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The Reader: West should let Syria reconstruction begin
The US is going to bolster its military presence in north-east Syria to deny Islamic State “and others” (ie the Assad government) access to the oilfields there.
President Trump has boasted about holding the oilfields and talked about sending in US companies to take them over. Those oilfields belong to Syria, whose people are food insecure and desperately need to start the work of reconstruction in their country.
The US army should leave Syria now, and the severe sanctions enforced by the US and EU should end.
Brendan O’Brien
Dear Brendan
The American raid that led to the death of IS terror chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was an exception. For Donald Trump is ending the limited US presence in northern Syria. That hasn’t created the nirvana you hope for, where a benevolent Assad uses the nation’s natural resources to support local people. Far from it. The Kurdish population is under assault from Turkey, and reoccupied by a despotic Syrian regime. It’s an echo of the whole story of the Syrian civil war. Because the West hasn’t got involved, many thousands have died and millions have suffered. If only the US were bolstering its presence. Sadly, the reverse is happening.
George Osborne, Evening Standard editor
We must relocate London Heliport
Amid the current discussion on pollution in London, one centre of environmental pollutions seems to have escaped attention — the London Heliport in Battersea.
When it was first established, this was an undeveloped area of London but is now in the middle of a high-rise, high-density population zone.
According to statistics provided by London Oxford Airport, which is responsible for business development of the heliport, levels of activity have declined.
However, helicopters are larger and remain on the ground with engines running, the noise has become insufferable, and on some days it starts soon after 7am and continues until after 10pm.
The heliport should be relocated.
Anthony J Rundell
Birth rate isn’t about religion
Peter King
Recent figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the birth rate has fallen to its lowest level for at least 80 years, decreasing by 3.2 per cent since 2017 and just under 10 per cent since 2012.
The population is increasing but religious beliefs and more births are not the cause.
Lee Wootton
Booker numbers don’t add up
I read with sympathetic interest publisher Sam Jordison’s mystification
I happen to have served on two book prize juries in which this occurred and in my experience, an unbreakable tie between an uneven number of judges can occur only if the chair feels too conflicted to give a casting vote or if the sudden unavoidable absence of one member leaves an equal number of judges.
In the case of Booker 2019, neither of these problems seems to have arisen. Rather, the chair, Peter Florence, appears to suggest that all five judges proved unanimously unwilling to prefer Margaret Atwood or Bernadine Evaristo. Apart from the statistical improbability of selecting such an indecisive quintet, all five judges would surely be failing their contractual agreement to pick a single winner. Jordison is right that the Booker and/or Florence need to explain how the mathematical impossibility occurred.
source:standard
