PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2017

ATUT KORUPSI UNTUK KEPENTINGAN BISNIS

saco-indonesia.com, Indonesian Corruption Wacth (ICW) telah menilai korupsi yang dilakukan oleh Gubernur Banten, Ratu Atut Choysiah, lebih kental untuk kepentingan bisnis keluarga daripada politik. Pasalnya, proyek-proyek yang tertera pada APBD Banten sebagian besar tender telah dimenangkan oleh perusahaan milik keluarga Atut.

“Aspek ekonomi lebih kental daripada aspek politik. Upaya pemenangan proyek sebagian ke perusahaan milik Atut. Kan Wawan juga banyak membiayai politisi-politisi di sana,” kata Wakil koordinator ICW, Ade Irawan, saat berbincang, Jumat (20/12/2013).

Ade juga menjelaskan, karakteristik korupsi Atut adalah memenangkan perusahaan miliknya untuk bisa mendapatkan proyek di APBN dan APBD dengan memanfaatkan kekuasaannya. Sehingga ketika kekuasaan tidak lagi dipegang, mereka akan kesulitan untuk membiayai perusahaannya.

“Bagaimana mereka mengarahkan uang negara untuk perusahaan mereka. Misalnya dalam pengadaan sport centre dan RSUD. Kepentingan bisnis lebih besar. Itu faktor yang lebih besar untuk bisa membangun sebuah dinasti politik di Banten,” ucapnya.

Ade juga menambahkan, jika kepentingan untuk bisnis mereka tidak tercapai, maka mereka juga akan mencoba merebut kekuasaan sehingga kepentingan bisnis mereka bisa diraih.

“Misalnya di Pandeglang untuk bisa bekerja dengan Bupati Pandeglang, Dimyati Natakusuma, asal ada kepentingan bisnis tertentu yang dipertemukan. Jika tidak, mereka (Atut) akan rebut kekuasaan,” tukasnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

BUPATI NGADA BISA DIPENJARA 3 TAHUN

saco-indonesia.com, Ketua DPP Partai Hanura Saleh Husin telah menilai keliru sikap Bupati Ngada Marianus Sae yang telah melakukan pemblokiran terhadap Bandara Turelelo Soa, NTT. Menurut dia, sebagai pejabat negara, seharusnya Marianus bisa untuk memberikan contoh yang baik.

"Harusnya sebagai seorang kepala daerah beliau justru harus memberikan contoh yang baik buat masyarakat," ujar Saleh dalam pesan singkat, Senin (23/12).

Dia juga menjelaskan, pemicu yang telah membuat Marianus marah harusnya bisa diantisipasi dengan baik tanpa harus bersikap arogan. Dia telah menilai, tindakan ini juga akan mencoreng dunia penerbangan Tanah Air.

"Ini adalah tindakan arogansi dan tidak dapat dibenarkan sama sekali dan ini juga sangat mencoreng dunia penerbangan Indonesia di mata internasional," kata anggota Komisi V DPR yang membidangi Perhubungan ini.

Saleh pun juga mendesak agar Kementerian Perhubungan (Kemenhub) untuk memberikan sanksi akibat insiden itu. Bahkan menurut dia, Bupati Ngada juga bisa dituntut pidana 3 tahun dan denda Rp 1 miliar.

"Untuk itu Kemenhub harus bisa memberikan teguran ke pemda setempat terkait masalah tersebut. Dia juga sudah melanggar Pasal 421, UU No 1 Tahun 2009 Tentang Penerbangan. Ancaman Pidana 3 tahun, denda Rp 1 miliar. Harusnya polisi dapat langsung mengambil tindakan. Karena itu sudah mengancam nyawa manusia," pungkasnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

DATA ALIRAN DUIT ANAS SUDAH DISERAHKAN KE KPK

saco-indonesia.com, Pusat Pelaporan dan Analisis Transaksi Keuangan (PPATK), telah mengaku sudah menyerahkan data informasi soal aliran duit di rekening milik mantan Ketua Umum Partai Demokrat, Anas Urbaningrum kepada Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK).

Langkah itu juga sebagai upaya dalam menelusuri transaksi yang mencurigakan suami Atthiyah Laila itu.

"Seluruh permintaan KPK telah mengenai aliran dana (Anas), juga sudah kami berikan," ungkap Ketua PPATK M Yusuf kepada wartawan, di Gedung DPR, Senayan, Jakarta, Senin (27/1/2014).

Yusuf juga menambahkan, setelah laporan tersebut telah dilaporkan, maka KPK juga sebagai penegak hukum akan dapat mengkaji apakah terindikasi pidana atau tidak.

"Setahu saya dari segi transaksi kita tidak terlibat, mungkin dari perkembangan penyidik," tandasnya.

Sebelumnya, Juru bicara KPK, Johan Budi, juga mengaku meminta bantuan kepada PPATK untuk dapat menelusuri transaksi mencurigakan dari tersangka kasus gratifikasi proyek Hambalang itu. KPK pun juga terus berupaya dalam melakukan pelacakan terhadap aset milik mantan Ketua PB HMI tersebut.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Konveksi 2 lantai di Jakbar terbakar, 22 unit damkar diterjunkan

Si jago merah telah kembali mengamuk di Jalan Sawah Lio IV Rt 04 Rw 06, Jembatan Lima, Jakarta Barat. Api telah membakar sebuah rumah dan satu konveksi berlantai dua.

"22 Unit mobil pemadam kebakaran telah diterjunkan ke lokasi, terdiri dari unit pompa, rescue dan lain sebagainya," ujar petugas piket Suku Dinas Pemadam Kebakaran Jakarta Barat, Suparjo di Jakarta, Jumat (14/3).

Kebakaran diperkirakan telah terjadi sekitar pukul 08.55 WIB berdasarkan laporan dari salah seorang warga. Saat ini, petugas masih menelusuri penyebab kebakaran tersebut.

"Lokasinya kebetulan di kawasan rumah padat penduduk, dekat pasar Mitra," jelasnya.

Tidak ada korban jiwa dalam peristiwa ini. Tidak diketahui berapa kerugian akibat kebakaran tersebut.

UMRAH RAMADHAN MENYERUPAI HAJI

Salah satu amal istimewa di bulan puasa adalah umrah di bulan Ramadhan. Keutamaannya menyerupai ibadah haji. Diriwayatkan dalam Shahihain, dari Ibnu Abbas Radhiyallahu ‘Anhuma, Rasulullah Shallallahu ‘Alaihi Wasallam bersabda kepada seorang wanita Anshar, “Apa yang menghalangimu untuk ikut berhaji bersama kami?” Ia menjawab, “Kami tidak memiliki kendaraan kecuali dua ekor unta yang dipakai untuk mengairi tanaman. Bapak dan anaknya berangkat haji dengan satu ekor unta dan meninggalkan satu ekor lagi untuk kami yang digunakan untuk mengairi tanaman.” Nabi Shallallahu ‘Alaihi Wasallam bersabda,

فَإِذَا جَاءَ رَمَضَانُ فَاعْتَمِرِي ، فَإِنَّ عُمْرَةً فِيهِ تَعْدِلُ حَجّ

“Maka apabila datang Ramadhan, berumrahlah. Karena sesungguhnya umrah di dalamnya menyamai ibadah haji.” Dalam riwayat lain, “Seperti haji bersamaku.” Lalu apa maksud dari hadits di atas?

Para ulama berbeda pendapat tentang orang yang akan mendapatkan keutamaan yang tersebut dalam hadits. Paling tidak ada tiga pendapat utama: Pertama, hadits ini khusus untuk wanita yang diajak bicara oleh Nabi Shallallahu ‘Alaihi Wasallam. Di antara ulama yang berpendapat dengannya adalah Sa’id bin Jubair dari kalangan Tabi’in. (lihat fathul Baari, Ibnul Hajar: 3/609)

Sandaran pendapat ini adalah hadits Ummu Ma’qil, beliau berkata: “Haji adalah haji dan umrah adalah umrah. Sungguh Rasulullah Shallallahu ‘Alaihi Wasallam telah mengatakan hal ini kepada-ku; aku tidak tahu apakah itu khusus untuk-ku, -yakni: ataukah untuk manusia secara umum-.” (Diriwayatkan oleh Abu Dawud, no. 1989, hanya saja lafadz hadits ini lemah. Dilemahkan oleh Syaikh Al-Albani dalam Dhaif Abi Dawud)

Pendapat kedua, Keutamaan umrah ini bagi orang yang berniat haji lalu tidak mampu mengerjakannya. Kemudian ia menggantinya dengan umrah di Ramadhan. Sehingga ia mendapat pahala haji secara sempurna bersama Rasulullah Shallallahu ‘Alaihi Wasallam karena terkumpul dalam dirinya niat haji dalam pelaksanaan umrah.

Ibnu Rajab dalam Lathaif al-Ma’arif berkata: Dan ketahuilah, orang yang tak mampu dari satu amal kebaikan dan bersedih serta berangan-angan bisa mengerjakannya maka ia mendapat pahala bersama dengan orang yang mengerjakannya. –lalu beliau menyebutkan contoh-contohnya, di antaranya-  beberapa wanita tidak bisa berhaji bersama Rasulullah Shallallahu ‘Alaihi Wasallam. Maka saat beliau kembali, para wanita bertanya tentang sesuatu yang bisa mencukupkannya (menyamai) dari haji tersebut. Beliau bersabda: ‘Berumrahlah di Ramadhan. Karena sesungguhnya umrah di Ramadhan  menyamai ibadah haji atau haji bersamaku’.” Selesai. Ibnu Katsir dalam Tafsirnya juga menyimpulkan yang sama (I/531)

Pendapat ketiga, Pendapat madhab empat dan selainnya, bahwa keutamaan dalam hadits ini bersifat umum bagi setiap orang yang berumrah di bulan Ramadhan. Umrah di dalamnya menyamai haji berlaku bagi semua orang. Tidak khusus hanya untuk person-person atau karena kondisi tertentu. Hal ini seperti yang disebutkan dalam kitab Radd ak-Mukhtar (II/473), Mawahib al-Jalil (III/29), al-Majmu’ (VII/138), al-Mughni (III/91), dan al-Mausu’ah al-Fiqhiyah (II/144)

Pendapat yang paling mendekati kebenaran adalah pendapat ketiga. Bahwa keutamaan tersebut berlaku bagi siapa saja yang berumrah di bulan Ramadhan. Hal ini didukung oleh beberapa alasan berikut ini:

    Hadits tersebut bersumber diriwayatkan dari sejumlah sahabat. Al-Tirmidzi berkata: “Dalam bab ini bersumber  Ibnu Abbas, Jabir, Abu Hurairah, Anas, Wahb bin Khanbasy.” Dan mayoritas riwayat mereka tidak disebutkan kisah wanita penanya.
    Praktek kaum muslimin sepanjang masa dari kalangan sahabat, tabi’in, para ulama dan shalihin. Mereka sangat semangat melaksanakan umrah di bulan Ramadhan untuk mendapatkan pahala ini.

Penghususan keutamaan ini untuk mereka yang tidak mampu melaksanakan haji pada tahun tersebut terbantahkan dengan jawaban berikut ini: Sesungguhnya orang yang benar niat dan semangatnya lalu mengusahakan sebab-sebabnya yang kemudian ada sesuatu yang menghalanginya, maka Allah Subhanahu wa Ta’ala akan mencatat untuknya pahala amal melalui keutamaan niat. Maka bagaimana Nabi Shallallahu ‘Alaihi Wasallam mengikat pahala dengan amal tambahan, yakni mengerjakan umrah di Ramadhan. Padahal niat yang jujur dan benar sudah cukup untuk diberikan pahala.

Makna Umrah di Ramadhan menyamai Haji

Keutamaan umrah di Ramadhan yang menyamai haji memiliki beberapa makna: Pertama, tidak diragukan lagi bahwa umrah di Ramadhan tidak mencukupkan seseorang dari kewajiban haji. Maknanya, siapa yang sudah umrah di Ramadhan tidak lantas ia terbebas dari kewajiban mengerjakan haji yang wajib.

Maksud dari hadits adalah penyamaan pahala, bukan penyamaan dalam pelaksanaan perintah. Jadi, samanya di sini adalah kadar pahala antara umrah di Ramadhan dan pahala haji. Bukan dari jenis dan bentuknya. Dan tidak diragukan lagi bahwa haji lebih utama daripada  umrah ditinjau dari jenis amal.

Maka siapa yang sudah umrah di Ramadhan maka ia mendapatkan pahala sebanyak pahala haji. Hanya saja dalam pelaksanaan ibadah haji terdapat keutamaan, keistimewaan, dan kedudukan yang tidak didapatkan dalam umrah. Seperti doa di Arafah, melempar jumrah, menyembelih hewan kurban, dan selainnya. Walaupun keduanya sama dalam kadar banyaknya pahala, namuan keduanya tidak sama dalam pelaksanaan dan jenis ibadah. Ini seperti keterangan Ibnu Taimiyah saat beliau menjelaskan hadits yang menyebutkan bahwa surat Al-Ikhlash menyamai sepertiga Al-Qur’an.

Ibnu Rahawaih berkata, makna hadits ini, -yakni hadits: “Umrah di Ramadhan menyamai haji.”- seperti yang diriwayatkan dari Nabi Shallallahu ‘Alaihi Wasallam bahwa beliau bersabda: “Siapa yang membaca Qul Huwallahu Ahad maka sungguh ia telah membaca sepertiga Al-Qur’an.” (HR. al-Tirmidzi)

Ibnu Taimiyah dalam Majmu Fatawanya berkata, “Telah maklum abhwa maksudnya: umrahmu di Ramadhan menyamai haji bersamaku (Nabi Shallallahu ‘Alaihi Wasallam). Karena sungguh ia berkeinginan untuk berhaji bersamanya. Lalu ia terhalang melakukannya. Lalu beliau memberitahukan kepadanya tentang sesuatu yang menyamai kedudukannya. Ini juga berlaku bagi sahabat lain yang kondisinya sama dengannya. Orang berakal tak akan mengatakan seperti yang dipahami orang-orang jahil, bahwa umrah salah seorang kita dari miqat atau dari Makkah menyamai haji bersamanya Shallallahu ‘Alaihi Wasallam. Sungguh sangat maklum, haji yang sempurna lebih utama daripada umrah di Ramadhan. Kalau salah seorang kita mengerjakan haji wajib maka tak akan seperti berhaji bersama beliau. Maka bagaimana dengan umrah!! Maka inti dari hadits, umrah salah seorang kita dari miqat  di bulan Ramadhan seperti kedudukan haji.”

Wallahu Ta’ala A’lam.

Sumber : http://ibadahhaji.wordpress.com

Baca Artikel Lainnya : HIKMAH SAKTI PERDANA TRAVEL HAJI DAN UMROH

Gene Fullmer, a Brawling Middleweight Champion, Dies at 83

Fullmer, who reigned when fight clubs abounded and Friday night fights were a television staple, was known for his title bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio.

Mike Phillips, Half of Kentucky’s ‘Twin Towers’ of Basketball, Dies at 59

The 6-foot-10 Phillips played alongside the 6-11 Rick Robey on the Wildcats team that won the 1978 N.C.A.A. men’s basketball title.

From T Magazine: Street Lit’s Power Couple

THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.

In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.

One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.

But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.

JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”

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In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”

That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.

But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.

“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”

THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.

In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.

“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”

They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.

They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”

Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”

The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.

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Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”

The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.

Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.

The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”

Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”

Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.

For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”

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Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.

The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.

But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:

WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS

“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”

One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”

Suzanne Crough, Actress in ‘The Partridge Family,’ Dies at 52

Ms. Crough played the youngest daughter on the hit ’70s sitcom starring David Cassidy and Shirley Jones.

Dave Goldberg, Head of Web Survey Company and Half of a Silicon Valley Power Couple, Dies at 47

By VINDU GOEL and QUENTIN HARDY

Mr. Goldberg was a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist who was married to Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook.

Dave Goldberg Was Lifelong Women’s Advocate

Verne Gagne, Wrestler Who Grappled Through Two Eras, Dies at 89

Gagne wrestled professionally from the late 1940s until the 1980s and was a transitional figure between the early 20th century barnstormers and the steroidal sideshows of today

Police Rethink Long Tradition on Using Force

WASHINGTON — During a training course on defending against knife attacks, a young Salt Lake City police officer asked a question: “How close can somebody get to me before I’m justified in using deadly force?”

Dennis Tueller, the instructor in that class more than three decades ago, decided to find out. In the fall of 1982, he performed a rudimentary series of tests and concluded that an armed attacker who bolted toward an officer could clear 21 feet in the time it took most officers to draw, aim and fire their weapon.

The next spring, Mr. Tueller published his findings in SWAT magazine and transformed police training in the United States. The “21-foot rule” became dogma. It has been taught in police academies around the country, accepted by courts and cited by officers to justify countless shootings, including recent episodes involving a homeless woodcarver in Seattle and a schizophrenic woman in San Francisco.

Ghostly Voices From Thomas Edison’s Dolls Can Now Be Heard

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.

In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.

Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.

Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.

The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.

In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory.

“The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”

Last month, the Historical Park posted online three never-before-heard Edison doll recordings, including the two from the Rolfses’ collection. “There are probably more out there, and we’re hoping people will now get them digitized,” Mr. Fabris said.

The technology, which is known as Irene (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), was developed by the particle physicist Carl Haber and the engineer Earl Cornell at Lawrence Berkeley. Irene extracts sound from cylinder and disk records. It can also reconstruct audio from recordings so badly damaged they were deemed unplayable.

“We are now hearing sounds from history that I did not expect to hear in my lifetime,” Mr. Fabris said.

The Rolfses said they were not sure what to expect in August when they carefully packed their two Edison doll cylinders, still attached to their motors, and drove from their home in Hortonville, Wis., to the National Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass. The center had recently acquired Irene technology.

Cylinders carry sound in a spiral groove cut by a phonograph recording needle that vibrates up and down, creating a surface made of tiny hills and valleys. In the Irene set-up, a microscope perched above the shaft takes thousands of high-resolution images of small sections of the grooves.

Stitched together, the images provide a topographic map of the cylinder’s surface, charting changes in depth as small as one five-hundredth the thickness of a human hair. Pitch, volume and timbre are all encoded in the hills and valleys and the speed at which the record is played.

At the conservation center, the preservation specialist Mason Vander Lugt attached one of the cylinders to the end of a rotating shaft. Huddled around a computer screen, the Rolfses first saw the wiggly waveform generated by Irene. Then came the digital audio. The words were at first indistinct, but as Mr. Lugt filtered out more of the noise, the rhyme became clearer.

“That was the Eureka moment,” Mr. Rolfs said.

In 1890, a girl in Edison’s laboratory had recited:

There was a little girl,

And she had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very, very good.

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

Recently, the conservation center turned up another surprise.

In 2010, the Woody Guthrie Foundation received 18 oversize phonograph disks from an anonymous donor. No one knew if any of the dirt-stained recordings featured Guthrie, but Tiffany Colannino, then the foundation’s archivist, had stored them unplayed until she heard about Irene.

Last fall, the center extracted audio from one of the records, labeled “Jam Session 9” and emailed the digital file to Ms. Colannino.

“I was just sitting in my dining room, and the next thing I know, I’m hearing Woody,” she said. In between solo performances of “Ladies Auxiliary,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Dead or Alive,” Guthrie tells jokes, offers some back story, and makes the audience laugh. “It is quintessential Guthrie,” Ms. Colannino said.

The Rolfses’ dolls are back in the display cabinet in Wisconsin. But with audio stored on several computers, they now have a permanent voice.

Joseph Lechleider, a Father of the DSL Internet Technology, Dies at 82

Mr. Lechleider helped invent DSL technology, which enabled phone companies to offer high-speed web access over their infrastructure of copper wires.

Fatal Police Shootings: Accounts Since Ferguson

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Dave Goldberg Was Lifelong Women’s Advocate

Even as a high school student, Dave Goldberg was urging female classmates to speak up. As a young dot-com executive, he had one girlfriend after another, but fell hard for a driven friend named Sheryl Sandberg, pining after her for years. After they wed, Mr. Goldberg pushed her to negotiate hard for high compensation and arranged his schedule so that he could be home with their children when she was traveling for work.

Mr. Goldberg, who died unexpectedly on Friday, was a genial, 47-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur who built his latest company, SurveyMonkey, from a modest enterprise to one recently valued by investors at $2 billion. But he was also perhaps the signature male feminist of his era: the first major chief executive in memory to spur his wife to become as successful in business as he was, and an essential figure in “Lean In,” Ms. Sandberg’s blockbuster guide to female achievement.

Over the weekend, even strangers were shocked at his death, both because of his relatively young age and because they knew of him as the living, breathing, car-pooling center of a new philosophy of two-career marriage.

“They were very much the role models for what this next generation wants to grapple with,” said Debora L. Spar, the president of Barnard College. In a 2011 commencement speech there, Ms. Sandberg told the graduates that whom they married would be their most important career decision.

In the play “The Heidi Chronicles,” revived on Broadway this spring, a male character who is the founder of a media company says that “I don’t want to come home to an A-plus,” explaining that his ambitions require him to marry an unthreatening helpmeet. Mr. Goldberg grew up to hold the opposite view, starting with his upbringing in progressive Minneapolis circles where “there was woman power in every aspect of our lives,” Jeffrey Dachis, a childhood friend, said in an interview.

The Goldberg parents read “The Feminine Mystique” together — in fact, Mr. Goldberg’s father introduced it to his wife, according to Ms. Sandberg’s book. In 1976, Paula Goldberg helped found a nonprofit to aid children with disabilities. Her husband, Mel, a law professor who taught at night, made the family breakfast at home.

Later, when Dave Goldberg was in high school and his prom date, Jill Chessen, stayed silent in a politics class, he chastised her afterward. He said, “You need to speak up,” Ms. Chessen recalled in an interview. “They need to hear your voice.”

Years later, when Karin Gilford, an early employee at Launch Media, Mr. Goldberg’s digital music company, became a mother, he knew exactly what to do. He kept giving her challenging assignments, she recalled, but also let her work from home one day a week. After Yahoo acquired Launch, Mr. Goldberg became known for distributing roses to all the women in the office on Valentine’s Day.

Ms. Sandberg, who often describes herself as bossy-in-a-good-way, enchanted him when they became friendly in the mid-1990s. He “was smitten with her,” Ms. Chessen remembered. Ms. Sandberg was dating someone else, but Mr. Goldberg still hung around, even helping her and her then-boyfriend move, recalled Bob Roback, a friend and co-founder of Launch. When they finally married in 2004, friends remember thinking how similar the two were, and that the qualities that might have made Ms. Sandberg intimidating to some men drew Mr. Goldberg to her even more.

Over the next decade, Mr. Goldberg and Ms. Sandberg pioneered new ways of capturing information online, had a son and then a daughter, became immensely wealthy, and hashed out their who-does-what-in-this-marriage issues. Mr. Goldberg’s commute from the Bay Area to Los Angeles became a strain, so he relocated, later joking that he “lost the coin flip” of where they would live. He paid the bills, she planned the birthday parties, and both often left their offices at 5:30 so they could eat dinner with their children before resuming work afterward.

Friends in Silicon Valley say they were careful to conduct their careers separately, politely refusing when outsiders would ask one about the other’s work: Ms. Sandberg’s role building Facebook into an information and advertising powerhouse, and Mr. Goldberg at SurveyMonkey, which made polling faster and cheaper. But privately, their work was intertwined. He often began statements to his team with the phrase “Well, Sheryl said” sharing her business advice. He counseled her, too, starting with her salary negotiations with Mark Zuckerberg.

“I wanted Mark to really feel he stretched to get Sheryl, because she was worth it,” Mr. Goldberg explained in a 2013 “60 Minutes” interview, his Minnesota accent and his smile intact as he offered a rare peek of the intersection of marriage and money at the top of corporate life.

While his wife grew increasingly outspoken about women’s advancement, Mr. Goldberg quietly advised the men in the office on family and partnership matters, an associate said. Six out of 16 members of SurveyMonkey’s management team are female, an almost unheard-of ratio among Silicon Valley “unicorns,” or companies valued at over $1 billion.

When Mellody Hobson, a friend and finance executive, wrote a chapter of “Lean In” about women of color for the college edition of the book, Mr. Goldberg gave her feedback on the draft, a clue to his deep involvement. He joked with Ms. Hobson that she was too long-winded, like Ms. Sandberg, but aside from that, he said he loved the chapter, she said in an interview.

By then, Mr. Goldberg was a figure of fascination who inspired a “where can I get one of those?” reaction among many of the women who had read the best seller “Lean In.” Some lamented that Ms. Sandberg’s advice hinged too much on marrying a Dave Goldberg, who was humble enough to plan around his wife, attentive enough to worry about which shoes his young daughter would wear, and rich enough to help pay for the help that made the family’s balancing act manageable.

Now that he is gone, and Ms. Sandberg goes from being half of a celebrated partnership to perhaps the business world’s most prominent single mother, the pages of “Lean In” carry a new sting of loss.

“We are never at 50-50 at any given moment — perfect equality is hard to define or sustain — but we allow the pendulum to swing back and forth between us,” she wrote in 2013, adding that they were looking forward to raising teenagers together.

“Fortunately, I have Dave to figure it out with me,” she wrote.

Jim Fanning, 87, Dies; Lifted Baseball in Canada With Expos

Hired in 1968, a year before their first season, Mr. Fanning spent 25 years with the team, managing them to their only playoff appearance in Canada.

Baltimore Residents Away From Turmoil Consider Their Role

BALTIMORE — In the afternoons, the streets of Locust Point are clean and nearly silent. In front of the rowhouses, potted plants rest next to steps of brick or concrete. There is a shopping center nearby with restaurants, and a grocery store filled with fresh foods.

And the National Guard and the police are largely absent. So, too, residents say, are worries about what happened a few miles away on April 27 when, in a space of hours, parts of this city became riot zones.

“They’re not our reality,” Ashley Fowler, 30, said on Monday at the restaurant where she works. “They’re not what we’re living right now. We live in, not to be racist, white America.”

As Baltimore considers its way forward after the violent unrest brought by the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of injuries he suffered while in police custody, residents in its predominantly white neighborhoods acknowledge that they are sometimes struggling to understand what beyond Mr. Gray’s death spurred the turmoil here. For many, the poverty and troubled schools of gritty West Baltimore are distant troubles, glimpsed only when they pass through the area on their way somewhere else.

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And so neighborhoods of Baltimore are facing altogether different reckonings after Mr. Gray’s death. In mostly black communities like Sandtown-Winchester, where some of the most destructive rioting played out last week, residents are hoping businesses will reopen and that the police will change their strategies. But in mostly white areas like Canton and Locust Point, some residents wonder what role, if any, they should play in reimagining stretches of Baltimore where they do not live.

“Most of the people are kind of at a loss as to what they’re supposed to do,” said Dr. Richard Lamb, a dentist who has practiced in the same Locust Point office for nearly 39 years. “I listen to the news reports. I listen to the clergymen. I listen to the facts of the rampant unemployment and the lack of opportunities in the area. Listen, I pay my taxes. Exactly what can I do?”

And in Canton, where the restaurants have clever names like Nacho Mama’s and Holy Crepe Bakery and Café, Sara Bahr said solutions seemed out of reach for a proudly liberal city.

“I can only imagine how frustrated they must be,” said Ms. Bahr, 36, a nurse who was out with her 3-year-old daughter, Sally. “I just wish I knew how to solve poverty. I don’t know what to do to make it better.”

The day of unrest and the overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations that followed led to hundreds of arrests, often for violations of the curfew imposed on the city for five consecutive nights while National Guard soldiers patrolled the streets. Although there were isolated instances of trouble in Canton, the neighborhood association said on its website, many parts of southeast Baltimore were physically untouched by the tumult.

Tensions in the city bubbled anew on Monday after reports that the police had wounded a black man in Northwest Baltimore. The authorities denied those reports and sent officers to talk with the crowds that gathered while other officers clutching shields blocked traffic at Pennsylvania and West North Avenues.

Lt. Col. Melvin Russell, a community police officer, said officers had stopped a man suspected of carrying a handgun and that “one of those rounds was spent.”

Colonel Russell said officers had not opened fire, “so we couldn’t have shot him.”

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The colonel said the man had not been injured but was taken to a hospital as a precaution. Nearby, many people stood in disbelief, despite the efforts by the authorities to quash reports they described as “unfounded.”

Monday’s episode was a brief moment in a larger drama that has yielded anger and confusion. Although many people said they were familiar with accounts of the police harassing or intimidating residents, many in Canton and Locust Point said they had never experienced it themselves. When they watched the unrest, which many protesters said was fueled by feelings that they lived only on Baltimore’s margins, even those like Ms. Bahr who were pained by what they saw said they could scarcely comprehend the emotions associated with it.

But others, like Lambi Vasilakopoulos, who runs a casual restaurant in Canton, said they were incensed by what unfolded last week.

“What happened wasn’t called for. Protests are one thing; looting is another thing,” he said, adding, “We’re very frustrated because we’re the ones who are going to pay for this.”

There were pockets of optimism, though, that Baltimore would enter a period of reconciliation.

“I’m just hoping for peace,” Natalie Boies, 53, said in front of the Locust Point home where she has lived for 50 years. “Learn to love each other; be patient with each other; find justice; and care.”

A skeptical Mr. Vasilakopoulos predicted tensions would worsen.

“It cannot be fixed,” he said. “It’s going to get worse. Why? Because people don’t obey the laws. They don’t want to obey them.”

But there were few fears that the violence that plagued West Baltimore last week would play out on these relaxed streets. The authorities, Ms. Fowler said, would make sure of that.

“They kept us safe here,” she said. “I didn’t feel uncomfortable when I was in my house three blocks away from here. I knew I was going to be O.K. because I knew they weren’t going to let anyone come and loot our properties or our businesses or burn our cars.”

Calvin Peete, 71, a Racial Pioneer on the PGA Tour, Is Dead

With 12 tournament victories in his career, Mr. Peete was the most successful black professional golfer before Tiger Woods.

Marty Napoleon, 93, Dies; Jazz Pianist Played With Louis Armstrong

Mr. Napoleon was a self-taught musician whose career began in earnest with the orchestra led by Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers.