Sir: Would you allow a little factual light to penetrate Roy Hattersley's uncharacteristic gloom ("Not up Rupert's Street", 25 September) [about the consequences of Sky seeking to buy Coronation Street]? "Poach", "predators", "pirates", "plunder": al...

Sir: In the headline to Patrick Cockburn's article about the Taba accords between Israel and the PLO, you declare the "New Palestinian state [is] shackled at birth" (Foreign News, 25 September). In reality there is nothing "new" in the accords. They ...

Sir: Tom Sawyer, Labour's general secretary, says I am not a "suitable" candidate for Labour - even though I was democratically selected in accordance with the party rulebook - because I broke the whip as an Islington councillor on "numerous occasion...

Sir: It is quite wrong for the Treasury Minister, Angela Knight, to assert that it is due to more people being in work now, as compared with at the time of the last general election, that more people are paying income tax ("Wider spread of tax net he...

Sir: Chris Patten, Governor of Hong Kong, has recommended that we give British passports to Hong Kong citizens. The Conservative government, which wants to keep down the number of immigrants at all costs, naturally opposes this humane plan. But then ...

Many people will be understandably sceptical about yesterday's predictions that we are entering a golden age in cancer treatment. The Imperial Cancer Research Fund forecasts that developments in drug therapy, combined with advances in screening and i...

Yesterday's Independent argued that we should incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, supposedly to reduce the risk of such embarrassments. I disagree. We would lose nothing if we withdrew from the court and the conventi...

Blair talked of reform to unemployment benefit so people would be encouraged to work, of a new income support system which would create incentives to self-help instead of curbing it, and of the need to move the nation's pensions into the private sect...

In a way, this is a pity, as imperial measures always seemed to me to be more flexible than metric ones. If you ever listen to the conversation in our shops such as butchers and fishmongers, you will realise that the basic units of imperial measure w...

Sir: The sensational news and television pictures of Hindu idols imbibing milk offered by devotees has generated a mixed reaction in the media, and various explanations for the phenomenon have been proffered. Capillarity seems to be the most popular ...

Sir: Randhir Singh Bains (Letters, 25 September) contrasts what he calls "traditional Asian" thought and "Hindu philosophy" with what he calls "Western materialism" and "Western rationalism", and applies the distinction to the consideration of curren...

Perhaps even more important, books remain, as the US business magazine Forbes put it earlier this year, "society's dominant clearing house for ideas". If you want to instil an idea into the minds of everyone, from an American president to a Chinese p...

Peter was not a great embracer of other people's politics, even though he did join the SDP and offer, famously, to canvass for it "weather permitting". He was very thick with some politicians, but would never have made one himself because of his inab...

Sir: The discovery that a combination of therapies has been successful in treating people with Aids is exciting and encouraging (report, 26 September). It is largely irrelevant, however, to those with HIV and Aids in the developing world, where 90 pe...

Sir: Your women readers will, no doubt, have noticed that it took six journalists to write the first part of your feature "Forty women under forty" (Section Two, 27 September), and that all of them are men. Yours faithfully, Linda Evans London, W4

Sir: I am keeping an open mind about the "milk-drinking" by Nandi at the Vishwa Temple in Southall, but my husband, who witnessed this phenomenon, has not been in the pub since, and now drinks only milk. Now that's what I call a miracle. Yours sincer...

"This is a seldom-used rule," says happy M1 Wanderers' manager Joe Supremo, "which says in the event of an otherwise drawn match, the team that settled its hotel bills quickest during their away leg shall be the winner. Luckily, we had paid in advanc...

Apparently not. Only observe America, which has no Net Book Agreement, and where the tyranny of the bestseller (discounted, naturally) is such that everyone you see reading is reading the same book, because that's all every bookshop and kiosk is sell...

In its ruling, the court does not accuse the government of the day of committing murder. It does not claim that Britain encouraged the "execution" of the trio. Nor does it condemn the four soldiers who carried out the operation: they acted, says the ...