December 31, 2013.

Jurist Prudence? Candid Judges Speak Out

"You can turn round now," said Julia.

Judges typically confine their opinions to their rulings. But 2013 was a year of exceptions.

He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her. What he had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted her face.

In Nebraska, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Kopf in February launched Hercules and the umpire, a blog that offers a mix of insights on the judicial process, legal news, personal reflections and wisdom. One nugget of advice to young judges: "It's not your job to save the world. Do law, leave justice to Clint Eastwood."

She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought herself a complete set of make-up materials. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done, but Winston's standards in such matters were not high. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of colour in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all, far more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added to the effect. As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half darkness of a basement kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth. It was the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter.

In his latest book, "Reflections on Judging," Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago pleads "guilty" to upholding a voter-identification law "now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression." The passage, picked up by several media outlets, was widely viewed as a mea culpa----a rare instance of a judge saying he got it wrong.

December 30, 2013.

More Rational Resolutions

Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and the line. She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:

Can "goal factoring" help you keep your New Year's resolution to hit the gym every day in 2014?

They sye that time 'eals all things,

They sye you can always forget;

But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years 

They twist my 'eart-strings yet! 

"Goal factoring," a method of designing better plans, is one of the techniques taught by the Center for Applied Rationality, which hosts three-day workshops that teach attendees how to use science-based approaches to achieve goals. A November workshop in Ossining, N.Y., instructed 23 participants on how thinking about one's future self as a different person can help goal-setting and why building up an "emotional library" of associations can reduce procrastination.

She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about. 

CFAR, a Berkeley, Calif.-based nonprofit, is prominent in the growing "rationality movement," which explores the science of optimized decision-making. In recent years, books about decision-making and probability theory----including "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, who writes a regular column for The Wall Street Journal, and "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman----have been best-sellers. Websites like Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong serve as communities for those who believe the best way to be effective, whether in changing eating habits or changing the world, is to actively look at the lessons of science and hard data. The movement draws on some of the same research as economists who argue that investors behave irrationally.

December 29, 2013.

Loan Sharks Smell Blood in China Waters

Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a corner of the packet.

 Sitting in an empty Papa John's PZZA -1.07%  pizza restaurant, real-estate developer Yang Boqun said he would somehow catch up on loan payments for 150 million yuan ($24.7 million) he borrowed to finish a five-story shopping mall in the eastern Chinese city of Jinhua.

"It's real tea. Not blackberry leaves."


But the mall's only tenants are a Bentley car dealership, movie theater and the restaurant----and the loan's interest rate is a steep 40%. The reason: When construction costs on the two billion-yuan project soared surprisingly high, traditional banks couldn't lend more to Mr. Yang.

"There's been a lot of tea about lately. They've captured India, or something," she said vaguely. "But listen, dear. I want you to turn your back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of the bed. Don't go too near the window. And don't turn round till I tell you."

So he turned to Credit China Holdings Ltd. 8207.HK +1.54%  , one of the thousands of so-called shadow lenders in China. Mr. Yang got the money----and now Credit China wants it back.

December 28, 2013.

Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues

(this story had an illustration of Camille Paglia)

"It's Inner Party coffee. There's a whole kilo here," she said.

'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.

"How did you manage to get hold of all these things?"

When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled "Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, " and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts."

"It's all Inner Party stuff. There's nothing those swine don't have, nothing. But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things, and----look, I got a little packet of tea as well."

The fact that the acclaimed book----the first of six; her latest, "Glittering Images," is a survey of Western art----was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia's sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.

December 27, 2013.

(The headline photo was an illustration of a man talking to a crowd.)

The Best Financial Advice I Ever Got (or Gave)

"Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here's a loaf of bread proper white bread, not our bloody stuff----and a little pot of jam. And here's a tin of milk----but look! This is the one I'm really proud of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round it, because----"

The holidays are a time for relaxing, helping the less fortunate, showering family and friends with love and attention—and, sometimes, for smiling and nodding through unsolicited stock tips from an overbearing relative who has been sampling the eggnog.

But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.

But good advice can make careers and forever change lives for the better. So The Wall Street Journal asked an array of prominent people who manage, invest, study and write about money to share the single best piece of financial advice they ever received----or gave.

"It's coffee," he murmured, "real coffee."

The respondents included investors who collectively have earned billions of dollars for clients and themselves; founders and owners of businesses that are household names; and Nobel laureates who shaped the world's understanding of the forces that drive the stock market.

December 26, 2013.

Childhood Cancer's New Conundrum

"Half a second," she said. "Just let me show you what I've brought. Did you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I thought you would. You can chuck it away again, because we shan't be needing it. Look here."

Adults who survived childhood cancer are facing a new health challenge: premature aging.

As more survivors reach their 30s and 40s, researchers are noticing health problems more common to much older people, such as frailty and serious memory impairment.

She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneath were a number of neat paper packets. The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy, sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.

"It isn't sugar?" he said.

"Their overall physical being resembles that of people 30 years older than they are,'' said Kirsten Ness, associate member of the Department of Epidemiology and Cancer Control at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. She is one of the authors of a number of studies looking at premature aging in childhood cancer survivors.

December 25, 2013.

The Last Christmas Present: Lots of Trash

"Oh, the usual reason. It's started early this time."

Christmas isn't so pretty on the back end.

For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will. But after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to. When she said that she could not come, he had the feeling that she was cheating him. But just at this moment the crowd pressed them together and their hands accidentally met. She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection. It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple of ten years' standing. He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met. It was not actually at that moment, but at some time on the following day, that the idea of renting Mr. Charrington's room had occurred to him. When he suggested it to Julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

The annual frenzy of gift giving brings smiles to kids and billions of dollars to retailers that rely on the year-end holidays to drive a fifth or more of their annual sales. But the holidays also produce an ever growing pile of trash, one that is getting bigger as Americans shift more of their shopping to the Web.

At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia burst into the room. She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the Ministry. He started forward to take her in his arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because she was still holding the tool bag.

David Menke, a sanitation worker in Ohio, sees it firsthand driving a garbage truck and collecting trash on the outskirts of Cincinnati. "You can tell people are buying more things online, as there are already a lot of Amazon and FedEx boxes," said the 34 year old.

December 24, 2013.

Financial Scammers Increasingly Target Elderly Americans

"What?"

Minnesota State Rep. Joe Atkins spoke at a senior-citizen community last year and asked how many had recently been targeted by scammers.

"Tomorrow afternoon. I can't come."

"Every single hand in the room went up, 75 for 75," Rep. Atkins says. "Every single resident had gotten that same call."

"Why not?"

Four told him they had sent money and were ashamed.

December 23, 2013.

Pentagon Probes Firm for Violation of Iran Rules

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

WASHINGTON----The Pentagon's criminal investigations arm is probing one of the American military's largest suppliers in Afghanistan over allegations that it violated U.S. law by moving supplies through Iran, the Defense Department told lawmakers.


Folly, folly, folly! he thought again. It was inconceivable that they could frequent this place for more than a few weeks without being caught. But the temptation of having a hiding-place that was truly their own, indoors and near at hand, had been too much for both of them. For some time after their visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to arrange meetings. Working hours had been drastically increased in anticipation of Hate Week. It was more than a month distant, but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work on to everybody. Finally both of them managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day. They had agreed to go back to the clearing in the wood. On the evening beforehand they met briefly in the street. As usual, Winston hardly looked at Julia as they drifted towards one another in the crowd, but from the short glance he gave her it seemed to him that she was paler than usual.

 Anham FZCO, a company based in Dubai and Virginia, won a contract in 2012 worth an estimated $8.1 billion to supply food and water to American forces inside Afghanistan, one of the largest of the 12-year war in the Central Asian country.

"It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged it safe to speak. 'Tomorrow, I mean."

An article in The Wall Street Journal in September, which prompted the investigation, disclosed that Anham relied on the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and on Iranian supply routes to move steel, tractors and refrigeration panels into Afghanistan to build warehouses and other logistical centers.

December 22, 2013.

Snowden Critcizes U.S. Panel Overseeing Surveillance

Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly. Of all the crimes that a Party member could commit, this one was the least possible to conceal. Actually the idea had first floated into his head in the form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table. As he had foreseen, Mr Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room. He was obviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him. Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively knowing when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose of a love affair. Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he had become partly invisible. Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally. And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the house, one of them through the back yard, which gave on an alley.

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden criticized the presidential panel reviewing U.S. surveillance programs, saying it was a hand-picked group by the government that only suggested cosmetic changes, according to a Sunday Brazilian TV report.

Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:

“Their job wasn’t to protect privacy or deter abuses, it was to ‘restore public confidence’ in these spying activities. Many of the recommendations they made are cosmetic changes,” Mr. Snowden said in an email exchange with the Globo TV channel.

It was only an 'opeless fancy.

It passed like an Ipril dye,

But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!

They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!

According to Globo, Mr. Snowden corresponded with one of its reporters through his New York lawyer to protect his location. The emailed comments were broadcast on Globo’s “Fantastico” program on Sunday evening.

December 23, 2013

Icestorm Toronto: This Is Room 101 will be updated with the missing from 1984 and The Wall Street Journal entries as soon as my home gets power again.

Cheers

J.

December 21, 2013.

For the Mentally Ill, Finding Treatment Grows Harder

And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.

LEONARDTOWN, Md.----To the outside world, it came across as mood swings and anger. But Regina Cullison would later be told by psychiatrists she struggled with depression and anxiety—and that she needed help. And that is where her trouble began and ended.

IV

Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr. Charrington's shop. Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of the half-darkness.

According to her mother, there were few psychiatrists in the county who took private insurance. When Ms. Cullison lost her job as a dentist's assistant, and with it her insurance, she switched to a nonprofit facility. Doctors came and went, and none stayed long enough to establish a regular pattern of treatment.

In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups, provided by Mr. Charrington. Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water to boil. He had brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets. The clock's hands said seventeen-twenty; it was nineteen-twenty really. She was coming at nineteen-thirty.

After two years, Ms. Cullison abandoned her search for professional help and tried marijuana. Her mother, Carolyn Cullison, who is the director of a mental-health peer support group, said that helped push away the demons. But in May, while living together, the pair argued. Ms. Cullison apologized, retreated to a bedroom and shot herself. She was 26.

December 20, 2013.

Space Station Showing Its Age

She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him. He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour into his.

U.S. astronauts are poised to begin a series of spacewalks as soon as Saturday to replace a coolant system aboard the international space station, a harbinger of the increasing maintenance the aging laboratory is likely to need in coming years as it orbits Earth at more than 17,000 miles an hour.

"Yes, I like that," he said.

The space station, launched in 1998, is run by a partnership of 15 nations to support scientific research. It was designed to remain structurally sound for as many as 60 years, but in the past 10 years it has experienced a number of problems, from air leaks to computer glitches.

"Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we've got to fix up about the next time we meet. We may as well go back to the place in the wood. We've given it a good long rest. But you must get there by a different way this time. I've got it all planned out. You take the train----but look, I'll draw it out for you."

The latest trouble, with the coolant system, doesn't pose an immediate hazard to crew members or experiments. The refrigerator-size unit is one of two that use ammonia to control the temperature of vital electrical components.

December 19, 2013.

Putin Says He Will Pardon Jailed Tycoon Khodorkovsky

"We're not dead yet," said Julia prosaically.

MOSCOW----Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that jailed Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky had asked for clemency and would receive a pardon soon.

"Not physically. Six months, a year----five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing."

"Mikhail Khodorkovsky....recently wrote to me and asked me for a pardon. He has already been deprived of his liberty for more than 10 years. It is a severe punishment," Mr. Putin said. "He asked for a pardon for humanitarian reasons, his mother is sick, and I believe that we can make a decision and will soon sign a decree to pardon him."

"Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?"

A spokesperson for Mr. Khodorkovsky's press center said, "We ourselves don't know anything about this. We are trying to find out what is going on."

December 18, 2013.

Meltdown Averted, Bernanke Struggled to Stoke Growth

"Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all."

After a financial crisis he didn't see coming, Ben Bernanke steered the U.S. away from a potentially devastating panic. Yet five years later, the recovery he helped engineer with extraordinary policies remains frustratingly weak.

He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.

As Mr. Bernanke prepares for his final days as Federal Reserve chairman, that legacy—a mix of failings, boldness, persistence and frustration----is coming into sharper focus, and with it a clearer picture of the power and limitations of modern central banking.

"We are the dead," he said.

Fed officials meeting in Washington on Wednesday face another consequential decision: a close call on whether to start winding down their $85 billion-a-month bond-buying program.

December 17, 2013.

Obama Tries to Ease Silicon Valley's Concern's Over Spying

They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

WASHINGTON----President Barack Obama, under fire from Silicon Valley over the government's surveillance programs, met with technology executives Tuesday to try to ease their concerns about the National Security Agency's spying operations.

"Actually it would have made no difference," he said.

The meeting came one day after a federal judge challenged the constitutionality of the government's telephone-records surveillance programs and a week after a group of technology companies complained in a letter to Mr. Obama and Congress that the government snooping violated basic civil liberties.

"Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?"

The White House, in a statement after the meeting, said the president told the executives that he believes in a free and open Internet and made clear that he "will consider their input as well as the input of other outside stakeholders as we finalize our review of signals intelligence programs."

December 16, 2013.

Dehli Policewoman Finds Tradition Mightier Than The Badge

"Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I'd been the same person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would----I'm not certain."

NEW DELHI----Policewoman Preeti Dhaka had been married nearly a month when she returned to a city pulsing with crowds of angry women last December protesting the brutal gang rape of a student on a bus.

"Are you sorry you didn't?"

Ms. Dhaka's regular beat was to protect women from crimes, and her heart was with the demonstrators her bosses sent her to restrain. "So many people are out here for her," Ms. Dhaka told her sister, referring to the rape victim. "She should get justice."

"Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't."

But Ms. Dhaka's training as one of the capital's nearly 1,000 female investigators couldn't insulate her from Indian traditions that often conspire against laws meant to enforce women's rights. After a day of protest duty on New Year's Eve, she wrote a despairing note: Her new husband, unhappy that her dowry hadn't included a car, "tried to motivate me to die."

December 15, 2013.

Nelson Mandela Reaches His Final Resting Place

"Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down near the bottom. Do you see they're two different colours?"

QUNU, South Africa----Family, friends and African leaders remembered the life of Nelson Mandela at a funeral held on Sunday in his childhood hometown, the final stop in a nation-changing journey through prison to the presidency.

She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was pointing. He was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake. In a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very small, and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face. And the thought struck him....

"He went to school with bare feet and yet rose to the highest office in the land," said granddaughter Nandi Mandela, who stood before 95 candles, each one symbolizing a year in Mr. Mandela's life. "It is in each of us to achieve what we want in life."

"Why didn't you give her a good shove?" said Julia. "I would have."

"His life," she added, "is a story of resilience."

December 14, 2013.

China Lands Its First Unmanned Probe on the Moon

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

SHANGHAI----China on Saturday successfully landed its first unmanned lunar probe on the moon, in the latest milestone for the budding superpower's space ambitions.

Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.

The official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday that the Chang'e-3 lunar probe landed on the surface of the moon shortly after 9 p.m. Beijing time. The probe includes the lander and a lunar rover called Yutu, or "Jade Rabbit" in English.

It was three or four months after they were married. They had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry. It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom. There was nobody of whom they could ask the way. As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrongdoing. She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them. One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick red, apparently growing on the same root. He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and look at it.

State broadcaster CCTV provided minute-by-minute analysis of the space craft's descent. A live link to the country's space center showed staff anxiously watching monitors and shouting out commands. They clapped after it landed.

December 13, 2013.

Monte dei Paschi Impasse Puts Rescue at Risk

"I've been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell; people are such hypocrites."

MILAN----A clash between the management of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena BMPS.MI -3.28%  SpA and the bank's largest shareholder threatens to throw into chaos a plan to raise cash needed to stave off its full nationalization.

She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:

The Monte dei Paschi foundation, a charitable group that is the Siena-based bank's biggest shareholder with a 34% stake, is in financial straits due to the lender's troubles, as well as the foundation's attempts to keep control of Italy's third-largest financial institution.

"When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simpIy sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"

Now, it says it will vote against a much-needed €3 billion ($4.1 billion) capital increase unless the deal is delayed, a move that would upend a plan to rescue the bank. The collision raises the risk that the bank's new management, charged with overhauling Monte dei Paschi, could resign, say people familiar with the matter.

December 12, 2013.

J.P. Morgan to Pay Over $1 Billion to Settle U.S. Criminal Probe Related to Madoff

He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiousIy enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him. With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things; Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became merely a distasteful one.

J.P. Morgan Chase JPM +0.30%  is expected to pay more than $1 billion in penalties to the Justice Department to end a criminal probe into whether it provided adequate warnings about Bernard L. Madoff.

"I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing," he said. He toId her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week. "She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it. She used to call it----but you'll never guess."

The deal, which would also include a deferred-prosecution agreement with U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, could be wrapped up by the end of year, said others close to the case. Prosecutors have been looking for whether the bank failed to alert regulators despite numerous red flags. A central component of the case is why the bank didn't provide a formal report raising concerns about Mr. Madoff in the U.S. despite filing such a document with authorities in the U.K.

"Our duty to the Party," said Julia promptly.

Mr. Madoff had a two-decade-long relationship with J.P. Morgan before his arrest in December 2008.

December 11, 2013.

Ukraine Police Back Off After Failing to Stop Protest

"What was she like, your wife?" said Julia.

KIEV, Ukraine----Security forces pulled back Wednesday from the Ukrainian capital's main square and government buildings after a failed effort overnight to end the weekslong protest that has left the country in its worst political crisis in nearly a decade.

"She was----do you know the Newspeak word goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?"

Riot police wearing black helmets and carrying shields had pushed through makeshift barricades early Wednesday and were met by hundreds of protesters, some wearing orange hard hats, who had hastily gathered to defend the encampment.

"No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough."

While scuffles broke out between police and some demonstrators and opposition lawmakers, the security forces kept their clubs at their sides and didn't resort to the violence seen during a crackdown on Nov. 30 that had served to strengthen the protests' momentum.

December 10, 2013.

Mourners Gather to Say Farewell to Mandela

"They don't even like having married women there," she added. "Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who isn't, anyway."

JOHANNESBURG----U.S. President Barack Obama and dozens of other heads of state, as well as thousands of rain-soaked South Africans, gathered in a soccer stadium Tuesday to commemorate the life of former President Nelson Mandela.

She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. "And a good job too," said Julia, "otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed." Since then there had been various others. Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; "they, " meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to think it just as natural that "they" should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

Describing Mr. Mandela as "a giant of history," and "the last great liberator of the 20th century," Mr. Obama called on other world leaders to do more than give tacit support for his ideals.

They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been got rid of. It was hopeless even as a daydream.

"There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba's struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people," said Mr. Obama, referring to Mr. Mandela by his clan name. "Nelson Mandela reminds us that it always seems impossible until it is done."

December 9, 2013.

North Korea Purge Raises Stability Questions

"What are these books like?" said Winston curiously.

SEOUL----North Korea's highest-profile leadership purge since Kim Jong Un took power two years ago is being widely seen as a power-consolidation move but could trigger instability if it upsets the balance between the two major power centers: the military and the ruling party.

"Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I'm not literary, dear----not even enough for that."

On Monday, North Korean state television showed Mr. Kim's uncle, Jang Song Thaek, being dragged out of a meeting by security officials, reinforcing the unusually public downfall of the de facto No. 2 in the regime.

He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.

Mr. Jang and his associates were accused of a litany of "anti-state" crimes, ranging from corruption to womanizing and drug-taking, by a meeting of officials from the central committee of North Korea's Workers' Party on Sunday. The report was carried on the front page of North Korea's main newspaper, with a large photo of Mr. Kim chairing the meeting.

December 8, 2013.

South Africa Begins Farewell to Nelson Mandela

When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the narrow slits and make sure that no one was coming.

QUNU, South Africa----The country Sunday began to bid a collective goodbye to its first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, whose death last week sparked a logistical scramble to mark his passing in places that ranged from a massive soccer stadium to a rural town with no airport.

Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls ("Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!" she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was "not clever," but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

President Jacob Zuma had designated a day of prayer and reflection on the life of Mr. Mandela. The 95-year-old statesman, who died Thursday evening at his Johannesburg home, was seen as the great hope for a racially divided country. On Sunday, South African officials fanned out to different churches, in what amounted to a fresh campaign to use Mr. Mandela's spirit to bring people together.

She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the subsection of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls' School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.

"We should not forget the values that Madiba stood for and sacrificed his life for," President Zuma told those gathered at a church in Johannesburg, using the clan name of Mr. Mandela. "He actively participated to remove the oppressor to liberate the people of this country. When our struggle came to an end, he preached and practiced reconciliation to make those who had been fighting to forgive one another and become one nation."

December 7, 2013.

10 Things Emergency Rooms Won't Tell You

She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment later pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood with very little noise. Even now he had not found out her surname or her address. However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.

1. “Patience will get you nowhere.”

Nobody likes a visit to the emergency room. Babies are crying. People are wheezing or moaning in pain. And there’s little relief in watching the worst cases being rushed to an operating room. Nonetheless, more people step into ERs every year, with visits hitting 130 million in 2010, up 34% from 97 million in 1995, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Meanwhile, the number of emergency departments is down about 11% over that same time period.

As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in the wood. During the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually succeeded in making love. That was in another hiding place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good hiding place when once you got there, but the getting there was very dangerous. For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this kind of conversation, which she called "talking by instalments." She was also surprisingly adept at speaking without moving her lips. Just once in almost a month of nightly meetings they managed to exchange a kiss. They were passing in silence down a sidestreet (Julia would never speak when they were away from the main streets) when there was a deafening roar, the earth heaved, and the air darkened, and Winston found himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified. A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at hand. Suddenly he became aware of Julia's face a few centimetres from his own, deathly white, as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster.

As a result, people are waiting longer to see a doctor: A 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office found that patients whose condition indicated they should have been seen in 1 to 14 minutes, according to Emergency Nurses Association guidelines, waited 37 minutes on average to see a physician. Even worse, those who were supposed to be seen in less than 1 minute were left waiting for about 28 minutes. Crowding can be worse during the holidays, when some hospitals see an uptick in visits from patients suffering from heart disease or from excess alcohol consumption.

There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round the corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead. Even if it had been less dangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time to meet. Winston's working week was sixty hours, Julia's was even longer, and their free days varied according to the pressure of work and did not often coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening completely free. She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for the savings campaign, and such-like activities. It paid, she said, it was camouflage. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She even induced Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for the part-time munition work which was done voluntarily by zealous Party members. So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralyzing boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill lit workshop where the knocking of hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.

Hospitals are addressing the crowding by assigning more responsibilities to physician assistants and nurse practitioners and treating some patients without assigning them to a bed. Some hospitals are treating patients more quickly by using a team approach where patients are attended to by a doctor, nurse and registration worker at once who can immediately order needed tests and procedures as well as quickly treat patients with simple cases, says Alex Rosenau, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, or ACEP, a trade group for emergency physicians.

December 6, 2013

Nelson Mandela Dies at 95

As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She became alert and businesslike, put her clothes on, knotted the scarlet sash about her waist, and began arranging the details of the journey home. It seemed natural to leave this to her. She obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round London, stored away from innumerable community hikes. The route she gave him was quite different from the one by which he had come, and brought him out at a different railway station. "Never go home the same way as you went out," she said, as though enunciating an important general principle. She would leave first, and Winston was to wait half an hour before following her.

Nelson Mandela, who rose from militant antiapartheid activist to become the unifying president of a democratic South Africa and a global symbol of racial reconciliation, died at his Johannesburg home following a lengthy stay at a Pretoria hospital, the government said Thursday. He was 95.

She had named a place where they could meet after work, four evenings hence. It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where there was an open market which was generally crowded and noisy. She would be hanging about among the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelaces or sewing thread. If she judged that the coast was clear she would blow her nose when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without recognition. But with luck, in the middle of the crowd, it would be safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting.

In a state television address, President Jacob Zuma said Mr. Mandela had died that evening after a long illness. "Our nation has lost its greatest son. Our people have lost a father," said Mr. Zuma, dressed in a dark jacket and reading his statement in deep somber tones. "Although we knew that this day would come, nothing can diminish our sense of a profound and enduring loss."

"And now I must go," she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions. 'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty. I've got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something. Isn't it bloody? Give me a brush-down, would you? Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then good-by, my love, good-by!'

In a somber statement from the White House, President Barack Obama said Mr. Mandela "achieved more than could be expected of any man. Today he's gone home and we've lost one of the most influential, courageous and profoundly good human beings that any of us will share time with on this Earth."

December 5, 2013.

Moving Crude by Railcar Stalls on the Track

Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand. Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful. There was a line or two round the eyes, if you looked closely. The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft. It occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where she lived.

Companies that thought they had found a relatively easy way to move crude from the booming oil fields of North Dakota to the West Coast are encountering obstacles.

The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

Half a dozen companies are trying to build rail terminals on the coast of Washington state to receive trainloads of crude from the Bakken field in North Dakota. The oil would then be transferred to ships and barges that could carry it to refineries in the Pacific Northwest or south to California.

THREE

"We can come here once again," said Julia. "It's generally safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another month or two, of course."

Analysts say regulatory hurdles make it difficult to build the necessary rail yards and tank farms in California, and it's more expensive to ship crude there. But getting a permit in Washington is proving more challenging than companies expected.

December 4, 2013.

Obama Urges Steps to Resolve Income Inequality

"You like doing this? I don't mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?"

President Barack Obama, seeking to renew focus on the economy after months of mostly bad news about the health-law rollout, said Wednesday that growing income inequality is harming the U.S. economy and called on Congress to increase the minimum wage.

"I adore it."

"The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe," Mr. Obama said in a 45-minute speech hosted by the Center for American Progress, a think tank closely aligned with the White House.

That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no difficulty. Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The sun seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached out for the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her. Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.

Mr. Obama echoed many of the ideas he's offered before: closing tax loopholes and using the increased revenue for infrastructure projects; unwinding the across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester; and raising the federal minimum wage, now at $7.25 an hour.

December 3, 2013.

Detroit Eligible for Bankruptcy Protection

"Yes, perfectly."

DETROIT----Detroit, the fallen capital of U.S. industrial might, was declared eligible for bankruptcy protection Tuesday, clearing an important hurdle for the cash-poor city to restructure billions of dollars in long-term debt.

"I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones."

Five months after the city filed for Chapter 9 protection, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes ruled that Detroit was legally entitled to pursue the move. The judge found that the nation's 18th-largest city was insolvent before its July bankruptcy filing.

"Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the bones."

Judge Rhodes also concluded that Detroit was legally permitted to file for bankruptcy because it had too many creditors----more than 100,000----to expect it to be able to reach a realistic out-of-court settlement with them.

December 2, 2013.

Metro-North Train Exceeded Speed Limit Before NYC Crash

"Not with those swine, no. But there's plenty that would if they got half a chance. They're not so holy as they make out."

National Transportation Safety Board investigators said the Metro-North train that derailed Sunday morning in the Bronx was traveling 82 miles per hour as it entered a tight curve with a speed limit of 30 mph.

His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds----thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! He pulled her down so that they were kneeling face to face.

The investigators are "not aware of any problems or anomalies with the brakes," NTSB Member Earl Weener said at a news conference Monday.

"Listen. The more men you've had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?"

Four people were killed in the accident and more than 60 were injured, the first passenger deaths in Metro-North's 30-year history.

December 1, 2013.

Philippine Typhoon Spurs Diaspora to Action

"With Party members."

In the weeks since Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, Rogelio "Vonz" Santos Jr. has chartered private helicopters to deliver more than four tons of water, sardines and antibiotics to typhoon-ravaged areas that have seen little aid.

"Yes, always with Party members."

"My friends lost their families," said Mr. Santos, a 33-year-old Filipino-American who lives in New York, where he runs a U.S. biotech company with a Manila office. "A lot of things got de-prioritized, and this is my priority now." He said he has funded 14 relief missions with the $50,000 he and his friends have raised so far.

"With members of the Inner Party?"

Few countries have such a large part of its population living overseas as the Philippines, with about 10.5 million Filipinos, or more than 10% of the country's population, living abroad. Now, that sprawling network of people is springing into action, pumping in badly-needed aid after Typhoon Haiyan flattened large portions of the 7,000-island nation.

November 30, 2013.

As Deadline Expires, Problems Persist With Health Site

Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back to the clearing. When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were both breathing fast, but the smile had reappeared round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was almost as in his dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.

Technicians in the Washington area raced up to a month-end deadline set by the Obama administration to make the troubled federal insurance website work for a majority of users, but officials acknowledged they still faced a raft of problems that could take weeks or more to fix.

"Have you done this before?"

By Saturday evening, technicians completed a major hardware upgrade, adding computing, storage and database capacity to their data center, said one person familiar with the situation. "There was a big install and it worked," the person said.

"Of course. Hundreds of times----well scores of times anyway."

Contractors believe the upgrades will improve the system's performance and let it handle more visitors, but the person said they are testing the system and aren't yet sure it can handle 50,000 simultaneous users, the administration's stated objective. A few days before the deadline, officials said the site was only able to handle 25,000.