From the South China Morning Post this week in 1964 The US House of Representatives passed the Civil Rights Bill by 289 votes to 126, ending a long and bitter congressional battle. President Lyndon Johnson planned to sign the bill into law in a televised ceremony at the White House. Negro groups planned immediate action to test the new laws. The Reverend Martin Luther King said he would take white friends to lunch at a restaurant in St Augustine, Florida, where he was arrested a month earlier while trying to integrate it. Following passage of the bill, most businessmen appeared to be willing to adhere to the new law, but some were prepared to close their establishments rather than admit Negroes. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser said war with Israel was inevitable because western countries were supporting Israel in its usurpation of Palestine. In a speech at the United Arab Republic Air Force Academy, he said: 'The western countries are supplying Israel with all types of arms, ignoring the rights of the Arab peoples of Palestine. The Arabs will never accept peace with the Israelis unless it is based on justice.' Henry Cabot Lodge, former US ambassador in Saigon, predicted that the communists would eventually give up their drive to take over South Vietnam if the Americans and the South Vietnamese did their very best in the area. He told the National Press Club in Washington that the communists were far from invincible - even in Southeast Asia. 'In the Philippines and Malaya they eventually gave up. It will not require miracles now to tip the balance against them if we and the Vietnamese do our very best.' Also in Washington, the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, said peace ought to be possible in Vietnam without any extension of the fighting. He said that the first objective of US policy was to exploit that possibility, adding that peace would not be obtained by going out and looking for a war, although there was always that risk in dangerous situations. Deng Xiaoping , Secretary-General of the Chinese Communist Party, and a vice-premier, called for '...a whole set of correct policies and measures by China to root out revisionism and prevent the restoration of capitalism'. He was making a keynote political report to more than 20,000 delegates attending the ninth congress of China's Young Communist League. It was the league's first congress since 1957 and the unheralded news that it had taken place took foreign observers in Peking completely by surprise. Observers believed the holding of the congress made it probable that the long overdue congress of the Chinese Communist Party itself would be held during the three months before the 15th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Lord Head, the British High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, said the proportion of regular Indonesian troops had increased on the Borneo border with Malaysia. He said it could be assumed that an invading 20-member guerrilla band would comprise 15 regular troops and five volunteers, acting as bearers. Four Hong Kong Chinese were sentenced to eight months each by a Tokyo district court for picking pockets. A 37-year-old woman, Chen Tsui, her husband and two female companions travelled to Japan as tourists. The sentences of the husband and the two female companions were suspended, as Chen was considered to be the leader. A 7,000-ton Hong Kong freighter ran aground in thick fog 1.5 miles off Kunisaki Peninsula, north of Japan's southernmost island of Kyushu. No casualties were reported among the crew, comprising three British officers and 37 Chinese men. The government was to start work on a large-scale road construction scheme to improve traffic flow in Central District, especially at the bottleneck at the junction of Queen's Road Central and Garden Road.
