DROPPING FARM PRICES will put parity below 80% for first time in 19 years. Lower prices are coming for cotton, grain, citrus, eggs, milk.

WANDERING AMERICANS will lay out $28 billion for travel this year, up 12% from record 1958. They will spend $2.5 billion in foreign travel in 1959, close to $5 billion by 1964, predicts American Society of Travel Agents.

ATOM BLASTS FOR OIL are being seriously considered by U.S. Bureau of Mines figures nuclear blasts could free more than 1 trillion bbl. of oil locked in rocky shale formations. Opening shot is expected in Colorado.

SOVIET STEEL DEAL will send 20,000 tons of cold-rolled sheets (used to make auto bodies) from Republic Steel Corp. to U.S.S.R. for about $3.4 million, biggest such sale to Reds in recent years.

SEA-LABOR TRUCE has been signed by long-warring National Maritime Union and Seafarers' International Union, whose jurisdictional fights often halted U.S. ships. The two unions have allied to battle "flag of convenience" ships (TIME, Dec. 15, 1958).

FIRST INDUSTRIAL PARK sponsored by City of New York is planned for 100 largely vacant acres in Brooklyn's Flatlands. City intends to condemn the land (assessed value: $2,725,000), sell it to industrial developers, figures it can attract $20 million worth of industrial building and 3,000 jobs.

VERTICAL-TAKE-OFF planes, which rise and land with rotors but cruise with propellers, are expected to go into service in Europe by 1962. British European Airways intends to buy six VTOLs from Britain's Fairey Aviation Co., fly them to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam.

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