The pope’s call for the global abolition of the death penalty during his address to the US Congress is to be welcomed (Report, 25 September). There has always been an intellectual inconsistency with some pro-life politicians in America who show zeal in legislating to provide additional protections for life in the womb, but are restrained when it comes to their advocacy for protecting life on death row. Pope Francis has shone a helpful light on this political contradiction.
Mark Pritchard MP
Co-chairman, all party parliamentary group for the abolition of the death penalty
• Mercifully history does not record what my father said when he emerged from the air-raid shelter to find his house in ruins, and the marrows with the children’s names on exploded. Suffice it to say his sentiments to Goering had no tinge of demoralisation or tendency to capitulation. Before they commit to a bombing campaign (Letters, 26 September), people who have never been bombed in their own homes need to know there is no better recruiting sergeant for the opposition.
Mary Jackson
Gilston, Hertfordshire
• I read that Gucci designer Alessandro Michele has “grandness of … vision” (The new Gucci, 24 September). Apparently he says the clothes are “psycho-geographic maps capable of recording the urban unconscious” and an “atlas of emotions”. That’s all very well, but if you look at the faces of the models, “totally bored” is the emotion that springs to mind.
Dr Maureen Tilford
Norwich
• In the graphics alongside your article on the millennium development goals (The UN at 70, 25 September), the same symbol was used to show the number of “people” and the number of “boys”, yet the symbol for “girls” was different. Will the default setting for “people” still be male when the UN reaches 140?
Tanvisha Longden
London
