Dallas observed the 50th anniversary of former president John F. Kennedy’s assassination yesterday with its first official ceremony to mark the event seen as the darkest day in the city’s history.
Kennedy was to be remembered with prayers, a speech by Mayor Mike Rawlings and military jets flying over the city’s Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot.
The ceremony, which was to start at 11:30am, was set to coincide with the time of day Kennedy’s motorcade passed through packed downtown streets 50 years ago.
Only 5,000 people were to be able to view ceremonies at Dealey Plaza, but video screens were to be set up throughout downtown.
For previous anniversaries, conspiracy theorists who say there was a plot to kill Kennedy have usually taken over Dealey Plaza, denouncing the official line that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and fired three shots at Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.
They have come to Dallas in force this year, but were not to be part of the official event.
“His death forever changed our city, as well as the world,” Rawlings said in a statement ahead of the anniversary. “We want to mark this tragic day by remembering a great president with the sense of dignity and history he deserves.”
Dallas was seen as a pariah city for years after the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination and avoided any commemoration. That stigma started to fade decades ago and now, the Sixth Floor Museum in the former Texas School Book Depository is one of the city’s largest tourists attractions.
“Dallas came under a great deal of international criticism after the assassination. It was called the ‘City of Hate,’” the Sixth Floor Museum associate curator Stephen Fagin said.
Amid the Cold War paranoia and simmering racial tension of the 1960s, a small but influential group of arch conservatives protested Kennedy’s visit to Texas, saying he was soft on communism and should stay away.
In recent days, the city removed a large “X” embedded into the pavement by an unknown person or people that marked the spot on Elm Street where Kennedy was shot in the head.
The X had been seen as tasteless by many while the official observance — a small plaque on the plaza’s noted “grassy knoll” — had been criticized as inadequate.
After thousands of books, news articles, TV shows, movies and documentaries on that fateful day in Dallas, surveys show a majority of Americans still believe in the conspiracy theories, distrusting evidence pointing to Oswald as the sole killer.
Hugh Ayensworth, a reporter in Dealey Plaza 50 years ago who witnessed the assassination and also saw Oswald shot dead by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, has spent a lifetime investigating the killings and debunking suspected plots.
“We can’t accept very comfortably that two nobodies, two nothings — Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby — were able to change the course of world history,” he told reporters.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘PLAINLY ERRONEOUS’: The justice department appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s blocking of the release of a report into election interference by the incoming president US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against US president-elect Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned after submitting his investigative report on Trump, an expected move that came amid legal wrangling over how much of that document can be made public in the days ahead. The US Department of Justice disclosed Smith’s departure in a footnote of a court filing on Saturday, saying he had resigned one day earlier. The resignation, 10 days before Trump is inaugurated, follows the conclusion of two unsuccessful criminal prosecutions
RSS