- Is everyone buying into George W Bush's intrepid vision
of a manned mission to Mars? Some of the world's newspapers this week were
clearly behaving like spoilsports.
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- "The US is preparing for the invasion of Mars and
other planets," wrote the Palestinian daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah.
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- "What are the other planets chosen for the US invasion?
Are they an axis of planetary evil? And what is the relationship between
the regime on Pluto and fundamentalist groups?"
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- Australians fond of sarcasm read how Mr Bush was certainly
onto a winner.
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- "The US President may figure that a pre-emptive
strike against the Martians should occur while we have the size advantage,"
wrote columnist Tim Ferguson in Melbourne's The Age.
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- "Maybe he figures the Mission To Mars money is well
spent; he was never much good at book-learnin' and we've seen his disregard
for hospitals during the recent Iraq war," he said.
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- "George's reasons don't matter. Americans should
go to Mars and Australians should go with them. Single-minded persistence
in the face of futility is what humanity does best."
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- Space battles
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- In France, Le Monde cast a weary transatlantic eye over
past joint projects such as the International Space Station and concluded
Mr Bush's plan marked "a break with the period of international cooperation
which has prevailed for the past 30 years".
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- "The ascendancy of Airbus over Boeing illustrates
the kind of battles that are being fought in the corridors of space exploration,"
it said.
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- And France's Liberation daily wrote when Mr Bush points
at the moon, he is "clearly thinking above all about the astronaut
China intends to send there". It admitted however that the plan was
an electoral masterstroke.
-
- But few of the world's papers were as cynical this week
as Switzerland's Le Temps , which accused Mr Bush of "using space
as a diversion at a time when his Iraq policy is not exactly a shining
success".
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- Or Austria's Der Standard : "A national mission
to a far-away place where glory awaits and no rebel movement lurks will
help Americans forget about the continuing problems in Iraq and portray
the president as a peaceful visionary."
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- BBC Monitoring , based in Caversham in southern England,
selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news
agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.
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- © BBC MMIV
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- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3403581.stm
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