, I made several attempts to interview the head of the Institute, Dr Valentin
Greshenko, to put my concerns to him, but he refused. So my inquiries took me instead to Maternity Hospital Number Six, which stands in what my translator told me nervously was the "criminal area" of Kharkiv.
It was at this hospital, in 2002, that a young woman called Svetlana Plusikova gave birth to a baby girl. The 26-year-old agreed to meet me in a derelict fairground nearby, set in a leafless forest. She was too scared for me to come to her workplace.
Svetlana told me that after a relatively straightforward pregnancy, she gave birth without any complication. "It happened very, very quickly - the doctors didn't say anything."
It was only much later that she was informed the child had been stillborn. "They told me my child had already been dead inside me for five months."
Svetlana was unconvinced. Surely if her baby had been dead for so long, she would have suffered a miscarriage. And why was the dead infant not shown to her? It had been whisked away so quickly she didn't even have a chance to hear if it cried.
She has her own theories as to what happened. "I think she was stolen. If she was dead I should have been allowed to see her. I think a lot of young mothers like me lost their children, but right now nobody turns to the police."
Certainly, Svetlana is not alone in her suspicions. I met Dimitry and Olena Stulnev in their two-room flat nearby. I arrived during a power cut and started to interview them by candlelight. There, with tears running down her face, Olena told me about her own experience in
Maternity Hospital Number Six.
"I gave birth to a healthy girl," Olena told me. "She was crying and moving her hands and legs. I was shown the baby. After that the girl was taken away. They told me everything was OK and I could see her the next day."
But that never happened. Olena was told the following day that her baby had died. But when she asked what had caused the death, the answers were inconsistent. "They told me three stories. One, she didn't have enough air to breathe; two, the lungs didn't open; and three, that her heart failed."
The couple tried in vain to find out what really happened, but the more they investigated, the firmer the doors were shut in their faces.
So she contacted a charity campaigner named Tatyana Zhakarova, from the Federation Of Families With Many Children, who took up the case on her behalf.