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Thursday, October 26, 2006

October 26, 1960: World Trade Center Plans, Rev. King to Jail in Georgia, 'Major Violence' in Vietnam Predicted, NASA Moon Plans

"A $250,000,000 World Trade Center adjoining New York's downtown financial district appeared assured yesterday," the New York Times reported on this day in 1960. "The Port of New York Authority, which has been studying the feasibility of such a project since February, will recommend before the end of this year that it be constructed."

"Senator John F. Kennedy emphasized today his charge that the United States prestige had declined and that this was a threat to the nation's survival," W.H. Lawrence reports Elmhurst, Ill., for the Times.

"Vice President Nixon and his running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, tonight joined forces in a roof-raising rally designed to shift the Republican campaign into high gear," Harrison Salisbury reports from Cincinnati.

"The Rev. Martin Luther King was ordered today to serve four months in prison," the Times reports from Decatur, Georgia. "A judge here ruled that his participation in an Atlanta sit-in demonstration had violated the terms of a suspended sentence in a traffic case."

"The Bulova Watch Company yesterday introduced an electronic wrist watch that it said used new principles," The Times reports. "The new timepiece, called the Accutron, utilizes a miniature tuning fork and electronic components and circuitry to replace the movement of conventional watches used since the seventeenth century."

"The Philippine Government says it has warned of a possible outbreak of major violence in South Vietnam," the Times reports from Washington.

"United States officials have noted an increase in terrorism in Vietnam in recent weeks. However, officials here said they had no information to support the urgent warnings that have come from the Filipinos regarding the liklihood of a serious attack.

"Meanwhile, President Eisenhower sent assurances today of continued United States support to President Ngo Kinh Diem of South Vietnam. In his letter of good wishes on Vietnam's fifth anniversary, President Eisenhower said that the main responsibility for protecting the country's independence fell to the Vietnamese themselves. But he added: 'I want to assure you that for so long as our strength can be useful, the United States will continue to assist Vietnam in the difficult yet hopeful struggle ahead.'"

"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration took the first step today on a program to send a three-man space craft on a reconnaissance trip around the moon by 1970," the Times reported today. "The agency announced that three companies ... had been selected to make feasibility studies of the advanced space ship, known as Apollo. ... Plans call for the early flight tests of the Apollo in 1962. The first earth-orbithing manned space flights couuld take place in 1966, followed by more ambitious trips to the moon sometime in the 1968-70 period."

At the United Nations, "The United States accused Cuba today of 'incessant propaganda and reckless charges' to generate an 'atmosphere of false crisis'," the Times reports.