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.