Your reports and editorial suggest self-interest on the part of several City Council members who are seeking approval authority over appointees to the rent guidelines board because they live in rent-regulated apartments — and some of them — like wealthy New Yorkers — even have second homes or own property elsewhere, including properties they inherited [Editorial, “Quinn’s Rent,” August 11, 2008].

But the vast numbers, the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers living in rent-regulated apartments — you fail to point out — do not have second and third homes or gargantuan salaries; they cannot afford to stay in their homes if rent-regulation laws were lifted.

Indeed, your insinuations and editorials make the few exceptions to the rule — the exceptions being they who you contend can afford to move into market-rentals — the enemy of the good, and of the common good, which is protection that is owed to the long term and many aged New Yorkers who can hardly pay fuel surcharges and meet everyday expenses for groceries and the like, much less pay skyrocketing or what to them is exorbitant rent.

MICHAEL MEYERS

Executive Director

New York Civil Rights Coalition

New York, N.Y.

‘For Prisoner No. 38, a Jail Cell “That Meets Highest Standards”‘

In reference to the article, “For Karadzic, a Cell ‘That Meets Highest Standards,'” I am all in favor of human rights standards for prisoners, but I believe that prisoners like Radovan Karadzic, who have been charged with genocide, should not have the freedom to wander the halls and take art and language classes [Foreign, July 31, 2008].

That is above basic treatment.

Mr. Karadzic and his men shot down defenseless women, children, and old people, burying them in mass graves, sometimes after torture, rape, and mutilation.

He is being given a trial in a court of law, a dignity which he did not afford his many victims.

LUCY DEGIDON

Bronx, N.Y.