08/09/03

I believe the Space Shuttle missions by Nasa do have a key to a happier and brighter future here on earth.

Most of the Shuttle missions are for servicing and/or expanding the International Space Station, which will eventually be used as an orbiting laboratory.

This multi-billion pound project is aimed at helping life on Earth, benefiting us in all kinds of ways, from medicinal to mechanical, so those people with no basic necessities will survive, but only if we keep the Manned Space Programme. - Jamie Williams, aged 12, Northallerton.

ASYLUM SEEKERS

I READ Dr Colin Clarke's article (Echo, Sept 2) in which he says we should do away with our border controls.

I would like to know where does he propose to house, build roads, schools, work places, etc for the millions who would enter England?

As this country is only 500 miles long and 200 miles wide and is already full, it can only be on our farmland, which we need for food, and on our woodland areas, which are diminishing by the day.

Having no borders has already occurred in the past. Before there were countries, there were just tribes, which were constantly being attacked by other marauding tribes. It did not work then and would not work now. All it would do would ensure that the English lose England.

What right does he have to put our country at such risk? - J Parkins, West Cornforth.

PETE Winstanley blames the IMF, the world bank and the WTO for Third World poverty. I can assure him that if those organisations did not exist there would still be poverty in the Third World, since it is caused mainly by their rulers who steal as much as they can from their own people, and also the Third World birth rate.

Mr Winstanley does not even mention the rule of Marxist ruler Robert Mugabe, who has reduced Zimbabwe from prosperity to starvation in a few years. The political left wing has its share in world poverty, since it promotes guerrilla warfare in countries which are struggling to survive.

How often do we see Africans swathed in machine guns and cartridges, all of which cost money, while their children starve? - Alistair Simpson, Darlington.

IS Mr Winstanley (HAS, Sept 2) trying to tell the readers that mass immigration by thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers has no effect on our population?

They are costing us taxpayers billions of pounds to keep, house and feed. Money that could be spent on our people.

This Government is bleeding the taxpayer dry and our industry is being forced to take its firms to other European countries because they are unable to make a decent profit because of tax and other restrictions placed upon them by this Government and its dictatorial attitude.

Do your readers know that this Government intends to issue 150,000 work permits to foreigners this year, plus the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who are being allowed to stay, plus anybody from Eastern Europe can just walk in?

I have a friend in London who tells me that you can buy a passport, identity cards, work permits - all being forged by immigrants.

And finally, Mr Winstanley, these people are taking away from our own people a large slice of the cake that would make life easier for them. Thanks to Tony Blair and his multi-racial team that is a disaster for our once Great Britain. - F Wealand, Darlington.

CHARLES DARWIN

I WAS surprised by the attempt by EA Moralee (Echo, Aug 28) to dismiss Darwin's theory of evolution as "supposition " and "speculative".

Darwin's theory has been accepted by almost all thinking people as the best explanation of the facts as we see them, the arrangement of the fossil evidence and their position in the strata, the slow change in the form of individual species with time, and the ages of the rocks as determined by radioactive decay. Leaders of almost all mainstream churches accept evolution.

Against this, she tries to give credence to creationism, where the universe is apparently only some 6,000 years old, all life was created perfectly by God in an instant and has been unchanged ever since. What evidence is there for these beliefs?

Do they think that God purposely created the universe to look billions of years old as some sort of joke or test? - Eric Gendle, Middlesbrough.

Hartlepool HOSPITAL

I HAVE been reading about the threat to the accident and emergency department at Hartlepool Hospital, which is not far from the Trimdons. I've been listening out for what the local MP has to say. I am still listening and I live in hope.

Job losses, factories shut down and now this; will there ever be a lifting of the clouds over the North-East and East Durham in particular. - Peter Brown, Trimdon Village.