February 28, 2014.

In Crimea, a Long History of Russian Power Struggles

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction----indeed, in some sense was the destruction----of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.

Even in a world of nuclear weapons, naval power is critical to projecting a country's power beyond its borders. So in Russian history, the Crimean peninsula and its port of Sevastopol have been a potent symbol of Moscow's ability to extend its influence via the Black Sea into the Mediterranean and beyond.

Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

Russia seized Crimea from the declining Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. In the mid-19th century, the efforts of Britain and France to constrain further expansion of the Russian empire sparked the Crimean War.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor car or helicopter----set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call "the proles." The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

The war became a watchword in Britain for military incompetence, thanks largely to the reports from the region by William Russell, a journalist for the Times of London who is regarded as one of the first modern war correspondents. The haplessness of British military commanders was immortalized in Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

February 27, 2014.

Big on the Big Easy

To understand the nature of the present war----for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war----one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment.

Francine Segal heard about a luxury condo development being built among the mansions of New Orleans's historic Uptown and immediately went to investigate. Aware the property was not yet listed and unable to track down the selling agent's info, she went straight to the developer's door.

All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill paid and hardworking coolies. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world's economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different.

"I took my dog and walked over to [the developer's] house," says Ms. Segal, a dialect coach for the film industry, who bought the condo for $1.5 million after seeing just the floor plan. "Everybody wants to be here."

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient----a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow white concrete----was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process----by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute----the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Ms. Segal, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 30 years, is among the buyers fueling New Orleans's real-estate market. For her, the big draw was being able to stay in the Uptown area, where new-construction luxury homes are difficult to find, she says.

February 26, 2014.

Data Harvesting Worries Farmers

Big agricultural companies say the next revolution on the farm will come from feeding data gathered by tractors and other machinery into computers that tell farmers how to increase their output of crops like corn and soybeans.

Chapter III

War is Peace

The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three superstates are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.

Monsanto Co. MON -0.24%  , DuPont Co. DD +0.53%  and other companies are racing to roll out "prescriptive planting" technology to farmers across the U.S. who know from years of experience that tiny adjustments in planting depth or the distance between crop rows can make a big difference in revenue at harvest time.

In one combination or another, these three superstates are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon.

Some farmers are leery about the new technology. They worry their data might be sold to commodities traders, wind up in the hands of rival farmers or give more leverage to giant seed companies that are among the most enthusiastic sellers of data-driven planting advice. The companies vow not to misuse the information.

February 25, 2014.

Inside the Showdown Atop Pimco, the World's Biggest Bond Firm

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.----Tension increased at Pacific Investment Management Co.'s headquarters here last summer. The bond market was under pressure, losses grew and clients pulled billions of dollars from the firm.

The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable.....

Bill Gross, who co-founded Pimco in 1971 and is largely responsible for building it into a behemoth overseeing almost $2 trillion in assets, struck some of his colleagues as testier than usual. He argued openly with Mohamed El-Erian, Pimco's chief executive—something employees say they rarely had seen.

Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it at a different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading:

Mr. Gross----by his own admission, a demanding boss----had long showed respect for Mr. El-Erian and indicated that the younger man eventually would take over the world's biggest bond firm. But one day last June, the two men squared off in front of more than a dozen colleagues amid disagreements about Mr. Gross's conduct, according to two people who were there.

February 24, 2014.

Your Heart May Be Older Than You Are

With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stair above Mr Charrington's shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He opened the window, lit the dirty little oilstove and put on a pan of water for coffee. Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book. He sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the briefcase.

We all know we should eat healthier, exercise more and sometimes take medicines to stave off heart disease. Some researchers think putting an age on our hearts will do a better job of motivating us to do all that.

A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title page ran:

In a recent study involving 3,000 patients, researchers in Spain compared a relatively new tool to measure heart-disease risk, called Heart Age, against a commonly used risk-assessment tool. Participants who were told their heart age was greater than their chronological age showed bigger health improvements a year later than those in the comparison group. Both groups were healthier after a year than a control group that received conventional advice about nutrition and exercise.

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF

OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

by

Emmanuel Goldstein

Winston began reading:

Chapter I

Ignorance is Strength

A checkup at the doctor, of course, may alert patients when blood pressure and cholesterol levels, among other risk factors, are too high. And a number of statistical tools let patients know when they are at moderate-to-high risk of an adverse cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack. Having risk information, however, often has little effect on patients' behavior, according to a 2010 review published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, a journal now named JAMA Internal Medicine.

February 23, 2014.

Mining for Gold at Minus 45 Celsius

The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Excuse me, I think you've dropped your brief-case.' He took the brief-case abstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days before he had an opportunity to look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary.

MEADOWBANK GOLD MINE, Nunavut----Gold miner Alain Belanger contends with 75 mile an hour winds, winter temperatures so cold they have cracked the steel on his 287-ton excavator and white-out blizzards that can halt mining for days.

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs----all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half burying the speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.

This open-pit mine west of Canada's Hudson Bay has had such steep construction and operating costs----flying workers in and out, stocking a year's worth of food, employee turnover and battling snow drifts that can reach eight feet----that the project is unlikely to break even over the long haul, Agnico-Eagle Mines Ltd. AEM.T +0.37%  executives now concede.

By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed down. For as much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube; then one more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it was unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case containing the book, which had remained between his feet while he worked and under his body while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.

As the world warms, miners dream of unlocking trillions of dollars in diamonds, gold, nickel and other metals in the Arctic, a treeless cap that spans northern parts of Canada, Alaska, Russia and Scandinavian countries. So far, it has proved a quixotic quest for all but a few tenacious miners like Agnico.

February 22, 2014.

Russia Stung By Ally Yanukovych's Defeat in Ukraine

He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone else in the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, no Party work of any description, until tomorrow morning. He could spend six hours in the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols, but irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no danger of anyone interfering with him. The heavy brief-case that he was carrying bumped against his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book, which he had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at.

MOSCOW----The dramatic collapse on Saturday of the authority of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine looks like a major reversal for the Kremlin, pulling Russia's southern neighbor toward Europe just weeks after it appeared Moscow had succeeded in drawing Kiev back into its embrace.

On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns -- after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces -- at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.

"This is a major defeat," said a senior Kremlin adviser, adding that the events of the last 24 hours bitterly remind Russian officials of the 2004 Orange Revolution, when Mr. Yanukovych saw his fraud-tainted election victory overturned after massive street protests brought a pro-western government to power.

There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

"We made the same mistakes again" this time, said the Kremlin adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "For us, the conclusion is that the West succeeded in engineering a coup d'état."

February 21, 2014.

FDA to Revamp Approval Path for OTC Drugs

"Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go. But wait. You had better let me give you one of these tablets."

WASHINGTON----The Food and Drug Administration plans to overhaul the way it approves over-the-counter medical products, a move that will change how tens of thousands of medicines and personal care items reach U.S. store shelves.

As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm. At the door Winston looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him Winston could see the writing-table with its green-shaded lamp and the speakwrite and the wire baskets deep-laden with papers. The incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O'Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.

The products----from pain relievers to sunscreens to antifungal medicines—have for decades been approved through a time-consuming process that hampers manufacturers' abilities to later modify their ingredients.

IV

Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It had come into his head spontaneously. His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. His overalls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak. 

Revamping the approval path would have big implications for the over-the-counter medical products industry, which in 2012 recorded $29.3 billion in annual U.S. sales, according to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association. The industry could introduce new forms of products more quickly as researchers discover better ingredients.

February 20, 2014.

Dozens Dead in Ukraine as Fresh Violence Flares in Kiev

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

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

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

When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch."

KIEV, Ukraine----The heart of the Ukrainian capital plummeted into renewed bloodshed on Thursday, shattering a truce reached just hours before between the government and demonstrators that was aimed at ending the country's political crisis.

"You knew the last line!" said Winston.

The fresh spasm of violence began when protesters broke through police lines hemming them inside Independence Square, the symbolic center of Kiev. As they marched toward the parliament, they were targeted by sniper and automatic-weapons fire, witnesses said.

"Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go. But wait. You had better let me give you one of these tablets."

A presidential statement said that dozens of police were killed or wounded in the hail of fire. Ukraine's health ministry late Thursday put the casualty toll since the violence erupted on Tuesday at 67 dead and 562 wounded.

February 19, 2014.

Ukraine Girds for Further Clashes

Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with O'Brien or the Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room over Mr Charrington's shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood frame. Almost at random he said:

KIEV, Ukraine----Kiev braced for further violence on Wednesday as thousands of protesters faced off with riot police across burning barricades, after the government halted its attempt to clear a square that has been the center of unrest for the past three months.

"Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's"?"

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych blamed opposition leaders for the violence, which at last count had killed 25 and injured 241, according to the Health Ministry. Opposition leaders said Mr. Yanukovych was responsible for the deaths. But riot police stopped short of completely storming Independence Square, which has been the symbol of resistance to his government.

Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the stanza:

The explosion of stun grenades thrown by police echoed through the center of Kiev until about 5 a.m., when police appeared to halt further advances. Their efforts were complicated by fires that had begun to burn out of control----one in a massive trade union building that the protesters had used as headquarters.

February 18, 2014.

"There are a couple of minutes before you need go," said O'Brien. "We shall meet again----if we do meet again----"

KIEV, Ukraine----Weeks of stalemate between the government and protesters here were shattered Tuesday by a burst of deadly violence that provoked a massive crackdown.

Winston looked up at him. "In the place where there is no darkness?" he said hesitantly.

Authorities stormed the activists' encampments in the center of the capital, leading to fiery battles that lasted well into the night.

O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. "In the place where there is no darkness," he said, as though he had recognized the allusion. "And in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave? Any message? Any question?"

At least 18 people were killed, and the number of injured climbed into the hundreds as police advanced toward Kiev's Independence Square, the heart of the protest movement, with the flash and thud of concussion grenades. As fighting progressed, so did the weaponry; many of the injured arrived at makeshift hospitals with gunshot wounds.

February 17, 2014.

Tennessee Defeat Has Labor Leaders Thinking Inward

"Black, very shabby. With two straps."

Labor leaders are gathering in Houston this week to plot out their strategy for the year, but much of their focus will be almost 700 miles away, in Chattanooga, Tenn., where workers on Friday rejected the United Auto Workers attempt to organize under the union's label at a Volkswagen VOW3.XE +0.15% plant.

"Black, two straps, very shabby----good. One day in the fairly near future----I cannot give a date----one of the messages among your morning's work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a repeat. On the following day you will go to work without your briefcase. At some time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say "I think you have dropped your brief-case." The one he gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book. You will return it within fourteen days."

Union leaders over the weekend voiced outrage about an anti-union campaign led by Republican Sen. Bob Corker, other Tennessee Republicans, and conservative lobbyists, blaming them for the defeat. But labor officials will also be looking inward over the next few days to consider whether their strategies need fine-tuning.

They were silent for a moment.

"The UAW, and the labor movement as a whole, is going to have to assess what happened [in Chattanooga] and use it as a learning experience for the future," said Josh Goldstein, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest federation of unions, whose executive council is gathering in Texas.

February 16, 2014.

In Canada, a Fishing Town Ponders Its End

"That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you. It is important to change one's hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of the book" ----even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to pronounce the words as though they were in italics---- "Goldstein's book, you understand, as soon as possible. It may be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not many in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought Police hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce them. It makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word. Do you carry a briefcase to work with you?" he added.

LITTLE BAY ISLANDS, Newfoundland----Alma Budgell is the last of 12 children born to a fishing family still living in this picturesque community. Now, she hopes to be among the very last people ever to live here.

"As a rule, yes."

The village has no retail shop and a school with just two children. Founded almost two hundred years ago, the town thrived with Newfoundland's once mighty fishing industry and declined along with it. Only some 90 people, most of them older than 60, still live here year-round.

"What is it like?"

Its tale of a dwindling and aging population is not uncommon among small towns in the Western world, but residents here have an unusual resettlement option.

February 15, 2014.

As World's Kids Get Fatter, Doctors Turn to the Knife

They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go. O'Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue. It was important, he said, not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very observant. As soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget her existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then stopped.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia----Daifailluh al-Bugami was just a year old when his parents noticed that his lips turned blue as he slept at night. It was his weight, doctors said, putting pressure on his delicate airways.

"There are details to be settled," he said. "I assume that you have a hiding-place of some kind?"

Now Daifailluh is 3, and at 61 pounds he is nearly double the typical weight of a child his age. So the Bugamis are planning the once unthinkable: To have their toddler undergo bariatric surgery to permanently remove part of his stomach in hopes of reducing his appetite and staving off a lifetime of health problems.

Winston explained about the room over Mr Charrington's shop.

That such a young child would be considered for weight-loss surgery----something U.S. surgeons generally won't do----underscores the growing health crisis here and elsewhere in the Middle East. Widespread access to unhealthy foods, coupled with sedentary behavior brought on by wealth and the absence of a dieting and exercise culture, have caused obesity levels in Saudi Arabia and many other Gulf states to approach or even exceed those in Western countries.

February 14, 2014.

U.S. Speedskating Asks for Permission to Change Under Armour Suits

"What shall it be this time?" he said, still with the same faint suggestion of irony. "To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?"

SOCHI, Russia----U.S. Speedskating asked Olympic and skating officials late Friday night for the option to switch the new Under Armour suits that some skaters think are causing the team's long-track athletes to underperform at these Games, the organization's executive director Ted Morris said.

"To the past," said Winston.

The request doesn't guarantee that American skaters will be wearing different suits when competition resumes on Saturday afternoon, should the International Skating Union and the International Olympic Committee sign off.

"The past is more important," agreed O'Brien gravely.

The team is currently split into two groups: those who want to stick with the current model and those who would revert to a suit they used while racking up victories throughout the fall. The alternate suit is also made by Under Armour.

February 13, 2014.

Termites Teach Robots a Thing or Two

He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist-watch.

CHICAGO----Inspired by termites, Harvard University researchers have designed a construction crew of tiny robots able to build complicated structures without blueprints or outside intervention.

"It is almost time for you to leave, comrade," he said to Julia. "Wait. The decanter is still half full."

The robots, which took four years to design, are the latest innovation in what computer scientists and robotics researchers call swarm intelligence----a field in which scientists are exploring ways to enable large groups of simple robots or flying drones to collaborate.

He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stem.

"Every robot acts independently, but together they will end up building what you want," said team leader Justin Werfel, a staff scientist in bio-inspired robotics at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University who helped demonstrate the robots Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.

February 12, 2014.

"You understand," he said, "that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark. You will receive orders and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later I shall send you a book from which you will learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which we shall destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full members of the Brotherhood. But between the general aims that we are fighting for and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything. I tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen. You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear. As this was your first contact, it will be preserved. When you receive orders, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it will be through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face."

Yankee captain Derek Jeter will retire after the 2014 season, he announced today via a letter from his Facebook account. Jeter's agent, Casey Close, confirmed that the letter is real and that this will be Jeter's last year.

Yankees' Derek Jeter to Retire After This Season

He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony. However much in earnest he might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs to a fanatic. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage. 'This is unavoidable,' his voice seemed to say; 'this is what we have got to do, unflinchingly. But this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth living again.' A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O'Brien. For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy figure of Goldstein. When you looked at O'Brien's powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that he could be defeated. There was no stratagem that he was not equal to, no danger that he could not foresee. Even Julia seemed to be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently. O'Brien went on:

"I could not be more sure," Jeter wrote. "I know it in my heart. The 2014 season will be my last year playing professional baseball."

"You will have heard rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages on walls, recognizing one another by codewords or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others. Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way."

Jeter, who will turn 40 ion June 26, is the undisputed face of baseball, a shortstop renowned for always saying and doing the right thing and never making a mistake in the nation's toughest market. He is beloved by Yankee fans and respected by his opponents----and a bigger-than-the-game figure who has dated starlets and used his considerable star power to headline major advertising campaigns.

February 11, 2014.

Standard Hotel to Fetch a Postcrisis Record

There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather absent-minded air O'Brien pushed them towards the others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. O'Brien looked at his wristwatch again.

The Standard Hotel in Manhattan's bustling Meatpacking district became famous a few years ago when some of its more brazen guests disrobed in front of its floor-to-ceiling windows.

"You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin," he said. "I shall switch on in a quarter of an hour. Take a good look at these comrades' faces before you go. You will be seeing them again. I may not."

Now the downtown hot spot is raising eyebrows for a different reason: a near-record sales price.

Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man's dark eyes flickered over their faces. There was not a trace of friendliness in his manner. He was memorizing their appearance, but he felt no interest in them, or appeared to feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking or giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out, closing the door silently behind him. O'Brien was strolling up and down, one hand in the pocket of his black overalls, the other holding his cigarette.

Final bidders include a group led by investor Steven Kantor. They and others are in negotiations to pay more than $400 million for the five-year-old property, say people familiar with the matter. The Standard, which is managed by hotelier Andre Balazs's company, sits above the city's elevated pedestrian park known as the HighLine and attracts a young and chic crowd.

February 10, 2014.

Millions Trapped in Health-Law Coverage Gap

"Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different person? We may be obliged to give him a new identity. His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair---- even his voice would be different. And you yourself might have become a different person. Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb."

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.----Ernest Maiden was dumbfounded to learn that he falls through the cracks of the health-care law because in a typical week he earns about $200 from the Happiness and Hair Beauty and Barber Salon.

Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin’s Mongolian face. There were no scars that he could see. Julia had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced O’Brien boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be assent.

Like millions of other Americans caught in a mismatch of state and federal rules, the 57-year-old hair stylist doesn't make enough money to qualify for federal subsidies to buy health insurance. If he earned another $1,300 a year, the government would pay the full cost. Instead, coverage would cost about what he earns.

"Good. Then that is settled."

"It's a Catch-22," said Mr. Maiden, an uninsured diabetic. Without help, he said, he must "choose between paying the bills and buying medicine."

February 9, 2014.

Russia Wins First Gold Medal in Team Figure Skating Competition

It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. "No," he said finally.

SOCHI, Russia----Russia won its first gold medal of the 2014 Winter Games Sunday night in a new team figure skating competition that showed it has deepened its talent bench two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union—and that it can score an important victory at its own Olympics.

"You did well to tell me," said O’Brien. "It is necessary for us to know everything."

Russian President Vladimir Putin was on hand to soak in the win, cheering from the stands for 15 year-old Yulia Lipnitskaya, a rising star who swept the women's singles portion of the team event.

He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with somewhat more expression in it:

The Olympics started off on a disappointing foot for its host country this past weekend, with two missed opportunities at medals in the biathlon and skiathlon. But the Russian team found its footing Sunday afternoon, first with a bronze medal in speedskating, then in luge, biathlon and a crown jewel----a gold in a sport in which it has trailed other countries over the past two decades.

February 8, 2014.

Violence Rocks Syrian City During Another Civilian Evacuation Attempt

"Yes."

HOMS, Syria----An attempt to implement the second phase of a United Nations plan to evacuate civilians and take desperately needed aid into a besieged rebel-held area in this central Syrian city was marred by violence on Saturday, with one U.N. official describing what happened as "a day in hell."

"You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?"

One day after succeeding in evacuating 83 people trapped in sections of central Homs for more than 18 months, a convoy comprised of U.N. and Syrian Arab Red Crescent vehicles was attacked with mortars and gunfire. The attack killed at least five people on the rebel side, wounded one Syrian aid worker and forced a U.N. team including its top representative in the country to remain trapped in the rebel-held sector for hours.

"No!" broke in Julia.

Opposition activists and one member of the aid team that went into the rebel-held area blamed pro-regime forces for the attack, while Homs Governor Talal al Barazi and several security and military officials blamed the rebels.

February 7, 2014.

As the Winter Olympics Open, Putin Showcases a Defiant Russia


"You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dockworker?"

SOCHI, Russia----On Friday night, Russian President Vladimir Putin will entertain world leaders at a reception under soaring, Corinthian-style columns and a giant, sparkling chandelier in the Atrium ballroom of the Stalin-era Rus Sanatorium.

"Yes."

It will be one of the most exclusive events of the Winter Olympics here, but Mr. Putin's guest list has some big gaps. Few of the Western world's most prominent leaders will be there, declining entreaties to attend, according to diplomats and government officials.

"You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?"

Instead, Russia's president will be surrounded by Chinese President Xi Jinping, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko. North Korea is sending its second-highest official, even though the country has no athletes competing at the Sochi Games.

February 6, 2014.

Immigration Overhaul Stalls

"Yes."

House Speaker John Boehner squashed growing expectations that Congress would rewrite immigration laws this year----dealing a setback to the White House, a swath of U.S. businesses and a bloc of fellow Republicans seeking to improve their party's chances with Hispanic voters.

"If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face----are you prepared to do that?"

Rank-and-file Republicans have voiced few complaints about the GOP's latest ideas for an immigration overhaul, which include some legal status for most of the 11.5 million people in the U.S. illegally. But many balked at debating an issue that divides Republicans and feared giving the president a legislative victory in an election year. Some suggested pushing the issue to 2015, when Republicans might have control of the Senate and more leverage.

"Yes."

Many in GOP ranks also expressed distrust that President Barack Obama would enforce any law they pass. "There's widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws," Mr. Boehner told reporters. "It's going to be difficult to move any immigration legislation until that changes."

February 5, 2014.

Inside the Microsoft CEO Search: How Satya Nadella Was Chosen

"To betray your country to foreign powers?"

The search for a new Microsoft Corp. MSFT -1.46%  leader was taking its toll.

"Yes."

It had been five months since Steve Ballmer announced he was stepping down as chief executive, and more than a year since the company's board had directed faster change at the once dominant technology giant.

"You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases----to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?"

Relations between Mr. Ballmer and co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates, as is their habit after decades of friendship, waxed and waned through the process and at times came under strain, people familiar with the men's relationship said. At times directors disagreed with actions of their fellow board members, or bristled at the media scrutiny of their search process, said other people familiar with the matter.

February 4, 2014.

RadioShack to Close About 500 Stores Within Months

"Yes."

On Sunday, RadioShack Corp. RSH -4.84%  used comedy, in the form of a Super Bowl ad, to show its stores being dismantled and rebuilt. On Tuesday, the news broke that some of the stores will be dismantled, period.

"To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?"

According to people familiar with the matter, RadioShack is planning to close around 500 locations in the coming months. It isn't clear which of RadioShack's roughly 4,300 stores will be closed and when exactly the closings will begin. The people familiar with the matter noted that it isn't unusual for companies to close stores when going through a restructuring.

"Yes."

The news was a cold dose of reality after the upbeat feeling generated by the commercial, which was widely considered one of the best that aired during the big game Sunday night. In the commercial, RadioShack poked fun at its outdated image by bringing in a crowd of throwback characters from the 1980s, including Hulk Hogan, Erik Estrada and Alf, who purport to want their store back and proceed to tear out the shelves and haul away products.

February 3, 2014.

Top Corporate Executives Scored Big in 2013 Rally

"You are prepared to give your lives?"

The stock market is under pressure and investors are feeling pain.

But some executives scored such stunning windfalls last year, due to 2013's market gains, that the recent troubles likely will sting a little less.

"Yes."

Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of other top executives notched multibillion-dollar paper gains from their companies' shares in 2013, highlighting the outsize winnings some corporate insiders made during last year's rally.

"You are prepared to commit murder?"

Mr. Buffett's holdings of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRKB -2.34%  appreciated by $12.7 billion last year. Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -3.50%  shares held by Mr. Bezos jumped by $12 billion in 2013, while the value of Mr. Zuckerberg's stake in Facebook Inc. FB -1.74% surged by $12 billion.

February 2, 2014.

Christie's Office Attacks Claims of Former Ally's Lawyer

"No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently." He looked at his wrist-watch. "It is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will have to leave separately. You, comrade"----he bowed his head to Julia----"will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to do?"

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's administration has attacked the motives of a former ally whose attorney claims the GOP presidential hopeful knew of highly disruptive lane closures on a New York area bridge as they were going on, contrary to the governor's previous statements.

"Anything that we are capable of," said Winston.

Mr. Christie's office challenged the claims of his former associate, David Wildstein, in a public statement on Saturday. "Bottom line----David Wildstein will do and say anything to save David Wildstein," said the message, first reported by Politico and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.

Mr. Wildstein's attorney Alan Zegas in the letter released to the Port Authority and the media on Friday said "evidence exists…tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge" of the lane closures while they were still going on during the week beginning Sept. 9.

February 1, 2014.

Too Much From Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG Estate S-series

"Then there is such a person as Goldstein?" he said.

AS A GREAT MAN with a rhinestone piano once said "Too much of a good thing is wonderful!" Well, Lee, some lovely gentlemen from Stuttgart have brought you a car. The Why of it will have to wait till we appear before our celestial magistrates, but the What is plain enough: one of the world's fastest station wagons (186 mph); the world's quickest wagon—0-60 mph in a sinus-draining 3.6 seconds; and surely one of the most considered and expressive absurdities in the history of consumption. And it's a wagon.

"Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know."

The specimen is a 2014 Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG Estate S-series, a family hauler as 'roided-out as the company's performance division, AMG, can feasibly make it.

"And the conspiracy----the organization? Is it real? It is not simply an invention of the Thought Police?"

Mercedes sold 123 copies of this car in the U.S. last year and, in case you are wondering, no, they don't make any money off them. But the cars have an outsize footprint among enthusiasts, automotive journalists and other ballers. I had one for a couple of weeks----the S-Model 4Matic wagon----and it is basically a five-passenger rally car. It has a panoramic sunroof so God can look down at your passengers' desperation.