PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

Kesehatan Untuk Ibu Menyusui

Menyusui adalah kegiatan yang bermanfaat untuk sang bayi. Bayi usia di bawah 2 tahun, sangat membutuhkan ASI untuk perkembangannya. Namun menyusui ternyata tidak hanya bermanfaat untuk bayi, sang ibu pun juga bisa merasakan manfaatnya. Banyak sekali penelitian kesehatan yang membuktikan bahwa menyusui dapat mencegah wanita dari kanker payudara. Berikut ini beberapa tips kesehatan untuk ibu menyusui

1. Susui bayi kapanpun ia minta

Sebagian ibu banyak yang menjadwalkan pemberisan ASI. Sebaiknya hal ini dihindari karena kapasitas produksi ASI ibu bervariasi. Semakin kecil produksi, semakin sering dan lama bayi menyusui. Dan hanya bayi itu sendiri yanng tahu kapan ia harus menyusu.

2. Gunakan baju yang nyaman

Ibu-ibu sangat merasa nyaman jika saat menyusui menggunakan baju menyusui yang oke. Untuk itu gunakan baju longgar dan tidak ketat. Tentu saja pilih bahan yang membuat sang ibu nyaman.

Saat ini banyak breastfeeding wear yang hadir dengan berbagai macam model yang bisa anda pilih. Dengan menggunakan baju yang khusus untuk menyusui, tentu saja sang ibu akan lebih nyaman untuk memakainya karena memang didesain sesuai dengan kebutuhan dan kesehatan sang ibu.

3. Tips bagi ibu yang bekerja

Tentu saja bagi ibu yang menyusui sebisa mungkin harus mengurangi jam kerjanya. Namun jika memang harus bekerja, usahakan ketika bekerja di luar rumah semapatkanlah sebisa mungkin untuk menyusui bayi. Satu kali sebelum berangkat bekerja, lalu sore hari setelah anda bekerja dan sekali setelah anda makan malam. Namun seperti tips nomor 2, anda harus siap kapanpun bayi minta dan biasanya ini terjadi tengah malam.

4. Tips menyusui tengah malam

Jika anda kelelahan dan harus menyusui tengah malam, bisa dengan menyimpan ASi dalam botol agar dapat diberikan pada si bayi kapan saja. Namun jangan berikan ASI yang disimpan pada bayi melewati 2x24 jam.

Selain itu jika anda merasa kurang nyaman menyimpan ASI dalam botol, mau tidak mau anda harus menyusui si bayi tengah malam. Ini bisa diakali dengan menggunakan baju menyusui / nursing wear saat tidur. Jika menggunakan nursing wear, wanita bisa menyusui kapan dan dimana saja dengan nyaman.

TIPS MEMILIH AC / SPAREPART AC YANG BAIK

Air Conditioner( AC ) Bagi masyarakat Jakarta sepertinya sudah telah menjadi kebutuhan wajib.

Bagaimana tidak,suhu udara yang begitu panas setiap hari telah membuat suasana ruangan menjadi gerah. Apalagi tingkat populasi udara luar ruangan yang begitu tinggi. Kehadiran AC telah menjadi solusi yang tepat untuk kedua problem ini.

Apabila saat anda berencana membeli perangkat AC untuk dirumah,mungkin beberapa tips ini bisa membantu anda :

Pilih AC yang telah mempunyai converter ( sparepart ac sebagai penghemat listrik )

Converter pada AC berfungsi untuk dapat mengatur beban listrik,secara otomatis AC akan dapat mengurangi beban pendinginan tetapi masih dalam posisi menyala (on).Seperti yang kita ketahui daya listrik terbesar pada saat start.

Perhatikan bagian kipasnya

Semakin lebar kipas,semakin kencang angin yang di hembuskan. Selain itu,AC yang telah memiliki sparepart ac yang ber kipas lebar tidak akan memiliki suara berisik. Evapator yang lebar pada AC juga menandakan kipas pada blower External lebih besar. Ini diperlukan untuk keseimbangan kinerja mesin .Dan akan lebih baik lagi bila kipas tersebut bergerigi karena dapat turbulansi menjadi tidak berisik.

Pertimbangan fitur-fitur tambahan yang berguna untuk kesehatan

Saat ini sudah ada AC dengan fitur yang mampu membasmi kuman. Bahkan ada juga yang mampu menyaring debu yang sangat halus termasuk bakteri. Jadi AC tidak lagi hanya menyejukan ruangan,tapi juga menyehatkan.

Sesuaikan dengan interior rumah

Jika anda seseorang yang peduli terhadap interior rumah,maka pilih AC yang mendukung nuansa interior rumah anda.

AMPLOP KE PENGHULU MASUK GRATIFIKASI

saco-indonesia.com, Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK) telah memutuskan pemberian ucapan terima kasih berupa uang atau barang dan biaya transport kepada penghulu nikah termasuk gratifikasi. Hal itu telah diputuskan oleh KPK setelah mengadakan rapat koordinasi dengan Kemenag, Kemenkokesra, Kemenkeu, Bappenas, yang telah membahas soal praktik pelaksanaan nikah oleh KUA di berbagai tempat.

"Dari rapat hari ini telah disepakati; praktik penerimaan honor, tanda terima kasih, pengganti uang transport dalam pencatatan nikah adalah gratifikasi sebagaimana yang tertera  dalam pasal 12B UU Tipikor," ujar Direktur Gratifikasi Giri Suprapdiono di KPK, Rabu (18/12).

Giri juga mengatakan anggaran operasional di KUA akan dinaikkan guna untuk mencegah para penghulu menerima ucapan imbalan dari pasangan yang dinikahkan. Sebab, menurutnya, uang operasional sebesar Rp 2 juta per bulan dianggap tidak dapat mencukupi biaya transport.

"Anggaran operasional cuma Rp 2 juta perbulan, tahun depan Rp 3 juta perbulan itu pun juga digunakan untuk operasional kantor. Maka dipandang biaya tersebut tidak dapat memenuhi transport pengulu," ujar Giri.

Pihaknya telah memahami banyak penghulu yang tidak memiliki transport untuk bisa datang ke tempat pernikahan. Hal itu yang dapat menjadi celah untuk penerimaan gratifikasi.

"Hanya sedikit yang punya alat transport, pada dasarnya gak ada sarana dan prasarana penghulu untuk bisa mendatangani pengantin, inilah yang jadi celah untuk penerimaan gratifikasi," ujar Giri.

Giri juga menambahkan jika nanti ada penghulu yang menerima honor, tanda terimakasih, atau uang transport, dari pengantin, harus segera dilaporkan kepada KPK.

"Setiap penerimaan gratifikasi harus dilaporkan kepada KPK dan untuk bisa memudahkan akan diatur mekanisme kemudian," tambahnya.

Selain itu, biaya operasional pencatatan di luar jam kantor, akan dibebankan ke APBN. Untuk itu, pemerintah juga perlu mengubah PP Nomor 7 Tahun 2004.

"1. Biaya operasional pencatatan di luar kantor, luar jam kantor dibebankan ke APBN. 2. Perlu ubah PP No 7/2004 paling lambat 2014. 3. Menunggu peraturan yang baru, Kemenag akan keluarkan peraturan menteri," pungkasnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

BERCOCOK TANAM CABE

Cabe Pandaisikek yang masih muda sekitar usia 3,5 bulan. CABE Adalah salah satu komoditi Andalan Di nagari Pandaisikek,80% lahan pertanian di Pandaisikek di tanami dengan cabe. Cabe Pandai Sikek Biasa juga disebut dengan Cabe keriting, Bentuknya kecil dan panjang berbeda dengan cabe jawa , Medan Atau daerah lain Di Indonesia.Tidak hanya bentuk, rasanya pun jauh lebih pedas daripada cabe di daerah lain. Pembudi dayaan cabe dipandaisikek dilakukan dengan 2 cara yaitu tradisional dan teknologi, Tapi kali ini kita akan membahas tehnik cocok tanam cabe secara modren/teknologi dan menggabungkan pengunanan Kimia beserta Organik. 1. Tata cara pengolahan Lahan Bentuk Petaka Cabe Keriting Lahan yang kita pergunakan Kali ini kira-kira berukuran 450 M persegi Atau sekitar 10 Kg Plastik Mulsa Dengan pH tanah Sekitar 5pH, Yang sudah terbebas dari gulma atau sudah bersih. Tentu kita juga bertanya Apa itu pH…….? pH (potential of hydrogen) yaitu tingkat Basa dan keasaman tanah yang menentukan tingkat kesuburan tanah. Bentuk dan ukuran petak Cabe Lahan terlebih dahulu kita buat petakanya dengan jarak 170 cm. petakan awal kita buat dengan kedalaman sekitar 10 cm dengan lebar 50 cm atau hanya untuk membentuk lahanya saja, setelah selesai kita sudah bisa menaburkan pupuk kandang ( pupuk kandang yang dipergunakan kali ini adalah yang berasal dari Tahi Ayam sebagai bahan Organiknya ) dengan ukuran 20 karung sisa pakan ayam. Penebaran dilakukan hingga merata diatas petakan tadi,Setelah selesai kita tunggu sekitar 7-10 hari untuk mendinginkan pupuk kandang tadi juga supaya merata dengan tanah, barulah nanti bisa di lakukan proses berikutnya. Petakan yang sudah didiamkan tadi Langsung saja ditabur dengan pupuk Kimia. Pupuk yang kita gunakan kali ini adalah NPK dengan kadar Hara 15% Nitrogen 9 % Fosfat 20% Kalium Oksida 2 % Magnesium Oksida 3,8 % Sulfur 0,015 % Baron 0,02 % Mangan 0,02 % Seng Dengan ukuran satu karung sekitar 50 Kg, Penaburan dilakukan hingga merata. Setelah itu barulah dilanjutkan dengan memperdalam petakan (hingga mencapai 40 cm) dan menimbun pupuk yang sudah di tabur tadi dengan tingkat kegemburan sekitar 20-30 cm (tanah benar-benar harus halus),Kegemburan dan kedalaman pupuk yang di timbun tadi sangatlah penting karena ini di maksudkan supaya akar cabe nantiknya gampang mencari makan, dan dalamnya pupuk di timbun supaya pada saat cabe berusia sekitar 2,5 bulan dia mendapatkan cadangan makanan yang banyak dan akan lebih mempercepat pertumbuhan hinga berkembang dengan baik hingga panen nanti. Setelah pengemburan selesai langkah selanjutnya membulatkan petakan tadi seperti setengah lingkaran dengan mengunakan rol atau kayu kira 1m, bentuk media tanam hinga bagus dan rapi sebelum dipasang plastik mulsa yang telah di sediakan. Setelah bulat di semprot dengan mengunakan pestisida pembunuh hama tanah, bisa juga menggunakan organik yang banyak beredar di pasaran. bentuk pemasangan plastik mulsa Untuk Pemasangan Mulsa kita membutuhkan bambu yang di belah kecil-kecil supaya mudah di bengkokan dengan ukuran panjang sekitar 20 cm lebar 1cm dan ketebalan 3 mm.Bambu ini digunakan utuk penyangga (samek) di tiap ujung dan pinggiran plastik mulsa. Pemasangan sebaiknya di lakukan pada saat cuaca panas, dengan tujuan supaya mulsa gampang ditarik hingga meregang dan pada cuaca dingin mulsa ini akan kelihatan lebih rapi dan kuat pasangannya. Setelah pemasangan selesai lahan sebaiknya didiamkan pula beberapa hari untuk membunuh hama yang masih berada di dalam petakan. Berikutnya penanaman, sebelum kita tanam tentu terlebih dahulu kita ketahui tentang pembibitan. 2. Pembibitan Cabe bibit cabe berusia 15 hari Bibit: Dipilih dari induk yang berkualitas tinggi berdasarkan ukuran bentuk dan daya tahan.Biji cabe dipisahkan dari kulit dan dikeringkan beberapa waktu, sebelum di semaikan sebaiknya bibit di beridulu pestisida yang berbentuk tepung Seperti Antracol,kocide dll supaya waktu penyemaian tidak dimakan oleh hama. Lahan Penyemaian : Lahan yang sudah bersih di bikin petakan kira-kira berukuran panjang 5 m dan lebar 1,2m untuk 4000 biji bibit, Kemudian digemburkan dan di beri pupuk kandang (4 kg keadaan kering) yang sudah dicampur dengan sedikit pupuk NPK (2 ons) dan ditebar hingga merata diatas petakan. Cara menyemaikan Bibit : bibit juga ditebar hingga merata diatas petakan yang sudah diberi campuran pupuk tadi kemudian di timbun tipis dengan tanah halus. Kemudian ditutup dengan daun pisang hingga rata sampai bibit ini tumbuh nantinya, kira-kira 7-10 hari. Bibit yang sudah tumbuh di beri atap dengan menggunakan plastik transparan yang banyak di jual di pasara. Ini supa bibit terlindung dari hujan dan panas matahari lang sung Jangan lupa bibit disiran / di semprot ( bila di perlukan) hinga usia 45 hari. Bibit dengan ketinggian sekitar 10-15 cm sangat baik untuk dipindahkan kemedia tanam. 3. Penyiapan Media Tanam Dari lahan / petakan yang sudah di siapkan sebelumnya kita sudah bisa memulai penanaman, tetapi sebelumnya plastik mulsa yang sudah di pasang di lubang dengan mengunakan sebuah alat yang bisa di bikin sendiri bahkan ada juga di jual dipasaran. Alat ini bisa di buat dengan sebuah kaleng susu dengan ukuran diameter 6 cm yang di beri tangkai dengan kayu sebagai pegangan sementara di sekeliling kaleng tersebut di beri lubang dengan paku. Jarak tanam Cara menggunakan alat ini juga sederhana, Kaleng yang sudah berlubang tadi dimasukan bara tempurung kelapa sehingga kaleng akan panas dan siap di pergunakan. Mulsa di beri lubang dengan jarak 60-70 cm sementara untuk jarak disampingnya dibuat zikzak dengan jarak yang sama.Lahan barulah siap untuk d tanami.( usahakan penanaman dilakukan pada cuaca dingin karena plastik mulsa yang kena matahari bisa membuat bibit cabe tidak jadi hidup) 4. Cara Tanam Bibit cabe yang baru di tanam Penanaman Cabe tidak lah sulit, caranya sama dengan penanaman tumbuhan yang lain. Tapi untuk cabe, karena lahan telah disiapkan dengan pupuk dan cadangan makanan yang cukup kita hanya tinggal mencabutnya di persemaian dan langsung di tanam pada mulsa yang telah di lubang. Untuk menanam Cabe ini cukup satu batang untuk tiap lubang, setelah beberapa waktu dan juga dirawat dengan baik akan menjadi sebatang cabe yang berkualitas tinggi. Pada Contoh-contoh gambar yang telah kita tampilkan terlihat ada tanaman yang di tumpang sari,kebetulan kami menampilkan tanaman sayuran jenis sawi. Untuk tumpang sari bisa ditanam jenis sayuran yang lain, asal usia tanaman yang di tumpang itu berusia cepat (sekitar 1,5 bulan. Tapi kali ini kita tidak membahas pokok permasalahan tumpang sari jadi kita bahas saja lain waktu.kita masuk ketahap Berikutnya yaitu: 5. Perawatan Apapun yang kita usahakan di dalam pertanian,perawatan adalah hal yang sangat penting, kita masuk terlebih dahulu pada: A. Penyemprotan Penyemprota bisa menggunakan pestisida kimia ataupun organik, Penyemprotan dilakukan rutin minimal i kali seminggu. Jenis racun yang kita gunakan tergantung pada keadaan tanaman cabe itu sendiri dan cuaca di daerah masing-masing. kenapa demikian , Keadaan iklim juga mempengaruhi jenis pestisida kenapa demikian, ada sebagian pesrisida yang di tentukan dengan cuaca untuk penggunaanya. Jenis Pestisida yang sering di pergunakan adalah sebagai berikut – – Penyemprotan dilakukan sampai cabe habis di panen. B. Membuang tunas batang ( Merempel ) Pembuangan tunas batang ( Merempel ) Untuk kwalitas cabe yang bagus tunas batang haruslah dibuang , karena nantinya cabe ini juga akan bercabang dan cabangnya inilah yang akan di biarkan besar. Kira- kira usia tanaman cabe berusia 20 hari, pembuang tunas yang pertama kitalakukan,20 hari berikutnya pembuangan yang ke dua dan untuk terakhir menjelang pengikatan batang cabe ke tiang penyangga. sebaiknya dalam melakukan pembuangan tunas kita mengunakan gunting yang bersih. C. Tiang Penyangga Tiang Penyangga dibuat dari bambu dengan ukuran panjang 1 m lebar 3 cm dan ketebalan 2 cm.Pada ujung tiang tadi di runcing supaya gampang menancapkanya ketanah. Pemasangan tiang penyangga ini pada usia cabe 1 bulan dengan jarak sekitar jarak 5 cm dari rumpun cabe, jangan terlalu dekat karena kalau dekat bisa merusak akar yang sudah mulai menjalar. Fungsi dari tiang ini adalah agar saat cabe sudah besar rumpunya tidak digoyang oleh angin karena sudah kita ikat longgar antara batang cabe dengan tiang itu sendiri. Pengikatanya bisa kitalakukan pada usia cabe 2 bulan. 6. Panen Cabe masak siap untuk di panen Kita sudah bisa panen cabe ini di usia 4,5 bulan Tergantung apa buah cabenya sudah masak / belum. Dalam Melakukan pemanenan Jangan lupa mengambil buah yang rusak walaupun masih muda karena akan menentukan kwalitas dan daya tahan usia panen cabe> BERCOCOK TANAM CABE

BANDARA ADISUCIPTO TUTUP AKIBAT KELUD

saco-indonesia.com, Penerbangan dari dan tujuan Bandara Adisucipto telah ditutup sampai batas waktu yang belum ditentukan. Penutupan itu telah dilakukan karena hujan abu dari Gunung Kelud mengguyur kawasan bandara. Abu vulkanik juga sangat berbahaya bagi mesin pesawat.

"Penutupan telah dilakukan sampai batas yang belum ditentukan," ujar Humas Bandara Adisucipto, Faizal Indra Kusuma di Yogyakarta, Jumat (14/2).

Sejak pukul 06.00 pagi WIB, seharusnya Bandara Adisucipto sudah memberangkatkan beberapa pesawat dari maskapai Garuda, Lion Air dan Batavia. Setiap harinya, Bandara Adisucipto telah memberangkatkan lebih dari 30 penerbangan yang berada.

Meski telah terjadi penundaan penerbangan, namun hal tersebut tidak membuat para penumpang kecewa. Pasalnya mereka telah menyadari dengan kondisi tersebut dan justru sangat membahayakan jika melakukan penerbangan.

Yohanes, salah satu calon penumpang pesawat tujuan Jakarta juga mengatakan dirinya tidak masalah menunggu asalkan bisa sampai dengan selamat.

"Yang utama keselamatan, dipending enggak apa-apa," ujarnya singkat.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

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.

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.”

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.

Ruth Rendell, Novelist Who Thrilled and Educated, Dies at 85

Ms. Rendell was a prolific writer of intricately plotted mystery novels that combined psychological insight, social conscience and teeth-chattering terror.

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.

Edward Chambers, Early Leader in Community Organizing, Dies at 85

A lapsed seminarian, Mr. Chambers succeeded Saul Alinsky as leader of the social justice umbrella group Industrial Areas Foundation.

Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Biographer of Clara Barton and Robert E. Lee, Dies at 64

Ms. Pryor, who served more than two decades in the State Department, was the author of well-regarded biographies of the founder of the American Red Cross and the Confederate commander.

Robert Patterson Jr., Lawyer and Judge Who Fought for the Accused, Dies at 91

Judge Patterson helped to protect the rights of Attica inmates after the prison riot in 1971 and later served on the Federal District Court in Manhattan.

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, 93, Dies; Polish Auschwitz Survivor Aided Jews

Mr. Bartoszewski was given honorary Israeli citizenship for his work to save Jews during World War II and later surprised even himself by being instrumental in reconciling Poland and Germany.

Obama Finds a Bolder Voice on Race Issues

As he reflected on the festering wounds deepened by race and grievance that have been on painful display in America’s cities lately, President Obama on Monday found himself thinking about a young man he had just met named Malachi.

A few minutes before, in a closed-door round-table discussion at Lehman College in the Bronx, Mr. Obama had asked a group of black and Hispanic students from disadvantaged backgrounds what could be done to help them reach their goals. Several talked about counseling and guidance programs.

“Malachi, he just talked about — we should talk about love,” Mr. Obama told a crowd afterward, drifting away from his prepared remarks. “Because Malachi and I shared the fact that our dad wasn’t around and that sometimes we wondered why he wasn’t around and what had happened. But really, that’s what this comes down to is: Do we love these kids?”

Many presidents have governed during times of racial tension, but Mr. Obama is the first to see in the mirror a face that looks like those on the other side of history’s ledger. While his first term was consumed with the economy, war and health care, his second keeps coming back to the societal divide that was not bridged by his election. A president who eschewed focusing on race now seems to have found his voice again as he thinks about how to use his remaining time in office and beyond.

Continue reading the main story Video

Play Video|1:17

Obama Speaks of a ‘Sense of Unfairness’

In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.

“This will remain a mission for me and for Michelle not just for the rest of my presidency but for the rest of my life,” Mr. Obama said. “And the reason is simple,” he added. Referring to some of the youths he had just met, he said: “We see ourselves in these young men. I grew up without a dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift, not having a sense of a clear path. The only difference between me and a lot of other young men in this neighborhood and all across the country is that I grew up in an environment that was a little more forgiving.”

Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.

Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.

The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.

“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”

The alliance was in the works before the disturbances last week after the death of Freddie Gray, the black man who suffered fatal injuries while in police custody in Baltimore, but it reflected the evolution of Mr. Obama’s presidency. For him, in a way, it is coming back to issues that animated him as a young community organizer and politician. It was his own struggle with race and identity, captured in his youthful memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” that stood him apart from other presidential aspirants.

But that was a side of him that he kept largely to himself through the first years of his presidency while he focused on other priorities like turning the economy around, expanding government-subsidized health care and avoiding electoral land mines en route to re-election.

After securing a second term, Mr. Obama appeared more emboldened. Just a month after his 2013 inauguration, he talked passionately about opportunity and race with a group of teenage boys in Chicago, a moment aides point to as perhaps the first time he had spoken about these issues in such a personal, powerful way as president. A few months later, he publicly lamented the death of Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teenager, saying that “could have been me 35 years ago.”

Photo

 

That case, along with public ruptures of anger over police shootings in Ferguson and elsewhere, have pushed the issue of race and law enforcement onto the public agenda. Aides said they imagined that with his presidency in its final stages, Mr. Obama might be thinking more about what comes next and causes he can advance as a private citizen.

That is not to say that his public discussion of these issues has been universally welcomed. Some conservatives said he had made matters worse by seeming in their view to blame police officers in some of the disputed cases.

“President Obama, when he was elected, could have been a unifying leader,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican candidate for president, said at a forum last week. “He has made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions.”

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, some liberal African-American activists have complained that Mr. Obama has not done enough to help downtrodden communities. While he is speaking out more, these critics argue, he has hardly used the power of the presidency to make the sort of radical change they say is necessary.

The line Mr. Obama has tried to straddle has been a serrated one. He condemns police brutality as he defends most officers as honorable. He condemns “criminals and thugs” who looted in Baltimore while expressing empathy with those trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

In the Bronx on Monday, Mr. Obama bemoaned the death of Brian Moore, a plainclothes New York police officer who had died earlier in the day after being shot in the head Saturday on a Queens street. Most police officers are “good and honest and fair and care deeply about their communities,” even as they put their lives on the line, Mr. Obama said.

“Which is why in addressing the issues in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York, the point I made was that if we’re just looking at policing, we’re looking at it too narrowly,” he added. “If we ask the police to simply contain and control problems that we ourselves have been unwilling to invest and solve, that’s not fair to the communities, it’s not fair to the police.”

Moreover, if society writes off some people, he said, “that’s not the kind of country I want to live in; that’s not what America is about.”

His message to young men like Malachi Hernandez, who attends Boston Latin Academy in Massachusetts, is not to give up.

“I want you to know you matter,” he said. “You matter to us.”

Advertisement Politics Obama Finds a Bolder Voice on Race Issues

As he reflected on the festering wounds deepened by race and grievance that have been on painful display in America’s cities lately, President Obama on Monday found himself thinking about a young man he had just met named Malachi.

A few minutes before, in a closed-door round-table discussion at Lehman College in the Bronx, Mr. Obama had asked a group of black and Hispanic students from disadvantaged backgrounds what could be done to help them reach their goals. Several talked about counseling and guidance programs.

“Malachi, he just talked about — we should talk about love,” Mr. Obama told a crowd afterward, drifting away from his prepared remarks. “Because Malachi and I shared the fact that our dad wasn’t around and that sometimes we wondered why he wasn’t around and what had happened. But really, that’s what this comes down to is: Do we love these kids?”

Many presidents have governed during times of racial tension, but Mr. Obama is the first to see in the mirror a face that looks like those on the other side of history’s ledger. While his first term was consumed with the economy, war and health care, his second keeps coming back to the societal divide that was not bridged by his election. A president who eschewed focusing on race now seems to have found his voice again as he thinks about how to use his remaining time in office and beyond.

Continue reading the main story Video

Play Video|1:17

Obama Speaks of a ‘Sense of Unfairness’

In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.

“This will remain a mission for me and for Michelle not just for the rest of my presidency but for the rest of my life,” Mr. Obama said. “And the reason is simple,” he added. Referring to some of the youths he had just met, he said: “We see ourselves in these young men. I grew up without a dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift, not having a sense of a clear path. The only difference between me and a lot of other young men in this neighborhood and all across the country is that I grew up in an environment that was a little more forgiving.”

Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.

Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.

The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.

“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”

The alliance was in the works before the disturbances last week after the death of Freddie Gray, the black man who suffered fatal injuries while in police custody in Baltimore, but it reflected the evolution of Mr. Obama’s presidency. For him, in a way, it is coming back to issues that animated him as a young community organizer and politician. It was his own struggle with race and identity, captured in his youthful memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” that stood him apart from other presidential aspirants.

But that was a side of him that he kept largely to himself through the first years of his presidency while he focused on other priorities like turning the economy around, expanding government-subsidized health care and avoiding electoral land mines en route to re-election.

After securing a second term, Mr. Obama appeared more emboldened. Just a month after his 2013 inauguration, he talked passionately about opportunity and race with a group of teenage boys in Chicago, a moment aides point to as perhaps the first time he had spoken about these issues in such a personal, powerful way as president. A few months later, he publicly lamented the death of Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teenager, saying that “could have been me 35 years ago.”

Photo

 

That case, along with public ruptures of anger over police shootings in Ferguson and elsewhere, have pushed the issue of race and law enforcement onto the public agenda. Aides said they imagined that with his presidency in its final stages, Mr. Obama might be thinking more about what comes next and causes he can advance as a private citizen.

That is not to say that his public discussion of these issues has been universally welcomed. Some conservatives said he had made matters worse by seeming in their view to blame police officers in some of the disputed cases.

“President Obama, when he was elected, could have been a unifying leader,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican candidate for president, said at a forum last week. “He has made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions.”

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, some liberal African-American activists have complained that Mr. Obama has not done enough to help downtrodden communities. While he is speaking out more, these critics argue, he has hardly used the power of the presidency to make the sort of radical change they say is necessary.

The line Mr. Obama has tried to straddle has been a serrated one. He condemns police brutality as he defends most officers as honorable. He condemns “criminals and thugs” who looted in Baltimore while expressing empathy with those trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

In the Bronx on Monday, Mr. Obama bemoaned the death of Brian Moore, a plainclothes New York police officer who had died earlier in the day after being shot in the head Saturday on a Queens street. Most police officers are “good and honest and fair and care deeply about their communities,” even as they put their lives on the line, Mr. Obama said.

“Which is why in addressing the issues in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York, the point I made was that if we’re just looking at policing, we’re looking at it too narrowly,” he added. “If we ask the police to simply contain and control problems that we ourselves have been unwilling to invest and solve, that’s not fair to the communities, it’s not fair to the police.”

Moreover, if society writes off some people, he said, “that’s not the kind of country I want to live in; that’s not what America is about.”

His message to young men like Malachi Hernandez, who attends Boston Latin Academy in Massachusetts, is not to give up.

“I want you to know you matter,” he said. “You matter to us.”

Rolf Smedvig, Trumpeter in the Empire Brass, Dies at 62

A former member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Smedvig helped found the wide-ranging Empire Brass quintet.

Ben E. King, Soulful Singer of ‘Stand by Me,’ Dies at 76

Mr. King sang for the Drifters and found success as a solo performer with hits like “Spanish Harlem.”

G.O.P. Hopefuls Now Aiming to Woo the Middle Class

WASHINGTON — The last three men to win the Republican nomination have been the prosperous son of a president (George W. Bush), a senator who could not recall how many homes his family owned (John McCain of Arizona; it was seven) and a private equity executive worth an estimated $200 million (Mitt Romney).

The candidates hoping to be the party’s nominee in 2016 are trying to create a very different set of associations. On Sunday, Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, joined the presidential field.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida praises his parents, a bartender and a Kmart stock clerk, as he urges audiences not to forget “the workers in our hotel kitchens, the landscaping crews in our neighborhoods, the late-night janitorial staff that clean our offices.”

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a preacher’s son, posts on Twitter about his ham-and-cheese sandwiches and boasts of his coupon-clipping frugality. His $1 Kohl’s sweater has become a campaign celebrity in its own right.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky laments the existence of “two Americas,” borrowing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase to describe economically and racially troubled communities like Ferguson, Mo., and Detroit.

Photo

 

“Some say, ‘But Democrats care more about the poor,’ ” Mr. Paul likes to say. “If that’s true, why is black unemployment still twice white unemployment? Why has household income declined by $3,500 over the past six years?”

We are in the midst of the Empathy Primary — the rhetorical battleground shaping the Republican presidential field of 2016.

Harmed by the perception that they favor the wealthy at the expense of middle-of-the-road Americans, the party’s contenders are each trying their hardest to get across what the elder George Bush once inelegantly told recession-battered voters in 1992: “Message: I care.”

Their ability to do so — less bluntly, more sincerely — could prove decisive in an election year when power, privilege and family connections will loom large for both parties.

Questions of understanding and compassion cost Republicans in the last election. Mr. Romney, who memorably dismissed the “47 percent” of Americans as freeloaders, lost to President Obama by 63 percentage points among voters who cast their ballots for the candidate who “cares about people like me,” according to exit polls.

And a Pew poll from February showed that people still believe Republicans are indifferent to working Americans: 54 percent said the Republican Party does not care about the middle class.

That taint of callousness explains why Senator Ted Cruz of Texas declared last week that Republicans “are and should be the party of the 47 percent” — and why another son of a president, Jeb Bush, has made economic opportunity the centerpiece of his message.

With his pedigree and considerable wealth — since he left the Florida governor’s office almost a decade ago he has earned millions of dollars sitting on corporate boards and advising banks — Mr. Bush probably has the most complicated task making the argument to voters that he understands their concerns.

On a visit last week to Puerto Rico, Mr. Bush sounded every bit the populist, railing against “elites” who have stifled economic growth and innovation. In the kind of economy he envisions leading, he said: “We wouldn’t have the middle being squeezed. People in poverty would have a chance to rise up. And the social strains that exist — because the haves and have-nots is the big debate in our country today — would subside.”

Continue reading the main story

 

Who Is Running for President (and Who’s Not)?

Republicans’ emphasis on poorer and working-class Americans now represents a shift from the party’s longstanding focus on business owners and “job creators” as the drivers of economic opportunity.

This is intentional, Republican operatives said.

In the last presidential election, Republicans rushed to defend business owners against what they saw as hostility by Democrats to successful, wealthy entrepreneurs.

“Part of what you had was a reaction to the Democrats’ dehumanization of business owners: ‘Oh, you think you started your plumbing company? No you didn’t,’ ” said Grover Norquist, the conservative activist and president of Americans for Tax Reform.

But now, Mr. Norquist said, Republicans should move past that. “Focus on the people in the room who know someone who couldn’t get a job, or a promotion, or a raise because taxes are too high or regulations eat up companies’ time,” he said. “The rich guy can take care of himself.”

Democrats argue that the public will ultimately see through such an approach because Republican positions like opposing a minimum-wage increase and giving private banks a larger role in student loans would hurt working Americans.

“If Republican candidates are just repeating the same tired policies, I’m not sure that smiling while saying it is going to be enough,” said Guy Cecil, a Democratic strategist who is joining a “super PAC” working on behalf of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Republicans have already attacked Mrs. Clinton over the wealth and power she and her husband have accumulated, caricaturing her as an out-of-touch multimillionaire who earns hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech and has not driven a car since 1996.

Mr. Walker hit this theme recently on Fox News, pointing to Mrs. Clinton’s lucrative book deals and her multiple residences. “This is not someone who is connected with everyday Americans,” he said. His own net worth, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is less than a half-million dollars; Mr. Walker also owes tens of thousands of dollars on his credit cards.

But showing off a cheap sweater or boasting of a bootstraps family background not only helps draw a contrast with Mrs. Clinton’s latter-day affluence, it is also an implicit argument against Mr. Bush.

Mr. Walker, who featured a 1998 Saturn with more than 100,000 miles on the odometer in a 2010 campaign ad during his first run for governor, likes to talk about flipping burgers at McDonald’s as a young person. His mother, he has said, grew up on a farm with no indoor plumbing until she was in high school.

Mr. Rubio, among the least wealthy members of the Senate, with an estimated net worth of around a half-million dollars, uses his working-class upbringing as evidence of the “exceptionalism” of America, “where even the son of a bartender and a maid can have the same dreams and the same future as those who come from power and privilege.”

Mr. Cruz alludes to his family’s dysfunction — his parents, he says, were heavy drinkers — and recounts his father’s tale of fleeing Cuba with $100 sewn into his underwear.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey notes that his father paid his way through college working nights at an ice cream plant.

But sometimes the attempts at projecting authenticity can seem forced. Mr. Christie recently found himself on the defensive after telling a New Hampshire audience, “I don’t consider myself a wealthy man.” Tax returns showed that he and his wife, a longtime Wall Street executive, earned nearly $700,000 in 2013.

The story of success against the odds is a political classic, even if it is one the Republican Party has not been able to tell for a long time. Ronald Reagan liked to say that while he had not been born on the wrong side of the tracks, he could always hear the whistle. Richard Nixon was fond of reminding voters how he was born in a house his father had built.

“Probably the idea that is most attractive to an average voter, and an idea that both Republicans and Democrats try to craft into their messages, is this idea that you can rise from nothing,” said Charles C. W. Cooke, a writer for National Review.

There is a certain delight Republicans take in turning that message to their advantage now.

“That’s what Obama did with Hillary,” Mr. Cooke said. “He acknowledged it openly: ‘This is ridiculous. Look at me, this one-term senator with dark skin and all of America’s unsolved racial problems, running against the wife of the last Democratic president.”

Finding Scandal in New York and New Jersey, but No Shame

From sea to shining sea, or at least from one side of the Hudson to the other, politicians you have barely heard of are being accused of wrongdoing. There were so many court proceedings involving public officials on Monday that it was hard to keep up.

In Newark, two underlings of Gov. Chris Christie were arraigned on charges that they were in on the truly deranged plot to block traffic leading onto the George Washington Bridge.

Ten miles away, in Lower Manhattan, Dean G. Skelos, the leader of the New York State Senate, and his son, Adam B. Skelos, were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on accusations of far more conventional political larceny, involving a job with a sewer company for the son and commissions on title insurance and bond work.

The younger man managed to receive a 150 percent pay increase from the sewer company even though, as he said on tape, he “literally knew nothing about water or, you know, any of that stuff,” according to a criminal complaint the United States attorney’s office filed.

The success of Adam Skelos, 32, was attributed by prosecutors to his father’s influence as the leader of the Senate and as a potentate among state Republicans. The indictment can also be read as one of those unfailingly sad tales of a father who cannot stop indulging a grown son. The senator himself is not alleged to have profited from the schemes, except by being relieved of the burden of underwriting Adam.

The bridge traffic caper is its own species of crazy; what distinguishes the charges against the two Skeloses is the apparent absence of a survival instinct. It is one thing not to know anything about water or that stuff. More remarkable, if true, is the fact that the sewer machinations continued even after the former New York Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, was charged in January with taking bribes disguised as fees.

It was by then common gossip in political and news media circles that Senator Skelos, a Republican, the counterpart in the Senate to Mr. Silver, a Democrat, in the Assembly, could be next in line for the criminal dock. “Stay tuned,” the United States attorney, Preet Bharara said, leaving not much to the imagination.

Even though the cat had been unmistakably belled, Skelos father and son continued to talk about how to advance the interests of the sewer company, though the son did begin to use a burner cellphone, the kind people pay for in cash, with no traceable contracts.

That was indeed prudent, as prosecutors had been wiretapping the cellphones of both men. But it would seem that the burner was of limited value, because by then the prosecutors had managed to secure the help of a business executive who agreed to record calls with the Skeloses. It would further seem that the business executive was more attentive to the perils of pending investigations than the politician.

Through the end of the New York State budget negotiations in March, the hopes of the younger Skelos rested on his father’s ability to devise legislation that would benefit the sewer company. That did not pan out. But Senator Skelos did boast that he had haggled with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, in a successful effort to raise a $150 million allocation for Long Island to $550 million, for what the budget called “transformative economic development projects.” It included money for the kind of work done by the sewer company.

The lawyer for Adam Skelos said he was not guilty and would win in court. Senator Skelos issued a ringing declaration that he was unequivocally innocent.

THIS was also the approach taken in New Jersey by Bill Baroni, a man of great presence and eloquence who stopped outside the federal courthouse to note that he had taken risks as a Republican by bucking his party to support paid family leave, medical marijuana and marriage equality. “I would never risk my career, my job, my reputation for something like this,” Mr. Baroni said. “I am an innocent man.”

The lawyer for his co-defendant, Bridget Anne Kelly, the former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, a Republican, said that she would strongly rebut the charges.

Perhaps they had nothing to do with the lane closings. But neither Mr. Baroni nor Ms. Kelly addressed the question of why they did not return repeated calls from the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., begging them to stop the traffic tie-ups, over three days.

That silence was a low moment. But perhaps New York hit bottom faster. Senator Skelos, the prosecutors charged, arranged to meet Long Island politicians at the wake of Wenjian Liu, a New York City police officer shot dead in December, to press for payments to the company employing his son.

Sometimes it seems as though for some people, the only thing to be ashamed of is shame itself.