Without Radio One's commitment to break new music (that doesn't mean they can never play anything familiar, Pierre) there would be no Cornershop, Space, Verve, Run DMC, Nevins, All Seeing I etc for unadventurous commercial stations to plagiarise and ...

The value of human life has been eroded over the decades through the growth of euthanasia, abortion, and television and computer-game violence, which all promote the killing of people who happen to be an inconvenience. Until we as a society, and poli...

That is why we are marching today, and, hopefully, at last, Tony Blair and Jack Straw will listen and understand this is one campaign that is not going to go away. THIS week, The Independent invited the main party leaders to sign up to the Prime Mini...

What Ashley Weinberg and his colleagues at Manchester University do not ask - and this is an indictment of modern academic research, because it is a far more interesting question - is: do you have to be mad to rule the world? Now, before mental healt...

Quentin Tarantino says that he feels black inside, and wishes that the colour of his skin matched that of his soul. I heard that Steven Spielberg, who has adopted black children feels a kinship with the brethren that is closer than friendship. And, I...

I hope that, when the matter is put to a scientific test, the excellent Mr Tilt will not be one of the strong-necked whites used as controls. Professor C R LEEDHAM-GREEN Woodford Green, Essex

Yes, so did I. This weekend the British Psychological Society holds its annual conference in Brighton, and among the genuine insights it throws up there are always a large amount of studies (of which the three listed above are examples) which contain...

Heat will certainly kill a living plant but will it really destroy the kanamycin resistance genes inserted into every cell of these fruit? DNA is tough stuff and is very resistant to heat degradation - life wouldn't have been around so long if the su...

Despite the fact that dozens of studies have shown no quantifiable link between screen violence and real-life crime, David Usborne (report, 27 March) still assumes that videos have a comparable influence to that of the boys' fathers, who have spent y...

For more students, especially those from poor schools and poor families, even to get to university demands fairer sharing of scarce resources. This means that the only way to open the university doors wider is further to reduce costs or to introduce ...

Baroness BLATCH House of Lords London SW1

So when we criticise Mr Blair for cosying up to vested interests, we are not animated by prejudice or allowing ourselves to be distracted by tittle tattle. Mr Blair should not have mentioned Mr Murdoch when he spoke to Romano Prodi on the telephone o...

I fear that we are slipping into the appalling delusion that the pursuit of money, so clearly seen in some boardrooms, among fundholders in offshore trusts and among the Lottery ticket / Premium Bond-buying public, is somehow rendered acceptable if w...

When the estate in Northumberland was about to be sold in 1992 (to Freddy and Bruce Shepherd or their company), Jessica was quoted as saying "I do not even know of the place." All the same, she, her sister Nancy and all were, and are, descended from ...

If funding was to be found to provide pounds 1,000 PCs for 23.5 million homes, it would cost pounds 23.5bn, not pounds 240m, which clearly represents only a pounds 10 unit cost for the PCs. Let's hope the Millennium Dome does not make the same scale ...

Tilt, quite extraordinarily, suggested the problem was that people of Afro-Caribbean background were likelier to suffer "positional asphyxia" because "there is a physiological difference" between them and whites. As Jason Bennetto and Andrew Buncombe...

What is occurring here is nothing less than a backlash against feminism and, as always, it is women themselves who are colluding in this backlash. The problem of the thirtysomething female who hasn't met "Mr Right" - ie Mr Big-Salary, Mr Devastatingl...