1. BRITAIN

1. BRITAIN

The Times, London, April 14: Forty years ago Gene Kranz, as flight director for the Apollo 13 mission to the Moon, was faced with the potential loss of three astronauts losing oxygen 200,000 miles from Earth. He ordered the mission’s back-up crew to report to Mission Control in Houston and plug the leak in a dummy command module using only the tools, duct tape and ingenuity available to the men that he had to save. Failure, he said, was not an option.

That was NASA’s guiding ethos throughout the 1960s, as it answered President John F. Kennedy’s call to put men on the Moon and bring them safely back to Earth. It was the mantra that guided Fred Haise, Jim Lovell and John Swigert back to a miraculous splashdown in the Pacific once they had used the duct tape to build a rudimentary carbon dioxide scrubber. It has been replaced, Kranz believes, by a recipe for mediocrity.

2. CHINA

China Daily, Beijing, April 14: The Nuclear Security Summit that ended in Washington has helped revive international hope for global nuclear security and added new impetus to efforts toward a world free from the threat of nuclear weapons.

In his speech delivered at the summit, Chinese President Hu Jintao also comprehensively elaborated China’s nuclear policy as well as its stance on strengthening nuclear security and protecting the peaceful use of nuclear energy.