January 31, 2014.

Bloody Struggle Erupts Over Avocado Trade

The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege. Winston regarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man's whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality even for a moment. O'Brien took the decanter by the neck and filled up the glasses with a dark-red liquid. It aroused in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a hoarding----a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass. Seen from the top the stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it gleamed like a ruby. It had a sour-sweet smell. He saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at it with frank curiosity.

TANCÍTARO, Mexico----Super Bowl Sunday is a big deal in this remote and seemingly peaceful mountain town, whose entrance is marked by a statue of an avocado.

"It is called wine," said O'Brien with a faint smile. "You will have read about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am afraid." His face grew solemn again, and he raised his glass: "I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein."

Americans eat more guacamole for the big game than on any other day of the year, and more of the avocados for the dip are grown in the green hills here than any other place in the world.

Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight or Mr Charrington's half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. He set down the empty glass.

But for the past few years, a good chunk of the profits has gone to a violent criminal gang that made millions of dollars extorting avocado farmers and packinghouse operators while strong-arming groves from landowners, said residents and local officials who recently began fighting back.

January 30, 2014

Youth Participation Weakens in Basketball, Football, Baseball, Soccer

"We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready."

If there's an unofficial national day for America's sports passion, it is Super Bowl Sunday, and one of the largest U.S. television audiences of 2014 is expected to watch the Seattle Seahawks face the Denver Broncos.

He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in without knocking. Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter and glasses.

But ahead of this weekend's spectacle in New Jersey, there is some sobering news about the country's most-popular team sports: Fewer children are playing them.

"Martin is one of us," said O'Brien impassively. "Bring the drinks over here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have we enough chairs? Then we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. Bring a chair for yourself, Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next ten minutes."

Combined participation in the four most-popular U.S. team sports----basketball, soccer, baseball and football----fell among boys and girls aged 6 through 17 by roughly 4% from 2008 to 2012, according to an examination of data from youth leagues, school-sports groups and industry associations.

January 29, 2014.

Flow of Unaccompanied Minors Tests U.S. Immigration Agencies

"Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone."

LOS ANGELES----A record number of minors traveling alone are entering the U.S. illegally, presenting a new humanitarian and fiscal challenge as Congress grapples with the fate of 11 million undocumented residents already here.

"We have come here because----"

In a report to be released Thursday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops forecasts that 60,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America will cross the Southwest border into the U.S. this year. That is up from less than 25,000 the year before, and just 5,800 a decade ago. Border-watchers say it highlights violence and unrest in several Central American countries. Minors who cross from Mexico are almost always repatriated.

He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:

Since 2011, the U.S. "has seen an unprecedented increase in the number of unaccompanied migrating children" crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the Washington-based bishops' group reports, citing a surge in Border Patrol apprehensions.

January 28, 2014.

Poll Finds Americans Anxious Over Future, Obama's Performance

He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose.

President Barack Obama will lay out his agenda for the year on Tuesday night before a nation increasingly worried about his abilities, dissatisfied with the economy and fearful for the country's future, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

"Shall I say it, or will you?" he said.

Since the rise of modern polling in the 1930s, only George W. Bush has begun his sixth year in the White House on rockier ground than Mr. Obama.

"I will say it," said Winston promptly. "That thing is really turned off?"

At the same time, the public supports many of the themes and policy ideas Mr. Obama looks set to emphasize in his annual State of the Union address to Congress. Large majorities of respondents said they want the White House and lawmakers to focus on job creation and early-childhood education, and a slimmer majority favored increasing the minimum wage.

January 27, 2014.

Apple iPhone Sales, Outlook Come Up Short

Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.

Apple Inc. AAPL +0.81%  reported selling fewer iPhones than projected at year-end and said revenue in the current quarter might decline, sending its shares down sharply in after-hours trading.

"You can turn it off!" he said.

The results highlighted new dynamics and intensifying competition in the smartphone market. Apple continues to target the market for high-end phones, even as demand accelerates for lower-cost models, particularly in emerging markets. But Apple is resisting the urge to release a truly low-cost phone that could crimp profitability.

"Yes," said O'Brien, "we can turn it off. We have that privilege."

"Our objective has always been to make the best, not the most," said Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook on a conference call with analysts.

January 26, 2014

ESPN's Internet Rollout Tests Television Cash Cow

O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite towards him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:

BRISTOL, Conn.----In the control room of ESPN's headquarters, a row of screens shows video feeds going out to cable providers for each of its television channels. But a growing part of ESPN's future lies across the room, where a similar setup tracks transmissions to the Internet.

"Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop unproceed constructionwise antegetting plusfull estimates machinery overheads stop end message."

 On a recent Saturday, technicians were busy streaming several dozen games, some at the same time as they were on television and others that weren't televised at all. Damon Phillips, in charge of the service, used a tablet computer to monitor how many people were watching online.

He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the soundless carpet. A little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him with the Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream. He could not even fall back on the pretence that he had come to borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's presence was impossible to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.

"I'm obsessed with this," he said, pointing to the usage tally, which he starts checking at 5:30 a.m. while on his exercise bike. "I look at it all day long."

January 25, 2014.

Bombings, Clashes Sweep Egypt

VIII

They had done it, they had done it at last!

CAIRO----Hundreds of Egyptians were trickling into Tahrir Square on Saturday morning to mark the third anniversary of the Arab Spring revolt that has violently split the country, the day after a string of bombings and clashes killed at least 18 people.

The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet. At the far end of the room O'Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the servant showed Julia and Winston in.

Saturday's festivities unfolded amid tight security under the threat of street-level riots and fresh terror attacks. Helicopters circled overhead as security personnel frisked revelers filing into the iconic protest center in downtown Cairo where a sound stage had been erected Friday evening.

Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different routes and only met on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a place needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro -- everything was intimidating. Although he had a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner, demand his papers, and order him to get out. O'Brien's servant, however, had admitted the two of them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. Winston could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not grimy from the contact of human bodies.

Celebrations were already marred by a small explosion in front of a police training center early on Saturday morning in the dense Cairo neighborhood of Ain Shams, according to Egyptian state media. No casualties were reported from the attack.

January 24, 2014.

Agonizing Choices for Lives Saved by Miracle Drugs

He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper, which this time there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless he carefully memorized what was written on it, and some hours later dropped it into the memory hole along with a mass of other papers.

PRINCETON, N.J.----Sixteen-year-old Megan Crowley lay facedown on an operating table last June as her surgeon tried to straighten her spine, badly contorted by a genetic disease that nearly killed her as a little girl.

They had been talking to one another for a couple of minutes at the most. There was only one meaning that the episode could possibly have. It had been contrived as a way of letting Winston know O'Brien's address. This was necessary, because except by direct enquiry it was never possible to discover where anyone lived. There were no directories of any kind. 'If you ever want to see me, this is where I can be found,' was what O'Brien had been saying to him. Perhaps there would even be a message concealed somewhere in the dictionary. But at any rate, one thing was certain. The conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.

The doctor had warned Megan that she stood a 5% chance of dying from the risky surgery, but she eagerly chose it anyway. Her 15-year-old brother Patrick, stricken with the same rare disease, refused the procedure and awaited news of her at home.

He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's summons. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay----he was not certain. What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while he was speaking to O'Brien, when the meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.

In the operating room, an alarm suddenly blared: Megan's nerve signals had flatlined, suggesting paralysis. "Megan, wiggle your toes!" her surgeon, David Roye, recalls yelling, waking her from anesthesia. She tried, to no effect.

January 23, 2014.

New Masters of the Art Universe

"Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The reduction in the number of verbs----that is the point that will appeal to you, I think. Let me see, shall I send a messenger to you with the dictionary? But I am afraid I invariably forget anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick it up at my flat at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my address."

On the morning of Oct. 2, hedge-fund manager Daniel Loeb sat down in his Park Avenue office----which he'd decorated with a photograph of a Marlboro Man by Richard Prince----and fired off a vitriolic activist-investor letter. Mr. Loeb, 52 years old, has a reputation for sending blistering critiques to companies he intends to overhaul, like Sony and Yahoo. This time around, he attacked the performance and management of Sotheby's, calling the auction house "an Old Master painting in desperate need of restoration."

They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat absentmindedly O'Brien felt two of his pockets and then produced a small leather-covered notebook and a gold ink-pencil. Immediately beneath the telescreen, in such a position that anyone who was watching at the other end of the instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled an address, tore out the page and handed it to Winston.

Halfway around the world in Hong Kong, Sotheby's chief executive and chairman Bill Ruprecht----a 58-year-old former furniture maker and a lifer at the company----didn't learn about the letter right away because he was asleep and didn't hear his cellphone. A frantic Sotheby's staffer got a direct line to his hotel room and woke him up.

"I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. "If not, my servant will give you the dictionary."

Hedge-fund managers, who play a vital but disruptive role in the broader financial markets, are increasingly throwing their weight around the art market: They are paying record sums to drive up values for their favorite artists, dumping artists who don't pay off and offsetting their heavy wagers on untested contemporary art by buying the reliable antiquity or two. Aggressive, efficient and armed with up-to-the-minute market intelligence supplied by well-paid art advisers, these collectors are shaking up the way business gets done in the genteel art world.

January 22, 2014.

U.S. Accuses Security Background Check Firm of Fraud

"No," said Winston. "I didn't think it had been issued yet. We are still using the ninth in the Records Department."

WASHINGTON----The Justice Department on Wednesday accused the government's largest private security background check contractor of defrauding the country of millions of dollars by methodically filing more than 660,000 flawed background investigations—40% of the cases it sent to the government over a four-year period.

"The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe. But a few advance copies have been circulated. I have one myself. It might interest you to look at it, perhaps?"

Prosecutors accused former top US Investigations Services LLC executives of directing improper practices that became a subject of internal jokes among company officials who helped secure millions of dollars in bonuses from the U.S. government.

"Very much so," said Winston, immediately seeing where this tended.

The details emerged as the Justice Department filed a 25-page civil complaint to join a whistleblowers' lawsuit against USIS under way in U.S. District Court in Alabama. In the complaint, U.S. attorneys accused USIS of using its close ties with the federal government to conceal the so-called practice of flushing background checks----sending the government cases that didn't have proper review.

January 21, 2014.

Australia's Housing Boom Spreads Beyond Sydney

"But you write it very elegantly," said O'Brien. 'That is not only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my memory for the moment."

LIVERPOOL, Australia----This once-downtrodden Sydney suburb is on the rise, an emblem of Australia's booming housing market.

Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that this was anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously have been intended as a signal, a codeword. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices. They had continued to stroll slowly down the corridor, but now O'Brien halted. With the curious, disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the gesture he resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:

Dilapidated cottages and housing estates are giving way to large homes and modern multistory apartments. Vacant land for residential development here goes for as much as A$400,000 ($352,574) per acre, compared with about A$200,000 five years ago, according to Australand Property Group, ALZ.AU -1.15%  a developer in the area.

"What I had really intended to say was that in your article I noticed you had used two words which have become obsolete. But they have only become so very recently. Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?"

The housing boom in Australia, once thought to be limited primarily to central Sydney, is spreading to other parts of the country. Prices of land and houses are rising in numerous cities and suburbs, fueled largely by demand from both large and small investors looking for yield amid low interest rates engineered by the central bank to keep the economy growing.

January 20, 2014.

Iran Seen Needing Big Steps for Final Deal

At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He would have been incapable of speaking. O'Brien, however, had continued forward in the same movement, laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston's arm, so that the two of them were walking side by side. He began speaking with the peculiar grave courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members.

WASHINGTON----Iran would have to remove 15,000 centrifuge machines and take other drastic measures to forge a comprehensive nuclear agreement with the West, according to a report by a U.S. think tank that drew from conversations with senior U.S. officials.

"I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you," he said. "I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in The Times the other day. You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?"

The steps required to preclude Tehran's ability to develop nuclear weapons illustrate the challenge the U.S. and other world powers will face in moving over the next six months from an interim deal to a final one.

Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. "Hardly scholarly," he said. "I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject. I have never had anything to do with the actual construction of the language."

In addition to removing the thousands of centrifuges that enrich uranium, Iran would have to shut down an underground uranium-enrichment site, convert a heavy water reactor and agree to a 20-year inspections regime, according to the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington. The findings were provided exclusively to The Wall Street Journal.

January 19, 2014.

Panama Canal Expansion: Standoff Worries Locals

In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

ABOARD THE MAERSK BATAM, On the Panama Canal----Everything about this Danish-flagged ship is big. It is longer than two football fields, as high as a seven-story building and carries 3,000 cargo containers weighing 30,000 tons.

VI


It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen.

But as shipyards from India to Korea continue to build vessels that are longer, wider and taller, the Maersk Batam actually is a midsize ship. Some people even call it small.

He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and he was almost at the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he became aware that someone larger than himself was walking just behind him. The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to speaking. Winston stopped abruptly and turned. It was O'Brien.

"Not that there's anything wrong with smaller ships," says Capt. Mike Hands, a Briton who has spent 40 of his 57 years working on ships. "Smaller ships go to smaller ports, which are always more interesting," he says, as the Batam begins its 10-hour passage through the Panama Canal.

January 18, 2014

Brazil's Class Struggle Goes to the Mall

"I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm interested in us."

SÃO PAULO----For as long as many can remember, a rolezinho was slang for a gathering of teenagers in a public place. The teens organize a group and arrange a meeting place, perhaps outdoors, in a park. In São Paulo, it is often at a shopping mall, a favorite weekend hangout across all social classes.

"You're only a rebel from the waist downwards," he told her.

But in recent weeks, rolezinhos growing to as many as 6,000 participants via social-media sites have brought to the forefront Brazil's deep divide between rich and poor. On Jan. 11 in Itaquera, a massive mall in São Paulo's up-and-coming east zone, hordes of rowdy teens flooded the halls prompting calls to the police, who shot at the adolescents with rubber bullets and tear gas. More gatherings are being planned around Brazil this weekend, including in Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia.

She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight.

São Paulo police say they are investigating some of the teens for criminal conspiracy and disturbing the peace, prompting criticism that the teens are being persecuted because they are from Brazil's lower classes. Those critics note that few robberies took place despite the commotion—only one store in Itaquera reported catching someone leaving with a hat and a pair of shorts that weren't paid for during a Dec. 7 mob of 6,000 teens, according to mall administrators.

January 17, 2014

Five Things to Know About Ultra HD TVs

"It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes later. But if the same thing happened today, I should keep it."

LATE JANUARY, just before the Super Bowl, is one of the most popular times to shop for a big-screen television. But this year, A/V connoisseurs in the market for a humongous, high-end flat-screen might want to hold off until well after the game. The latest Ultra High-Definition TVs (sometimes called Ultra HD, UHD or 4K) will hit stores this spring. For shoppers who want the latest and greatest, these models might be worth the wait and higher price. Ultra HD sets provide a substantial boost in detail, and, unlike the smattering of quality sets that came out last year, not all of the newest ones will carry stratospheric prices. Below, five key points you need to know about the near-future of home entertainment.

"Well, I wouldn't!" said Julia. "I'm quite ready to take risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper. What could you have done with it even if you had kept it?"

1. Ultra HD looks amazing. Images in this new format are super-detailed and vivid. These screens pack in the same number of pixels as four hi-def sets. Result: a sense of realism that rivals the movie theater.

"Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have planted a few doubts here and there, supposing that I'd dared to show it to anybody. I don't imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there----small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off."

2. But...you'll need a gigantic TV set. There's no need to upgrade to Ultra HD unless you're in the market for a huge TV----say, 65 inches or larger diagonally. That's because the format's resolution boost is all but impossible to notice on smaller sets (unless you sit headache-inducingly close to the screen). Granted, some eagle-eyed viewers may be able to discern a difference, and the technology does offer other visual enhancements. But it'll be hard to justify the premium at more modest screen sizes.

January 16, 2014.

Hefty Bank Fees Waylay Soldiers

"Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the time, aren't they?"

Fort Hood National Bank lets soldiers overdraw their accounts by hundreds of dollars at its seven branches on the Fort Hood U.S. Army base in Texas. It charges them up to $35 for each overdraft.

He tried to make her understand. "This was an exceptional case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event----years after it."

Not long after Samantha Smith started her customer-service job at the bank in 2010, she noticed she spent most of her time on soldiers struggling with those fees.

"And what good was that?"

The bank disclosed the fees, she says, but many soldiers didn't understand it would charge them $35 repeatedly, even for small debit-card transactions. When their Army paychecks arrived, the bank withheld overdrawn sums and fees, often leaving them short of funds and vulnerable to more overdraft charges, she says.

January 15, 2014.

Yahoo's No. 2 Is Out After Clash With CEO Mayer

Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had once held between his fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.

Yahoo Inc. YHOO -0.17%  CEO Marissa Mayer is parting ways with her top executive, an expensive setback in her effort to turn around the struggling Internet portal.

"Were they friends of yours?" she said.

Henrique de Castro, the chief operating officer Ms. Mayer poached from Google Inc. GOOG -0.07%  in 2012, is departing this week. One of the highest-paid executives in Silicon Valley, Mr. de Castro exits after about a year on the job with a severance package that could be worth more than an estimated $42 million.

"No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members. Besides, they were far older men than I was. They belonged to the old days, before the Revolution. I barely knew them by sight."

The departure is a further sign yet that Ms. Mayer is struggling to revive growth in Yahoo's advertising business, which has continued to lose share to rivals Facebook Inc. FB -0.24%  and Google. Mr. de Castro, functioning as the company's top ad executive and liaison to marketers on Madison Avenue, failed to convince advertisers to spend more money to reach visitors to its websites and mobile apps.

January 14, 2014.

German Firms Seed Web Shopping in the Developing World

Both of them knew----in a way, it was never out of their minds----that what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary. It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that once inside it time could be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of escape. Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or Katharine would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide together. Or they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their lives undetected in a back-street. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

LAGOS, Nigeria----The message from his boss on the phone from Germany was straightforward, recalls Hendrik Harren, a former website manager in Africa: "I want you to build the Amazon of Nigeria for me."

Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way into it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the impulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence, announce that he was the enemy of the Party, and demand his help. Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to judging people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston should believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition existed or could exist. The tales about Goldstein and his underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish which the Party had invented for its own purposes and which you had to pretend to believe in. Times beyond number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations, she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest belief. When public trials were happening she had taken her place in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded the courts from morning to night, chanting at intervals 'Death to the traitors!' During the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all others in shouting insults at Goldstein. Yet she had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.

The caller was Oliver Samwer, an Internet tycoon in Berlin who had already cloned American e-commerce businesses for Europe's market. By 2012, his focus was shifting to the developing world.

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, "just to keep people frightened." This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. "Who cares?" she said impatiently. "It's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway."

Mr. Harren found his new assignment daunting. "I had never founded an Amazon," he says.

January 13, 2014.

Amec Eyes $3.2 Billion Foster Wheeler Deal

A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shops were looted in the turmoil; then a rumour flew round that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation.

LONDON----British energy-services company Amec PLC AMEC.LN +0.36%  said Monday it has provisionally agreed on a $3.2 billion cash and shares acquisition of U.S.-listed but Switzerland-based rival Foster Wheeler AG FWLT -1.05%  .

In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could get there, Julia and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the open window, naked for the sake of coolness. The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes, and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counterattack.

Amec said the acquisition of Foster Wheeler would improve its geographic reach, and more than double its revenue in designated growth regions such as Latin America.

Four, five, six----seven times they met during the month of June. Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He usually stopped to talk with Mr Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had always vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman. With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or that----a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's hair -- never asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it. To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn out musicalbox. He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes. There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and another about a cow with a crumpled horn, and another about the death of poor Cock Robin. "It just occurred to me you might be interested," he would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new fragment. But he could never recall more than a few lines of any one rhyme.

Foster Wheeler's capabilities in the refining and processing of oil and gas will also complement Amec's business in exploration and production, Amec's Chief Executive Samir Brikho told reporters on a conference call Monday.

January 12, 2014.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's Aides Pressed Hard for Endorsements

V

Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before----nothing had been crossed out----but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.

New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie's ability to secure Democratic endorsements supported his overwhelming re-election last year and helped establish him as a 2016 presidential contender, but now a traffic scandal has put the spotlight on his campaign's tactics with local officials across the state.

The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked. Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets. Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in going through back files of The Times and altering and embellishing news items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The rocket bombs crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance there were enormous explosions which no one could explain and about which there were wild rumours.

Interviews with mayors and other New Jersey Democratic officials show that Mr. Christie's allies in conversations that swung from friendly to persistent fostered a perception of better access to the governor's office and state commissions for those who cooperated, while a few who stayed neutral or endorsed Mr. Christie's opponent said they felt locked out. Others suffered no harm.

The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song, it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed with the still-popular 'It was only a hopeless fancy'. The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper. Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers. Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metres of bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark. The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.

One question is whether carrot-and-stick political tactics by Christie aides played a role in a traffic scandal allegedly engineered as a political punishment for a Democratic mayor who didn't endorse the governor.

January 11, 2014.

(picture to be added soon)

Arbitration Panel Suspends Yankee Alex Rodriguez for 2014 Season

"I can remember lemons," said Winston. "They were quite common in the fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them."

New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez will miss the entire 2014 season, after arbitrators on Saturday reduced his standing suspension to 162 games from 211.

"I bet that picture's got bugs behind it," said Julia. "I'll take it down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose it's almost time we were leaving. I must start washing this paint off. What a bore! I'll get the lipstick off your face afterwards."

The decision was handed down by a three-man panel chaired by arbitrator Fredric Horwitz. Major League Baseball originally had suspended Mr. Rodriguez in August for 211 games for his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Mr. Rodriguez said he would seek to stop the suspension in court. "I have been clear that I did not use performance-enhancing substances as alleged in the notice of discipline…and to prove it I will take this fight to federal court," he said in a statement.

Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room was darkening. He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

January 10, 2014.

Pig Virus Threatens to Bump Pork Cost

"I can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it ends up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"

CHICAGO----A virus that kills young pigs is roiling the U.S. pork industry, boosting prices in the $9 billion hog-futures market and threatening to create more pain for food shoppers.

It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after "the bells of Old Bailey." Perhaps it could be dug out of Mr Charrington's memory, if he were suitably prompted.

The disease, which has spread to farms in 22 states, is cutting into pork supplies and prompting some traders and investors to wager that hog prices could set records this year. Lean-hog futures rose to a seven-week high a week ago and are up 6% since mid-December.

"Who taught you that?" he said.

Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, or the PED virus, appeared in the U.S. for the first time in April and has killed thousands of piglets since then. The virus, which causes severe diarrhea and vomiting, is fatal only to young pigs and poses no threat to human health or food safety, according to swine veterinarians. The U.S. strain is nearly identical to a version that curbed hog production in China in 2012.

"My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight----at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was," she added inconsequently. "I've seen oranges. They're a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin."

January 9, 2014.

How Techies Are Transforming San Francisco

"It's a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement Danes its name was." The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him came back into his head, and he added half-nostalgically:

"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's!"

Twitter's TWTR -0.09%  headquarters. A high-rise apartment building where visitors sign-in on iPads. A jar of handcrafted applesauce for $14. Skyrocketing real-estate prices.

To his astonishment she capped the line:

Nearly five decades after the Summer of Love transformed San Francisco into the epicenter of the hippie movement, a new generation is redefining this city's culture again. No longer content to live and work in the quiet suburbs of Palo Alto and Menlo Park 30 miles south, thousands of young tech workers are migrating to the city, seeking a more urban, multicultural lifestyle. They are bringing with them a stampede of tech companies and venture capitalists, and inevitably attracting some homegrown resentment for jacking up housing costs and gentrifying once gritty neighborhoods.

"You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's, 

When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey----"

Last year, venture capitalist Greg Gretsch, managing director at Sigma West, which has $1.5 billion under management, moved his office from Menlo Park to San Francisco's Jackson Square neighborhood, a historic part of the city dating back to the 1850s that is now attracting the new digerati. He now walks to work from his Pacific Heights home and walks or bikes to visit startups in the South of Market, or Soma, district.

January 8, 2014.

IBM Struggles to Turn Watson Computer Into Big Business

"And that picture over there"----she nodded at the engraving on the opposite wall----"would that be a hundred years old?"

Three years after International Business Machines Corp. IBM +1.99%  began trying to turn its "Jeopardy"-winning computer into a big business, revenue from Watson is far from the company's ambitious targets.

"More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays."

IBM Chief Executive Virginia "Ginni" Rometty has told executives she hopes Watson will generate $10 billion in annual revenue within 10 years, according to an October 2013 conference-call transcript reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. She set that target after the executive in charge of Watson said its business plan would bring in $1 billion of revenue a year by 2018. That would make Watson the fastest IBM business unit to reach the $1 billion milestone.

She went over to look at it. "Here's where that brute stuck his nose out," she said, kicking the wainscoting immediately below the picture. "What is this place? I've seen it before somewhere."

But Watson had total revenue of less than $100 million as of late October, according to the transcript. One of its first big projects, with the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, was "in a ditch" in early 2013, said Manoj Saxena, the executive overseeing Watson.

January 7, 2014.

Record-Setting Cold Hits Easter U.S.

Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead. Julia got out of bed, pulled on her overalls, and made the coffee. The smell that rose from the saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive. What was even better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine. With one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other, Julia wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase, pointing out the best way of repairing the gateleg table, plumping herself down in the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement. She brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the glass.

A record-setting cold snap in the Midwest enveloped the eastern half of the country Tuesday, with brutally cold temperatures recorded from the deep south up to New England.

"What is it, do you think"' said Julia.

Officials opened warming centers, canceled school and asked residents to conserve electricity because of expected heavy demand.

"I don't think it's anything----I mean, I don't think it was ever put to any use. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it."

"Nobody is getting out of this one right now," said Bruce Terry, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, which predicted that Tuesday will be the coldest day of the big chill. Temperatures are expected to begin to moderate Wednesday.

January 6, 2014.

Profitable Learning Curve for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He did not reopen his eyes immediately. For several moments he had had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life. It was always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of darkness. With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke up without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short.

MENLO PARK, Calif.----Mark Zuckerberg needed help. Facebook Inc. FB -0.87%  's initial public offering in May 2012 had been a mess. And after turning a website born in his college dorm room into a company valued at $100 billion, the young chief executive was under pressure to prove he could sell lots of ads on smartphones.

"I'm sorry," he said, "it's nothing. I don't like rats, that's all."

So he went for a long walk a few weeks later through the center of Facebook's corporate campus here with Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, a top engineer at Facebook and friend who once was Mr. Zuckerberg's teaching assistant at Harvard University.

"Don't worry, dear, we're not going to have the filthy brutes in here. I'll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking before we go. And next time we come here I'll bring some plaster and bung it up properly."

"Wouldn't it be fun to build a billion-dollar business in six months?" Mr. Zuckerberg asked. He wanted Mr. Bosworth to help lead the company's shaky mobile-ad business, then bringing in almost nothing. Another part of the job: figure out all the ways Facebook could make money.

January 5, 2014.

Why I Chose the Red, White, and Blue

"Don't go on!" said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.

Growing up British, I thought that I knew everything about national self-loathing. We were reared in the shadows of long-gone might, taught that we were mere dormice scuffling in the footsteps of imperial giants. To dull the pain, we administered heavy doses of sarcasm, self-effacement and "Upstairs, Downstairs."

"Dearest! You've gone quite pale. What's the matter? Do they make you feel sick?"

But then I moved to the U.S., and over my decade here, I have realized that when it comes to the rhetoric of self-flagellation, as in so much else, we Europeans are small time. The U.S. government, we hear, is no longer checked and balanced but broken. Banks and insurance companies are plundering the nation's treasure. Bridges are crumbling, children aren't being educated, and that thudding sound is 1.3 billion Chinese sitting down to eat America's lunch. For all this country's glories, its morale in recent years has felt low.

"Of all horrors in the world----a rat!"

So a couple of months ago I did my bit to buck the gloom: I became a U.S. citizen.

January 4, 2014.

Small Plane in Distress Lands on Congested NYC Highway

"A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting. There's a hole down there. I gave him a good fright, anyway."

A small passenger plane returning to Connecticut from a sightseeing trip to the Statue of Liberty on Saturday lost power and was forced to land on a congested New York City highway, narrowly missing cars, authorities said.

"Rats!" murmured Winston. "In this room!"

The male pilot and two women passengers escaped serious injury in the landing and no vehicles were struck by the plane, which landed on the Major Deegan Expressway, one of the city's busiest highways.

"They're all over the place," said Julia indifferently as she lay down again. "We've even got them in the kitchen at the hostel. Some parts of London are swarming with them. Did you know they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes. It's the great huge brown ones that do it. And the nasty thing is that the brutes always----"

The Piper PA-28 was on its way to Danbury, Conn., heading north from the Statue of Liberty when it experienced engine trouble, said a spokesman for the Fire Department of New York. The pilot planned to land at La Guardia Airport in Queens but realized he wouldn't be able to reach the runway.

January 3, 2014.

Andreessen: Bubble Believers 'Don't Know What They're Talking About'

"It's twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in earlier than that, because----Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!"

In a 2011 essay in The Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist and Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen predicted that software companies are "eating the world" by replacing old industries with new services that are smarter, faster and cheaper.

She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during the Two Minutes Hate.

If anything, Andreessen's prophecy is unfolding ahead of schedule. The smartphone is now a portal into a taxi ride, a doctor's appointment or a date.

"What was it?" he said in surprise.

Startups like Airbnb Inc., TaskRabbit Inc. and RelayRides Inc. have used software apps to pioneer a new economy where consumers share their materials and services. Google Inc., GOOG -0.73%  the 12th most-valuable company by market capitalization when Mr. Andreessen's essay was published, is now third on that list.

January 2, 2014.

Passengers Rescued From Trapped Ship in Antartic

Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Winston woke up the hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine. He did not stir, because Julia was sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm. Most of her make-up had transferred itself to his own face or the bolster, but a light stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. A yellow ray from the sinking sun fell across the foot of the bed and lighted up the fireplace, where the water in the pan was boiling fast. Down in the yard the woman had stopped singing, but the faint shouts of children floated in from the street. He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary? Julia woke up, rubbed her eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.

Dozens of scientists and tourists who spent over a week aboard a vessel trapped in Antarctic ice were rescued Thursday in an international effort that followed multiple attempts thwarted by the region's harsh climate.

"Half that water's boiled away," she said. "I'll get up and make some coffee in another moment. We've got an hour. What time do they cut the lights off at your flats?"

The 52 were safely rescued by a transport helicopter from a Chinese icebreaker that landed on a makeshift helipad of ice near their stricken Russian research vessel. In multiple flights, it transferred about 12 at a time to an Australian vessel, where they will begin their journeys home, said authorities involved in the operation.

"Twenty-three thirty."

"Great relief!" scientific expedition leader Chris Turney said in a Twitter TWTR +3.16%  message.

January 1, 2014.

People to Watch in 2014

"Scent too!" he said.

From Hillary Clinton's possible presidential bid to Pope Francis's expected reforms at the Vatican to GM's new leadership under CEO Mary Barra, take a closer look at the new year's newsmakers.

"Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I'm going to do next? I'm going to get hold of a real woman's frock from somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I'm going to be a woman, not a Party comrade."

Maria Barra
The General Motors Co. GM +0.44%  executive steps into the role of CEO of the largest U.S. auto maker on Jan. 15. She faces the hurdles of defending GM's presence in North America while boosting its international market share.

They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed. It was the first time that he had stripped himself naked in her presence. Until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with the varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them. 'It's sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?' said Julia. One never saw a double bed nowadays, except in the homes of the proles. Winston had occasionally slept in one in his boyhood: Julia had never been in one before, so far as she could remember.

Marina Berlusconi
The daughter of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi could emerge as the new leader of her father's conservative movement after his legal troubles forced him from Parliament. Pressure is building on Ms. Berlusconi to step forward.