China bans coverage of blast-off By Catherine Armitage, China correspondent15oct03 China can only hope its first manned spacecraft, expected to orbit Earth for 23 hours after a probable launch this morning, is better at spin than its Government. In the elite two-nation club of spacefaring nations, disaster comes with the territory. But fear that a mishap will turn its biggest propaganda event in years into a public-relations catastrophe seems to have prompted the Chinese Government to ban live coverage of the launch from the remote Gobi desert site. That, inevitably, has become the story, in the non-official media at...