September 30, 2013.

Obama and Ryan Stay on Sidelines on Budget

But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stallkeepers were selling tired-looking vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the junk-shop where he had bought the blank book which was now his diary. And in a small stationer's shop not far away he had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.

Each is the architect of his party's budget priorities, yet both President Barack Obama and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan have largely removed themselves from talks in Washington's latest standoff for reasons that help explain why the country has moved to the brink of a government shutdown.

He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very old man, bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism. In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender. If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his diary came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him. He would say to him: "Tell me about your life when you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?"

The president and Mr. Ryan crafted the competing budget blueprints that Democrats and Republicans put before voters in 2012 elections. If only to replay the debates of that election, they would seem obvious choices to broker a way out of the impasse.

Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against talking to proles and frequenting their pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the patrols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it was not likely that they would believe him. He pushed open the door, and a hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in the face. As he entered the din of voices dropped to about half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young man with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round with glasses in their hands, were watching the scene.

For the moment, though, beyond public statements, Mr. Obama has played no inside role in the unfolding drama. And Mr. Ryan has been almost entirely silent. New players have emerged to fill the vacuum, notably Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and others in the GOP who want to undo the president's health-care law.

September 29, 2013.

U.S. Nears Shutdown as House Votes To Delay Health Law

"February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An' I tell you, no number----"

WASHINGTON----The U.S. government moved to within hours of its first shutdown since 1996, as House Republicans redoubled their drive early Sunday to delay the new health care law and Senate Democrats stood firm against changing the law as a condition of funding federal departments.

"Oh, pack it in!" said the third man.

The standoff left little prospect that Congress could reach agreement on terms for funding the government by midnight Monday, when the current fiscal year expires. A shutdown would leave essential services operating but prompt federal agencies to suspend many functions and furlough hundreds of thousands of workers.

They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly pay out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.

On a 231-192 vote, the House early Sunday passed a one-year delay of the health law, often called Obamacare, and attached it to a plan to fund the government through Dec. 15. The legislation now goes to the Senate. It also includes a provision repealing a tax on medical devices intended to help finance the health law, which the House approved on a 248-174 vote.

September 28, 2013.

Key Groups Have Love-Hate Relationship With Health Law

"Yes, it 'as, then!"

Health-insurance companies spent more than $80 million trying to defeat President Barack Obama's health-care plan. Having failed, they have spent the years since trying to kill a string of provisions they don't like.

"No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down reg'lar as the clock. An' I tell you, no number ending in seven----"

And yet, it is those same insurance companies that are working harder than just about anyone to try to make the law succeed.

"Yes, a seven 'as won! I could pretty near tell you the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February----second week in February."

It is one of the paradoxes of the sweeping health-care law: Fierce critics can also act as supporters who are key to whether the law will work. With Mr. Obama's struggles in selling the law, their efforts have become even more critical to its success.

September 27, 2013.

Hospitals Give Health Law Real-World Test

He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.

NEW YORK----Dale Johnson is Exhibit A for people who believe that the new federal health-care law has embedded in it the secret to better care for less money.

He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ("pubs," they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house front three men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of blows.

Suffering from congestive heart failure, coronary-artery disease and diabetes, the 58-year-old former teacher was hospitalized five times last year at Mount Sinai Medical Center here and visited its emergency room 12 times. Cost to Medicare: $43,849.

"Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!"

This year----with the help of a team of doctors, nurses and social workers----Mrs. Johnson shows up for appointments, takes her medications and is managing her chronic conditions. She has been hospitalized only once and ran up only $6,796 in Medicare costs through late August.

September 26, 2013.

The New Asylums: Jails Swell With Mentally Ill

Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards Winston, pointing excitedly to the sky.

CHICAGO----The sound of clanging steel doors and agitated voices in the Cook County Jail bullpen was deafening. Amid the din, Robert Miller, who would turn 19 the next day, wept quietly. Anger and sullenness were common here. Uncontrolled crying was a sign of a bigger problem.

"Steamer!" he yelled. "Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead! Lay down quick!"

Mr. Miller was being held on a drug-possession charge and was waiting for his day in court. But his anguish caught the attention of a woman on the other side of the bars. Elli Petacque Montgomery, the jail's chief clinical social worker, listened as Mr. Miller spoke and shuddered. The teenager, who disputes the drug charge, said he had tried in vain to get help for his disabling episodes. Twice, he said, he had attempted suicide.

"Steamer" was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearest window.

Ms. Montgomery scribbled notes on a clipboard. At the jail, she routinely sees people with conditions ranging from severe depression to schizophrenia.

September 25, 2013.

America's Toilet Turnaround

"'Yes," I says to 'er,  'that's all very well,' I says. 'But if you'd of been in my place you'd of done the same as what I done. It's easy to criticize,' I says, 'but you ain't got the same problems as what I got.'"

PERRYSVILLE, Ohio----In previous management jobs, Jim Morando watched Chinese imports engulf the U.S. market for vinyl tiles, wood flooring and window blinds.

"Ah," said the other, "that's jest it. That's jest where it is."

Now, as president of Mansfield Plumbing Products, a toilet manufacturer here, Mr. Morando says he has decided to "stand and fight."

The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them. "May I see your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?"----and so on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police heard about it.

After decades of losing out to foreign rivals, U.S. manufacturing of toilets is making a surprising, if modest, comeback----mostly under foreign ownership.

September 24, 2013.

Iranians Rebuff U.S. Offer to Meet at U.N.

VIII

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee----real coffee, not Victory Coffee----came floating out into the street. Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.

UNITED NATIONS----President Barack Obama told world leaders that an agreement with Iran to contain its nuclear program should be achievable, but Iran decided against an anticipated meeting of the U.S. and Iranian presidents at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.

He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.

The Iranian decision stalled what had been building as a potential diplomatic advance between Washington and Tehran after more than 30 years of conflict.

"If there is hope," he had written in the diary, "it lies in the proles." The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers----girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a doorway. Winston caught scraps of conversation as he approached.

A step forward is planned for Thursday, when Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif as part of a larger meeting between Tehran and global powers during the annual U.N. meeting.

September 23, 2013.

Kenya Mall Attack: Smoke Billows After Explosion

But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his side. He was writing the diary for O'Brien----to O'Brien; it was like an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which was addressed to a particular person and took its color from that fact.

NAIROBI, Kenya----A large explosion sounded Monday afternoon before a black plume of smoke billowed up into the Nairobi skyline from the upscale shopping mall that has been under a terrorist siege since Saturday.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth's center. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Gunfire preceded the blast and local television channels reported that a section of the mall was on fire.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Ole Lenku said the smoke came from a fire set by the attackers in order to try to foil security forces, and that almost all of the people trapped inside have been evacuated.

September 22, 2013.

Kenya Mall Attack: Death Toll Rises to 59

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

NAIROBI, Kenya----The terrorist siege of an upscale Kenyan shopping center by a group of gunmen, already responsible for 59 deaths, continued into a second day Sunday as soldiers and police tried to corner the attackers inside the mall while evacuating the wounded.

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; to-day, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.

Kenyan officials said that they were making progress in securing the building as the death toll rose. Occasional gunshots could be heard throughout the morning.

He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you----something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?

Saturday's attack started shortly after midday when about a dozen gunmen burst into Westgate mall in the capital, opening fire and throwing grenades in a terrorist attack claimed by Somalia's al-Shabaab militant group.

September 21, 2013.

A Nation Built for Immigrants

He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some accident----a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance----would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.

In a single generation, between 1980 and 2007, more than 10 million people migrated, legally or illegally, from Mexico to the U.S. Today there are more than 12 million Mexican-born people in the U.S. and millions of American children who are their offspring----amounting to almost 10% of the nation's population. That is exponentially larger than in 1970, when there were less than one million Mexican-born people in the country, or 1980, when there were two million. The Mexican migration, and the similarly large migration of others from the rest of Latin America, has in just one generation reshaped the nation. Hispanics have replaced blacks as the largest officially recognized minority group.

That was ten----eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party's hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?

Needless to say, this transformation hasn't gone unnoticed in our politics, especially in the border states most affected by the influx. Groups like the "minutemen," self-appointed guardians of the U.S. border, may no longer hold the spotlight, but the issue remains tense, as suggested by the iffy prospects on Capitol Hill of the latest attempt at "comprehensive immigration reform." Many Americans still worry that, with the profound shift in the country's ethnic composition over the past several decades, the U.S. is well on its way to flying apart.

But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then there had been other changes----two, three, he could not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:

None of this should come as a surprise to a student of American history. But for perspective, it is helpful to recollect that the conflicts produced by previous surges of migration resulted in much worse strains. More than that, in the process of dealing with these strains, Americans have developed a capacity and a habit of accommodating and uniting citizens with very serious and deep differences. Going back to the Founding Fathers----with their formula of limited government, civic equality and tolerance of religious and cultural diversity----each new surge of arrivals has been greeted as a crisis without precedent, only to disappear with unexpected speed as the nation faced new challenges.

September 20, 2013.

Despite Merkel's Popularity, Angst Creeps In

The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced to be Midsummer Day; but the whole story must be on record in countless other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.

BERLIN----Angela Merkel has become Europe's most popular leader by telling Germans they don't need to change, and by shielding them from much of Europe's debt-crisis pain at the same time.

Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known.

But as Ms. Merkel heads into a likely third term as Germany's chancellor, there are increasing calls from the business community, which she has counted among her most loyal supporters, and others for her to move more quickly to confront simmering domestic problems that they worry will eventually endanger German prosperity.

He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of view of the telescreen.

The time to fix the problems----energy costs, worn-out roads and gaps in education among them----is now, they say, while the economy is healthy.

September 19, 2013.

Rebel-on-Rebel Violence Seizes Syria

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

An al Qaeda spinoff operating near Aleppo, Syria's largest city, last week began a new battle campaign it dubbed "Expunging Filth."

The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing at what he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.

The target wasn't their avowed enemy, the Syrian government. Instead, it was their nominal ally, the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army.

A little later all three were rearrested. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes over again, with a whole string of new ones. They were executed, and their fate was recorded in the Party histories, a warning to posterity. About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of The Times of about ten years earlier----the top half of the page, so that it included the date----and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the caption at the bottom.

Across northern and eastern Syria, units of the jihadist group known as ISIS are seizing territory----on the battlefield and behind the front lines----from Western-backed rebels.

September 18, 2013.

Companies Unplug From the Electric Grid, Delivering a Jolt to Utilities

Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great figures left over from the heroic days of the Party. The glamour of the underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.

On a hill overlooking the Susquehanna River, two big wind turbines crank out electricity for Kroger Co.'s KR +2.19% Turkey Hill Dairy in rural Lancaster County, Pa., allowing it to save 25% on its power bill for the past two years.

There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even to be seen in the neighborhood of such people. They were sitting in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves which was the speciality of the cafe. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance had most impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in The Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were a rehashing of the ancient themes----slum tenements, starving children, street battles, capitalists in top hats----even on the barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to their top hats----an endless, hopeless effort to get back into the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one time he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one's eyes, like a mountain crumbling.

Across the country, at a big food-distribution center Kroger also owns in Compton, Calif., a tank system installed this year uses bacteria to convert 150 tons a day of damaged produce, bread and other organic waste into a biogas that is burned on site to produce 20% of the electricity the facility uses.

It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember how he had come to be in the cafe at such a time. The place was almost empty. A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out but no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too. There came into it----but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:

These two projects, plus the electric output of solar panels at four Kroger grocery stores, and some energy-conservation efforts are saving the Cincinnati-based grocery chain $160 million a year on electricity, said Denis George, its energy manager. That is a lot of money that isn't going into the pockets of utilities.

September 17, 2013.

Shooting Suspect Had Record of Gun Use, Misconduct

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed----after the event: that was what counted----concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have been----at any rate, it was at about the time when he and Katharine had parted. But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.

Aaron Alexis, the 34-year-old suspect killed in the U.S.Navy Yard shooting spree, had at least two earlier brushes with the law involving guns that led to the end of his four-year Navy career in 2011.

The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which they made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way. They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important. All three had written long, abject articles in The Times, analyzing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends.

Mr. Alexis was a New York native who lived in Fort Worth, Texas, and worked in a Navy fleet logistics support squadron based there before he was discharged from the military after a 2010 arrest for firing a gun at his apartment. The incident sent a bullet into a neighbor's property a few days after an alleged confrontation with the neighbor over noise.

Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great figures left over from the heroic days of the Party. The glamour of the underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.

No one was injured and no charges were filed, according to the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney's Office. According to the police report, Mr. Alexis said that "he was trying to clean his gun while cooking and that his hands were slippery."

September 16, 2013.

Summers Withdraws Name for Fed Chairmanship

But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe. There was also something called the jus primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.

WASHINGTON----Lawrence Summers pulled out of the contest to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve after weeks of public excoriation, forcing President Barack Obama to move further down the list of contenders to head the central bank.

How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and nonpolitical, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering----a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons----a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting----three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked wastepipe.

One leading candidate is Janet Yellen, the Fed's current vice chairwoman, who has garnered substantial support among Democrats in Congress and among economists. But the public lobbying on her behalf appears to have annoyed the president, say administration insiders, and may lead him to look elsewhere.

He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations----that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed, for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300----and so it went on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the jus primae noctis, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.

Mr. Obama has said he interviewed Donald Kohn, a former Fed vice chairman who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Administration insiders say Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury secretary, also is a possibility, though a person close to him reaffirmed Sunday night that he doesn't want the job. Dark-horse candidates include Stanley Fischer, an American citizen who recently stepped down as governor of the Bank of Israel, and Roger Ferguson, another former Fed vice chairman and now chief executive of TIAA-CREF, the nonprofit pension company.

September 15, 2013.

U.S., Russia Agree on Plan on Syrian Chemical Weapons

That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: "Proles and animals are free."

GENEVA----The U.S. and Russia agreed Saturday on a broad framework for destroying Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons by the first half of next year.

Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It had begun itching again. The thing you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had really been like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children's history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary:

Under the agreement between Moscow and Washington, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must provide a complete list of the types, quantity and locations of his country's chemical-weapons stockpiles to the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons by next Friday.

In the old days [it ran], before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as "Sir." The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and----

The plan will be codified in a U.N. Security Council resolution that won't rely on a threat of military action for enforcement, officials indicated. The U.S., France and Western allies had favored arming any U.N. resolution with a threat of force for noncompliance. But opposition from Moscow forced the Obama administration to drop the demand to pursue a diplomatic outcome and avoid U.S. military action.

September 14, 2013.

Wanted: Jobs for the New 'Lost' Generation

If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet----!

Like so many young Americans, Derek Wetherell is stuck.

He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's voices----had burst from a side-street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud "Oh-o-o-o-oh!" that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It's started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stallkeeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?

At 23 years old, he has a job, but not a career, and little prospect for advancement. He has tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, but no college degree. He says he is more likely to move back in with his parents than to buy a home, and he doesn't know what he will do if his car----a 2001 Chrysler Sebring with well over 100,000 miles----breaks down.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

"I'm kind of spinning my wheels," Mr. Wetherell says. "We can wishfully think that eventually it's going to get better, but we don't really know, and that doesn't really help us now."

September 13, 2013.

In Lehman's Shadow, Ex-CEO Fuld Carries On, Quietly

When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.

The phone call comes every month or so.

He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had written it down at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

"Hey, kid, how are you doing?" a familiar voice says. "Are you having fun? What are you working on? How can I help?"

VII

If there is hope [wrote Winston] it lies in the proles.

The calls, says a former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. employee, are from his former boss: Richard Fuld Jr.

September 12, 2013.

Wall Street's Top Cop: SEC Tries to Rebuild It's Reputation

After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright. For the first time he could see the woman properly. He had taken a step towards her and then halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for that matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment. If he went away without even doing what he had come here to do----!

The Securities and Exchange Commission is ending its push to punish financial-crisis misconduct in the same way it started----with a new chairman vowing that Wall Street's top cop will be tougher in the future.

It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed. What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all.

In 2009, at the depths of the recession, Mary Schapiro took the reins at the SEC promising to "move aggressively to reinvigorate enforcement" at the agency. She created teams to target various types of alleged misconduct, including one focused on the complicated mortgage bonds that helped set off a global financial panic.

He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:

The agency has filed civil charges against 138 firms and individuals for alleged misconduct just before or during the crisis, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. And it received $2.7 billion in fines, repayment of ill-gotten gains and other penalties. But some of the SEC's highest-profile probes of top Wall Street executives have stalled and are being dropped.

September 11, 2013.

New Yorkers Mark 12th Anniversary of Sept. 11

He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Katharine's white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the Party. Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them. His reason told him that there must be exceptions, but his heart did not believe it. They were all impregnable, as the Party intended that they should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.

Wednesday marks the 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, with events planned across the region to commemorate the tragedy.

But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He wrote:

The official city tribute will take place at the National September 11 Memorial plaza at the World Trade Center site. The names of the 2,983 victims lost in 2001 and the bombing of the site in 1993 will be read. Six pauses will mark when the planes hit the towers, when they fell and when the Pentagon and Flight 93 were attacked.

I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light----

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Govs. Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo are scheduled to attend the ceremony, along with family members of the victims and other dignitaries. A list of those reading the names will be released Wednesday.

September 10, 2013.

White House, Key Senators Weigh New Syria Options

As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. But even then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this. They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite regularly, whenever it was not impossible. She even used to remind him of it in the morning, as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had two names for it. One was 'making a baby', and the other was 'our duty to the Party' (yes, she had actually used that phrase). Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they parted.

WASHINGTON----A re-energized bout of international diplomacy Tuesday eclipsed President Barack Obama's push for Congress to authorize military strikes in Syria, delaying a vote on Capitol Hill as lawmakers and officials from France, Russia and other nations scrambled to develop proposals for resolving the standoff with Damascus.

Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and wrote:

In a day of fast-moving developments, Syria for the first time directly admitted that it possesses chemical weapons and said it would cease their production and disclose the locations of the stockpiles to the international community, including the United Nations and Russia, which is at the center of the negotiations.

She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt. I----

White House officials said Mr. Obama, ahead of his speech to the nation Tuesday night, had agreed to explore the possibility of a Syrian chemical-weapons handover. But a dispute emerged quickly among members of the U.N. Security Council over how such a measure could be enforced, with France seeking language that leaves military action on the table and Russia rejecting such a move.

September 9, 2013

Egypt Clamors for Military Leadership

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and----though the principle was never clearly stated----permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts were largely successful.

CAIRO----A movement to nominate Gen. Abdel Fattah Al Sisi as Egypt's next president is gaining pace, reflecting the strengthening public appetite to revive another military-backed authoritarian government.

He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten----nearly eleven years since they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever been married. They had only been together for about fifteen months. The Party did not permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there were no children.

The development signals Egyptians' yearning for stability and order amid the chaos, violence and economic distress that has enveloped Egypt since protesters forced the country's last military-backed autocrat, Hosni Mubarak, to step down in 2011, observers say.

Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early in her married life he had decided -- though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people----that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. 'The human sound-track' he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing----sex.

Supporters of Gen. Sisi, the defense minister and head of Egypt's armed forces, announced that starting next week they hope their "Complete Your Favor" campaign will gather 30 million signatures to demand that he run for president.

Septemeber 8, 2013.

Tokyo Chosen to Host 2020 Summer Olympics

I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She----

BUENOS AIRES----Choosing safety and security in a time of uncertainty, the International Olympic Committee voted to bring the 2020 Summer Games to Tokyo.

His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit. Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married----had been married, at any rate: probably he still was married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so. Only the proles used scent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.

Tokyo carried the day over rivals Istanbul and Madrid by convincing the committee it could best guarantee a successful Olympics. The vote will bring the Olympics back to Tokyo for the first time since 1964, when the Games helped Japan reintroduce itself to the world less than two decades after the end of World War II.

When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour camp: not more, if you had committed no other offence. And it was easy enough, provided that you could avoid being caught in the act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves. Some could even be purchased for a bottle of gin, which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between Party members. But----though this was one of the crimes that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed to----it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.

The decision means that the Far East will become the center of the Olympic movement toward the end of this decade. The 2018 Winter Games are scheduled for Pyeongchang, South Korea.

September 7, 2013.

(picture to be added soon)

Five Years Later, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Remain Unfinished Business

For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window----to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him.

WASHINGTON----Of all the temporary patches the U.S. government slapped onto the sinking financial system in September 2008----from pumping money into banks to rescuing insurer American International Group Inc. AIG -1.01%----none was more urgent to then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson than saving mortgage giants Fannie Mae FNMA +0.81% and Freddie Mac FMCC -0.88%.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back; a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case. They were a few metres apart when the left side of the man's face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.

"It was the single most important thing we did to prevent disaster----real disaster," said Mr. Paulson in a recent interview. But five years later, he adds, "it didn't occur to me that we'd be here with nothing done."

He drew his breath and went on writing:

Fannie and Freddie remain the largest single piece of unfinished business from the financial crisis. As record profits have replaced huge losses, some now question whether cosmetic changes could substitute for the more radical overhaul of the companies envisioned five years ago.

September 6, 2013.

Financial Crisis Anniversary: For Corporations and Investors, Debt Makes a Comeback

At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal to return to work. All three men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston's cigarette.

Looking back, J. Russell Porter said his company was "almost at death's door" when the U.S. economy hit bottom.

VI

Winston was writing in his diary:

With credit markets near frozen, he said, Gastar Exploration in 2009 couldn't find banks or investors willing to provide the $35 million the oil-and-gas producer needed to refinance its crushing debt.

It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I----

Mr. Porter, Gastar's chief executive, concentrated on survival. He sold off a major project and repaid most of the company's obligations. In financial terms, Gastar was deleveraging, or reducing its dependence on debt to minimize risk, part of a broader trend triggered by the financial crisis.

September 5, 2013.

IRS Rule Leads Restaurants to Rethink Automatic Tips

His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself----anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

An updated tax rule is causing restaurants to rethink the practice of adding automatic tips to the tabs of large parties.

The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.

Starting in January, the Internal Revenue Service will begin classifying those automatic gratuities as service charges—which it treats as regular wages, subject to payroll tax withholding----instead of tips, which restaurants leave up to the employees to report as income.

"Did I ever tell you, old boy," he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, "about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman's skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! That's a first-rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays----better than in my day, even. What d'you think's the latest thing they've served them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl brought one home the other night----tried it out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole. Of course it's only a toy, mind you. Still, gives 'em the right idea, eh?"

The change would mean more paperwork and added costs for the restaurants----and a potential financial hit for waiters and waitresses who live on their tips but don't always report them fully.

September 4, 2013.

Friction at Zurich Built Ahead of Suicide

The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministry's announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O'Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department -- she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.

Long-simmering friction between the chairman and chief financial officer of Zurich Insurance Group AG ZURN. VX -0.73% escalated this summer as the two tussled over how to explain the company's disappointing progress toward meeting certain business targets, according to company officials familiar with the situation.

At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair. She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away again. 

The sometimes-heated exchanges between Josef Ackermann, who became chairman in 2012, and CFO Pierre Wauthier didn't strike Zurich officials as problematic. Then, last week, Mr. Wauthier committed suicide at his lakeside home outside Zurich.

The sweat started out on Winston's backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make sure whether he was shouting loudly enough. 

He left a typed note blaming Mr. Ackermann for creating an unbearable, pressure-cooker working environment, and for treating colleagues disrespectfully, according to people familiar with the note, which hasn't been released. Mr. Ackermann, a hard-charging former investment banker who became Zurich's chairman after a long career as the chief executive of Deutsche Bank AG, abruptly resigned.

September 3, 2013.

U.S Still Hasn't Armed Syrian Rebels

"Not one," said Winston. "I've been using the same blade for six weeks myself."

In June, the White House authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to help arm moderate fighters battling the Assad regime, a signal to Syrian rebels that the cavalry was coming. Three months later, they are still waiting.

"Ah, well----just thought I'd ask you, old boy."

The delay, in part, reflects a broader U.S. approach rarely discussed publicly but that underpins its decision-making, according to former and current U.S. officials: The Obama administration doesn't want to tip the balance in favor of the opposition for fear the outcome may be even worse for U.S. interests than the current stalemate.

"Sorry," said Winston.

U.S. officials attribute the delay in providing small arms and munitions from the CIA weapons program to the difficulty of establishing secure delivery "pipelines" to prevent weapons from falling into the wrong hands, in particular Jihadi militants also battling the Assad regime.