September 2, 2013.

White House Girds for Battle With Congress

September 2, 2013.

He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal-tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree----existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.

WASHINGTON----The White House is girding for more than a week of battle with Congress over President Barack Obama's plan to launch limited military strikes against the Syrian regime for its alleged use of chemical weapons last month.

The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.

To back the administration's position, Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that the U.S. had obtained new blood and hair samples from inside Syria that confirmed President Bashar al-Assad's regime used sarin, a powerful nerve agent, against civilians in an Aug. 21 attack on an eastern Damascus suburb.

"The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this year," he said with a knowing shake of his head. "By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor blades you can let me have?"

Mr. Kerry said he believed this new evidence will help the White House build more support on Capitol Hill and among allies in Europe and the Middle East to take military action aimed at degrading Mr. Assad's ability to conduct chemical warfare.