PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

CARA MUDAH MEMBERSIHKAN SOFA

Setiap rumah biasanya telah memiliki sofa diruang keluarga ataupun di ruang tamu. Sofa yang telah terawat baik dan bersih akan dapat membuat ruangan terlihat lebih menarik dan telah memberikan kesan yang baik untuk pemilik rumah. Karena Image si pemilik rumah dipertaruhkan, sofa juga harus dibersihkan secara berkala. Repot? Tentu saja tidak. Untuk dapat membersihkan sofa,Anda hanya perlu melakukan langkah-langkah mudah berikut ini.
Cara bersihkan Sofa Kulit Oscar

Pertama,campurkan deterjen dengan air hingga berbusa. Sikat sofa dengan sikat halus atau sikat gigi di bagian sofa yang kotor dengan halus dengan busa dari air deterjen tersebut. Setelah terasa bersih,keringkan sofa dengan lap kering dengan cara ditekan-tekan atau dijemur. Untuk campuran pembersih,Anda juga dapat mencampurkan sedikit cuka di campuran deterjen air.

Apabila takut deterjen atau cuka akan merusak sofa, maka sebaiknya di coba dahulu di bagian belakang atau pojok yang tidak terlihat.
Cara bersihkan Sofa Kain

Sofa kain sangat berbeda cara memberihkannya dengan sofa oscar. Sofa kain memang lebih gampang kotor tetapi sofa kain lebih mudah di bersihkan, yakni hanya dengan vacum cleaner. Untuk orang yang alergi debu, sebaiknya sofa divacumm setiap hari agar tidak ada debu yang menempel di permukaan sofa.

Cara bersihkan Sofa Kulit Asli

Karena sofa berbahan kulit asli jauh lebih mahal dari pada bahan sofa lainnya, sebaiknya untuk dapat membersihkan sofa jenis ini digunakan cairan pembersih khusus kulit. Cairan ini juga dapat dibeli di toko yang menjual bahan-bahan kulit ataupun di supermarket.

Semua cara membersihkan sofa di atas dapat dilakukan sendiri dirumah dengan pengeluaran biaya atau harga yang murah, sehingga Anda tidak perlu memanggil tukang untuk membersihkan sofa secara khusus. Tetapi apabila sofa Anda telah rusak sedikit dan membutuhkan ganti kain atau service sofa lainnya, silahkan hubungi Subur Furniture karena kami juga telah memberikan jasa mengganti kain, oscar ataupun kulit untuk sofa lama kesayangan Anda dengan harga yang murah.

Selain untuk rumah terlihat lebih rapi, bagus, dan terawat, sofa yang bersihpun juga akan membuat anak kita yang tidur diatas sofa lebih pulas dan aman. Jadi tips untuk membersihkan sofa ini boleh dishare untuk teman-teman yang lain agar tamu yang datang atau keluarga yang pakai sofa dapat duduk dengan bersih.

MOBIL TRAVEL MASUK KE SUNGAI

saco-indonesia.com, Maineli yang berusia (50) tahun seorang Ibu Rumah Tangga warga Padang Panjang, Sumatera Barat bersama anaknya Faiza Kurniawan yang masih berusia 2 tahun ikut tewas saat mobil travel yang telah ditumpanginya masuk ke jurang Sungai Kampar. Mobil tersebut tenggelam di Sungai Kampar, tepatnya di Desa Merangin, Kecamatan Kuok, Kabupaten Kampar.

Kabid Humas Polda Riau, AKBP Guntur Aryo Tejo SIK, juga mengatakan, saat ini sudah ada 3 orang korban yang tewas akibat Lakalantas tunggal (out of control) Travel isuzu Panther dengan Nomor Polisi BA 1921 ZU di jalan lintas Riau, Sumatera Barat KM 78/79.

"Akibat dari kecelakaan tersebut 3 penumpang meninggal dunia di lokasi kejadian," kata Guntur.

Ketiga penumpang yang meninggal dunia dalam lakalantas tersebut antara lain, Syukur (68) seorang pekerja swasta, warga Padang Panjang, Sumbar. Maineli (50) seorang Ibu Rumah Tangga warga Padang Panjang, Sumatera Barat bersama anaknya Faiza Kurniawan yang masih berusia 2 tahun (sebelumnya ditulis 3 tahun).

"Korban ketiga ini (Faiza Kurniawan) pada saat kejadian kecelakaan hanyut ke sungai Kampar dan baru bisa ditemukan 12 jam kemudian setelah dilakukan pencarian oleh Kepolisian bersama Tim SAR, BPBD Kampar dibantu oleh warga masyarakat, korban telah ditemukan di desa Sawah kecamatan Kampar Utara setelah hanyut sekitar 20 Kilometer dari TKP," terang Guntur.

Sedangkan 2 penumpang lainnya yang telah mengalami luka ringan dan 1 lainnya luka berat. Saat ini ketiga penumpang selamat tersebut dirawat di Puskesmas Kuok Kampar.

"Sedangkan sopir yang belum dapat diketahui identitasnya telah melarikan diri dari TKP," kata Guntur.

Kronologis kejadian lakalantas tunggal Delta Travel dengan Nomor Polisi BA 1921 ZU jurusan Padang (Sumbar), Pekanbaru (Riau) yang telah mengangkut enam penumpang ini melaju dengan kecepatan tinggi, Rabu (25/12) malam sekitar pukul 20.00 wib.

"Sesampainya di Kilometer 78/79 desa Merangin, jalan yang banyak tikungan dan jurang yang dekat dengan sungai kampar, saat itu travel kehilangan kendali dan mengarah ke jurang menuju Sungai Kampar hingga menyebabkan 3 korban tewas dan 3 lainnya luka," jelas Guntur.

Saat ini mobil travel jenis Isuzu Panther tersebut telah berhasil dikeluarkan dari jurang dan dibawa ke Polres Kampar, "Sedangkan supir telah ditetapkan sebagai tersangka, dan tengah dilakukan pengejaran," pungkas Guntur.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

LIGA CHAMPIONS HARGA MATI

saco-indonesia.com, Bagi Manchester United, telah memastikan diri lolos ke Liga Champions 2014/15 yang merupakan target minimal yang wajib diraih musim ini. Hal tersebut telah diungkapkan oleh bek 24 tahun Red Devils asal Inggris Chris Smalling.

Musim lalu, United bersama Sir Alex Ferguson sanggup untuk menjuarai Premier League nyaris tanpa kesulitan berarti. Namun, sekarang keadaannya telah bertolak belakang. United besutan David Moyes bahkan diragukan bisa tampil di kompetisi antarklub paling elit Eropa musim depan.

"Kami juga tak terlalu memikirkannya (masuk Liga Champions 2014/15), tapi kami semua tahu bahwa itu adalah target minimal yang harus kami wujudkan," kata Smalling seperti dikutip Inside Futbol.

"Semoga pemain-pemain yang cedera segera kembali fit agar kemenangan demi kemenangan bisa lebih mudah diraih," pungkasnya.

Hingga pekan ke-24, United masih tertinggal tujuh poin dari Liverpool di batas empat besar klasemen liga. Butuh perjuangan keras bagi mereka untuk naik ke papan atas.

Opsi lain untuk lolos ke Liga Champions adalah dengan menjadi juara musim ini. United memang "cuma" kebagian lawan yang bernama Olympiacos di babak 16 besar. Namun, andai lolos, peluang untuk dapat melangkah lebih jauh pun bakal berat apabila mereka dihadapkan pada tim yang jauh lebih kuat.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

PENCURI TAS WAKIL DUBES BRUNAI DI BANDARA SOETTA TEREKAM CCTV

saco-indonesia.com, Wakil Dubes Brunei Darusalam, Ahmad Nasri Abdul Latief telah menjadi korban pencurian senilai Rp 200 juta di Bandara Soekarno Hatta,(Soetta)

Menuru Kapotlresta Bandara Soetta, Kombes CH Patoppoi, pencurian barang milik Wakil Dubes Brunei Darusalam telah terjadi Minggu (2/2) di Terminal 2D Bandara Soekarno Hatta.

Peristiwa itu telah terjadi saat Wakil Dubes yang berkantor di Jalan Teuku Umar No.51 Menteng Jakarta Pusat ini tiba dari Brunei di Bandara Soetta dengan naik pesawat Royal Brunei no penerbangan BI 735 sekitar pk.13.15.

Ketika itu korban yang bersama saksi Ardina MD Agus Din telah meletakkan barang bawaannya 5 tas diatas troly lalu menuju lift. ke area keberangkatan di lantai 2.”Pada saat itu ada seseorang yang telah mengarahkan korban ke lift,”jelasnya.

Korban baru sadar setelah ke luar dari lift di lantai 2 barang-barangnya berupa hand bag coklat yang berisi dompet,HP galax-note.8,dolar brunei 20.030, uang rupiah Rp400 ribu,kartu kredit HSBC,ATM bank brunei,KTP I’d bunei telah dicuri maling. “Kerugian total 200 juta,”jelas kapolres.

Kasus pencurian itu terekam dalam CCTV pelaku lebih dari satu dan berperan masing-masing.ada yang bertugas mengalihkan perhatian korban dan menggeser tas korban.

“Setelah kami melihat rekaman CCTV sedang melakukan pengejaran terhadap pelakunya,”jelas kapolres Kombes CH Patoppo

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

50 PELAJARAN PENTING DARI HAJI

Berikut ini adalah, 50 pelajaran berharga dari Rukun Islam Kelima untuk kehidupan manusia. Semoga Alloh memberikan taufiq, bantuan, dan menunjuki kebenaran pada kami dalam menyelesaikan tulisan ini.

1. Pendidikan untuk mentauhidkan Alloh, baik dalam ucapan maupun amalan, hal ini terlihat jelas dalam beberapa amalan berikut ini:

a. Bacaan talbiyah, yang disebut juga dengan kalimat tauhid: Labbaikallohumma labbaik…

b. Dimasukkannya dalam talbiyah kata: la syarika lak (tiada sekutu bagi-Mu).

c. Kata la syarika lak yang diulangi dua kali dalam bacaan talbiyah, ini menunjukkan adanya penekanan dalam hal tauhid.

d. Kata-kata: “Innal hamda wan ni’mata laka wal mulk”, maksudnya adalah: “Sesungguhnya semua pujian, segala nikmat, dan seluruh kekuasaan hanya bagi-Mu ya Alloh”, dan ini juga mengandung nilai tauhid.

e. Larangan thowaf di selain Ka’bah, itu artinya kita dilarang untuk thowaf di arofah, di jamarot, di pemakaman, tempat keramat, tempat bersejarah, dll. Ini semua bukti keyakinan kita, bahwa tiada sesembahan yang berhak disembah kecuali Alloh, dan itulah diantara bentuk nyata mentauhidkan Alloh.

2. Pendidikan untuk banyak memuji Alloh. Hal ini tampak pada kata hamdalah yang ada dalam talbiyah. Meski saat datang ke tanah suci, jamaah haji sedang dalam keadaan tertimpa musibah, didera cobaan, sakit, miskin, dan terasingkan… mereka semua tetap memuji Alloh, seakan-akan mereka dalam keadaan lapang, sehat, dan kuat… Sungguh tak diragukan lagi, memuji Alloh dianjurkan bagi setiap muslim, baik di saat suka, maupun duka.

3. Pendidikan untuk selalu membasahi lisan dengan dzikir, ini tampak pada:

a. Disunnahkannya membaca talbiyah hingga sampai di masjidil harom, atau sampai melihat ka’bah, atau sampai memulai thowaf. Meski para ulama berbeda pendapat tentang kapan harus mengakhiri talbiyah, tapi semua pendapat itu mengisyaratkan anjuran untuk memperbanyak talbiyah.

b. Saat thowaf, kita dianjurkan untuk memperbanyak doa, atau dzikir, atau pujian pada Alloh, dan semuanya merupakan bentuk dzikir.

c. Dalam sai juga demikian.

d. Doa di Hari Arofah yang berupa dzikir: “la ilaaha illallohu wahdahu….

e. Hari-hari di mina adalah hari untuk makan, minum, dan berdzikir.

f. Disyariatkannya melempar jumroh adalah untuk berdzikir mengingat-Nya.

g. Disunnahkan untuk membaca takbir dalam setiap lemparan kerikilnya.

Dan masih banyak lagi tempat dan kesempatan lain untuk memperbanyak dzikir dalam ibadah haji ini. Itu semua mengajarkan pada seorang muslim agar lisannya selalu basah dengan bacaan dzikir.

4. Mengajarkan kita untuk mengingat mati, yaitu dari pengenaan kain kafan dalam pelaksanaannya. Dengan ini, seorang mukmin akan teringat dan merasakan bagaimana akhir hidupnya, sehingga hal itu akan mempengaruhi hati dan amalannya.

5. Mengajarkan manusia untuk zuhud pada dunia dan kenikmatannya. Baik dia seorang yang kaya, presiden, atau menteri, ia tidak akan mengenakan kecuali baju putih itu. Seandainya ia ingin mengenakan baju lain yang dimilikinya, tetap saja tidak diperbolehkan baginya.

6- Mendidik manusia untuk qona’ah, sekaligus memberi pelajaran bahwa kekayaan yang hakiki adalah pada sifat qonaah itu. Oleh karena itu, para jama’ah haji dilatih untuk cukup hanya dengan mengenakan pakaian yang menutupi auratnya, cukup dengan tidur sekedar bisa menghilangkan lelah dan malas, dan cukup dengan makan sekedar bisa menopang tubuhnya.

7. Mengajarkan pada manusia, bahwa kekayaan duniawi tidaklah memiliki kedudukan di sisi Alloh bila dilihat dari dzatnya. Oleh karena itu para jamaah haji sama-sama dalam pakaian dan amalannya. Adapun kekayaan, kefakiran, kedudukan, dan tempat tinggal mereka, sungguh hal itu tidak punya pengaruh apa-apa. Yang mempengaruhi mereka hanyalah keikhlasan dan mengikuti sunnah dalam beramal. Sungguh demi Alloh, betapa banyak para masakin di tempat itu yang lebih mulia, dari mereka yang kaya dan memiliki kedudukan yang tinggi!!.

8. Mengajarkan pada manusia dasar Persatuan Islam, hal ini tampak dari seragamnya perbuatan, amalan, tempat, dan waktu mereka.

9. Mengajarkan pada manusia untuk sabar dalam menghadapi kemaksiatan, hal itu tampak pada hal-hal berikut ini:

a. Sabar untuk tidak melakukan hal-hal yang dilarang ketika dalam keadaan ihrom.

b. Sabar untuk tidak melakukan kefasikan, sebagaimana firman-Nya: “Barangsiapa berkewajiban menunaikan ibadah haji dalam bulan-bulan haji, maka janganlah ia berbuat fasik dan keji”. Sehingga ketika ia pulang ke negerinya, ia telah terdidik dan terbiasa sabar dari segala kemaksiatan, sebagaimana ia sabar menghadapinya pada hari-hari itu.

10. Mengajarkan pada muslim untuk sabar dalam ketaatan. Dan barangsiapa mau merenungi masalah-masalah tentang haji, tentu ia akan menemukan makna ini. Hal itu terlihat diantaranya:

Ketika jama’ah haji ingin bersegera kembali ke negerinya, ia tidak diperkenankan sebelum tanggal 12 dzulhijjah.

Pulangnya juga harus setelah melempar dan thowaf wada’, meski ia berasal dari negeri yang jauh, tetap saja ia harus menjalani semua amalan ketaatan ini, baru setelah itu diperkenankan untuk pulang.

11. Mengajarkan pada manusia, agar menyiapkan diri sebelum melakukan ketaatan, oleh karena itu disunnahkan bagi yang ingin memulai ihrom, agar mandi, membersihkan diri, memotong kuku, membersihkan rambut kemaluan dan ketiaknya, dan memarfumi badannya, sebagaimana dituntunkan oleh Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam-. Begitu pula ketika sudah tahallul awal dan akan melakukan thowaf ifadloh, disunnahkan baginya memakai parfum, sebagaimana dicontohkan oleh beliau. Tak diragukan lagi, tentunya hal ini akan berpengaruh terhadap jiwa ketika menjalani ibadahnya, sekaligus menambah kekhusyu’annya.

12. Mengajarkan pada manusia untuk ikhlas dan tulus hati, yang keduanya adalah puncak amalan hati, dengan keduanya sebuah amal akan diterima dan mendapatkan tempat yang mulia di sisi-Nya.

13. Mengajarkan pada manusia untuk tawakkal dan menyerahkan urusannya hanya pada Alloh semata, terutama dalam menunaikan dan memudahkan ibadahnya. Lihatlah bagaimana seorang muslim yang datang dengan meninggalkan keluarga, anak, dan hartanya, tentunya ia akan menyerahkan urusan harta dan sanak keluarganya pada Tuhannya, ia juga tentunya banyak meminta permohonan pada-Nya dalam menjalani beratnya perjalanan, terutama mereka yang datang dari negeri jauh.

14. mengajarkan manusia untuk bertawakkal yang benar, tentunya tawakkal yang tidak mengesampingkan usaha lahiriyah yang diperintahkan untuk mencari rizki, oleh karenanya Alloh berfirman: “Tidak ada masalah jika kalian ingin mengharapkan kemurahan (rizki) dari Tuhan kalian”. Ayat ini turun pada mereka yang menyangka bahwa makna tawakkal adalah dengan meninggalkan berdagang dalam haji.

15. Mengajarkan pada manusia untuk mewujudkan semua amalan-amalan hati. Sungguh tiada ibadah yang tampak padanya semua atau sebagian besar amalan hati seperti dalam haji ini. Terkumpul dalam ibadah haji ini amalan ikhlas, ketulusan hati, roja’, tawakkal, zuhud, waro’, muhasabah, keyakinan… dll”

16. Mendidik manusia untuk menundukkan hati dari apa yang diingininya, selama hal itu dilarang oleh syariat. Parfum, tutup kepala, dan semua larangan ihrom haruslah ditinggalkan oleh jama’ah haji padahal hatinya menginginkannya. Ia meninggalkannya bukan karena apa-apa, tapi karena syariat melarangnya.

17. mengajarkan manusia untuk taat dengan aturan dan batasan syariat. Hal ini nampak dalam aturan miqot dan batasannya, aturan waktu melempar, aturan waktu meninggalkan arofah, dll.

18. Mengajarkan pada manusia untuk membuka pintu qiyas yang shohih. Pelajaran berharga ini, bisa kita ambil dari ucapan Umar r.a. pada penduduk negeri Irak ketika mereka mengatakan: “Sungguh dua miqot itu, tidak pas dengan jalan kami”, maka Umar r.a. mengatakan: “Ambillah tempat yang sejajar dengannya di jalan kalian” (muttafaqun alaih).

Dengan ini, seorang muslim tahu bahwa aturan syariat bukanlah aturan yang kaku, dan tak bisa dirubah sama sekali. Tapi terbuka juga dalam aturan syariat ini pintu qiyas, tentunya hal ini hanya dikhususkan bagi mereka yang memiliki syarat dan ketentuan dalam ber-ijtihad.

19. Mengajarkan pada manusia tentang rukun kedua diterimanya suatu amalan, yakni mengikuti tuntunan Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam-. Oleh karena itu, beliau menyabdakan: “Ambillah cara manasik kalian dariku!” (muttafaqun alaih). Beliau juga mengatakan dalam kesempatan lain: “Melemparlah dengan kerikil yang seperti ini!”. Begitu juga perkataan Umar r.a. pada hajar aswad: “Aku tahu, kau ini hanyalah sebuah batu, yang takkan mampu memberi manfaat atau mendatangkan bahaya, andai saja aku tidak melihat Rosululloh -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- menciummu, tentunya aku takkan menciummu” (muttafaqun alaih).

Dengan itu semua, seorang muslim akan lulus dari madrasah hajinya, dalam keadaan telah terbiasa mengikuti tuntunan Nabinya -shollallohu alaihi wasallam-, baik dalam hal yang besar, maupun yang paling kecil sekalipun.

20. Memberikan pelajaran akan mudahnya ajaran syariat, sehingga keyakinan ini bisa tertanam dalam hatinya dan terasa ringan ketika menerapkannya. Hal ini, bisa terlihat dalam amalan-amalan berikut ini:

a. Letak miqot yang menyebar dan terpisah-pisah, hingga memudahkan para jama’ah haji dalam memulai ihromnya.

b. Cara manasik haji yang bermacam-macam.

c. Adanya hukum khusus bagi para jama’ah yang lemah dan lanjut usia.

21. Mendidik manusia, agar memperhatikan adanya perbedaan diantara mereka. Sungguh tidaklah mereka berada pada derajat yang sama. Hal ini tampak pada adanya cara manasik haji yang bermacam-macam. Diantara mereka ada yang tidak mampu menunaikan hajinya, kecuali dengan cara ifrod. Diantara mereka ada yang hanya mampu melakukannya dengan qiron dan hal itu menjadi lebih mudah dan lebih utama baginya. Dan diantara mereka ada yang bisa menunaikan manasik dengan cara yang paling utama, yakni tamattu’.

Sungguh ini menunjukkan tingginya perhatian syariat pada keadaan, kemampuan, masalah, dan perbedaan mereka. Sekaligus merupakan bantahan bagi orang yang menuntut bersatunya umat dalam segala hal, baik dalam amalan maupun dalam hal kepentingannya.

22. Mengajari manusia bagaimana fikhul khilaf dalam kehidupan nyata, hal itu tampak pada hal-hal berikut ini:

a. Perbedaan para jama’ah dalam dalam memilih cara manasiknya.

b. Perbedaan para jama’ah dalam menjalani amalan yang dilakukan pada hari ke-10 bulan Dzulhijjah.

c. Perbedaan para jama’ah dalam hal dzikir yang dibaca ketika meninggalkan Mina menuju Arofah. Sebagaimana disebutkan, para sahabat dulu ada yang bertalbiyah, ada juga yang bertakbir.

d. Perbedaan waktu bolehnya beranjak dari Muzdalifah ke Mina, melihat keadaan masing-masing, bagi yang lemah ada waktu tersendiri, dan bagi yang kuat ada waktu tersendiri.

e. Perbedaan para jama’ah dalam memilih nafar awal atau nafar tsani untuk ibadah hajinya.

f. Perbedaan para jama’ah dalam memilih menggundul atau memendekkan rambutnya ketika hendak bertahallul.

Semua contoh di atas, mengajari para jama’ah bagaimana menyikapi perbedaan dan individunya. Sungguh, tidak ada nukilan tentang timbulnya cekcok atau tuduhan antara satu sahabat dengan sahabat lainnya, karena sebab memilih cara manasik tertentu, meski pilihan mereka adalah cara manasik yang kurang utama.

23. Mengajari manusia, bahwa tidak semua yang diterangkan oleh syari’at itu mungkin dicerna oleh akal, tujuannya adalah agar syariat tetap menjadi pemegang kendali hukum di atas akal, bukan di bawahnya.

Lihatlah sebagai contoh sabda Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam-: “Perbanyaklah haji dan umroh, karena keduanya bisa menghilangkan kefakiran sebagaimana mampunya tengku pembakar menghilangkan karatnya besi. (Diriwayatkan oleh para pengarang kitab sunan, dan dishohihkan oleh Albani)…

Padahal jika di nalar dengan akal, memperbanyak haji dan umroh itu, akan mengundang banyak kebutuhan dan tentunya akan banyak menghabiskan uang, tapi syariat malah mengatakan seperti itu. Sungguh akal tidak akan bisa menerangkan secara rasional, bahwa orang yang memperbanyak haji dan umroh akan menghilangkan kefakiran, Alloh lah yang tahu akan hakikat di balik itu semua.

Dengan ini, seorang muslim akan terdidik untuk selalu menghubungkan dirinya dengan Alloh dan ilmu-Nya, sekaligus melatihnya untuk berjiwa besar dan mau mengakui kelemahan dan kekurangannya.

24. Mengajari manusia, bahwa yang paling afdlol, adalah yang sesuai dg syariat, bukan yang lebih berat dan susah, misalnya: Memulai ihrom dari miqot, lebih utama dari pada memulainya dari tempat sebelumnya, meski itu lebih berat dan susah. Sehingga dengan ini, seorang muslim terdidik untuk memuliakan syariat dan memperhatikannya.

25. Melatih manusia, untuk terbiasa tertib dan taat aturan. Budaya tersebut bukanlah keistimewaan negeri kafir, sebaliknya itu merupakah nilai Islam yang telah kita abaikan. Nilai ini tampak dari hal-hal berikut:

a. Harusnya tertib dalam menjalani amalan-amalan Umroh.

b. Sunnahnya tertib dalam menjalankan amalan-amalan pada hari ke-10 bulan dzulhijjah.

c. Harusnya tertib ketika melempar jamarot.
Tapi yang sungguh mengherankan, di zaman kita ini, justru ketertiban itu malah dijadikan cemoohan!…

26. Mendidik manusia untuk menekan syahwatnya secara khusus, oleh karena itu akad nikah menjadi larangan saat dalam keadaan ihrom, bahkan sampai rofats[1] dan jima’ pun dilarang. Tidak diragukan, ini mendidik seorang muslim agar waspada dan hati-hati dengan syahwat ini.

27. Mendidik manusia untuk menunaikan ibadahnya sesempurna dan sebaik mungkin, oleh karena itu Alloh berfirman: “Barangsiapa yang berkewajiban haji, maka janganlah ia melakukan rofats, kefasikan, dan debat (kusir) dalam ibadah hajinya”, beliau -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- juga bersabda: “Haji yang mabrur itu, tiada balasan lain baginya kecuali surga” (Muttafaqun Alaih). Ini semua mendidik muslim untuk menjaga kualitas ibadahnya.

28. Mendidik manusia untuk menyesuaikan dirinya saat keadaan dan kebiasaan lingkungannya berubah. Tentunya sepanjang tahun jama’ah haji terbiasa melakukan sesuatu di negaranya, lalu ketika datang haji, ia harus memaksa dirinya untuk menyesuaikan dengan waktu dan jam yang sedang ia jalani. Inilah maksud dari arahan Umar r.a. saat mengatakan: “Prihatinlah, karena nikmat-nikmat yang ada itu tidak akan langgeng selamanya”.

29. Mendidik manusia untuk banyak berdoa. Dalam manasik haji, disunnahkan bagi muslim untuk berdoa pada Tuhannya, di kebanyakan tempat yang dikunjunginya, misalnya:

a. Saat thowaf.

b. Saat sholat sunat 2 rokaat setelah thowaf.

c. Saat minum air zamzam.

d. Saat naik ke bukit Shofa dan Marwa.

e. Saat di tengah-tengah pelaksanaan sa’i.

f. Saat Hari Arofah

g. Setelah terbit fajarnya hari nahr (tanggal 10 dzulhijjah) hingga langit menguning.

h. Setelah melempar dua jamarot, Shughro dan Wustho.

Dan tempat-tempat lainnya, itu semua mendidik seorang muslim untuk selalu mendekatkan diri pada Tuhannya dalam doa dan selalu kembali pada-Nya.

30. Mendidik muslim untuk ta’abbud dengan sifat maha mendengar dan maha melihatnya Alloh ta’ala, sebagaimana madzhabnya Ahlus sunnah wal jama’ah dalam menetapkan sifat dan maknanya, ini tampak dalam hal-hal berikut ini:

a. Banyaknya bahasa yang beraneka ragam, suara yang berbeda-beda, kebutuhan yang bermacam-macam, pun begitu, Dia yang maha suci tetap mampu mendengarkan doanya ini, dan mengabulkan doanya itu, serta mengetahui seluruh bahasa mereka.

b. Dia maha tahu niat para jama’ah haji yang berbeda-beda, dan seberapa tulus dan ikhlasnya mereka, meski jumlah mereka sangat banyak.

31. Melatih manusia, untuk tidak menganggap remeh apapun yang diharamkan Alloh, oleh karena itulah dalam ibadah haji ini, ada beberapa kalimat yang diulang-ulang, diantaranya:

a. Tanah haram.

b. Bulan haram.

c. Larangan-larangan ketika sedang ihrom.

Dengan begitu seorang muslim terlatih untuk mengagungkan apa yang diharamkan oleh Alloh ta’ala dari sekian banyak sesuatu yang diharamkannya.

32. Melatih manusia untuk meneguhkan prinsip “loyal pada kaum muslimin dan berlepas diri dari kaum kafirin”. Oleh karena itulah disunnahkan dalam sholat sunat setelah thowaf untuk membaca surat alkafirun, yang didalamnya menekankan dan menuangkan dasar prinsip ini.

Termasuk diantara bukti paling nampak dari petunjuk menyelisihi kaum musyrikin adalah, beranjaknya para jama’ah haji (dari Muzdalifah) sebelum terbitnya matahari.

33. Mendidik manusia untuk tenang, tertib, dan mempraktekkan prinsip itsar (mendahulukan orang lain dalam hal duniawi). Oleh karena itulah dahulu Rosul -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- ketika meninggalkan Arofah menyabdakan: “tenang dan tenanglah”, karena saat itu merupakan momen yang biasanya rame dan memungkinkan terjadinya saling menyakiti antara kaum muslimin.

Sifat waqor dan tenang adalah sifat yang selayaknya melekat pada diri seorang muslim, sebagaimana Alloh memberikan sifat itu pada mereka dalam kitab-Nya: “yaitu mereka yang berjalan di atas bumi dengan sopan”

34. Mendidik manusia untuk menyatukan kata, meski keadaan dan cara manasik mereka berbeda-beda. Ini merupakan dasar yang agung, dan ditunjukkan dalam banyak nash syariat dan juga tampak dari keadaan para sahabat -rodliallohu anhum-.

35. Melatih manusia untuk mengingat hari kiamat, yakni dengan banyaknya orang yang berkumpul saat itu, bahkan pada hari kiamat nanti, Alloh akan mengumpulkan manusia dari awal hingga akhir penciptaan. Tak diragukan lagi, dengan mengingat hari kiamat, hati seorang muslim akan hidup dan memiliki pengaruh besar dalam kekhusyu’an dan ibadahnya.

36. Mendidik manusia untuk memperhatikan dan menghargai waktu. Hari arofah adalah kesempatan yang tak ada gantinya bila telah hilang, hari-hari tasyriq adalah hari-hari yang diperuntukkan untuk berdzikir (mengingat Alloh), dan di 10 hari pertama bulan dzul hijjah amalan ibadah dilipat-gandakan pahalanya, itu semua melatih seorang muslim untuk memanfaatkan waktunya untuk apapun yang bermanfaat baginya.

37. Mendidik manusia untuk menjaga ukhuwwah imaniyyah, itu tampak dari bertemunya raga, yang akan menjadikan berkumpulnya hati, dan tentunya akan terlihat pengaruh pertalian persaudaraan itu dalam tingkah laku dan kehidupan sehari-hari.

38. Mengajari manusia untuk mewujudkan lahan yang riil untuk mendidik jiwa, misalnya:

a. Haji adalah tempat untuk mendidik jiwa untuk menjaga pandangan mata dari sesuatu yang diharamkan.

b. Haji adalah tempat untuk mendidik jiwa untuk itsar (mendahulukan orang lain) dalam urusan duniawi)

c. Haji adalah tempat mendidik jiwa untuk memberi bantuan dan sedekah.

d. Haji adalah tempat mendidik jiwa untuk menerapkan amar ma’ruf nahi mungkar.

Sungguh haji merupakan pusat praktek nyata dan tempat pelatihan untuk menguji kepribadian seseorang.

39. Mendidik manusia untuk membuktikan taqwanya, karena tempat ketakwaan adalah hati, dan sebagian besar amalan haji itu bertumpu pada hati dengan derajat paling tinggi, oleh karena itulah Alloh menyebutkan redaksi takwa dalam ayat-ayat haji, Alloh berfirman: “Sempurnakanlah haji dan umroh itu untuk Alloh…” di akhir ayat disebutkan: “dan bertakwalah kalian pada Alloh!”… Dia juga berfirman: “Siapkanlah bekal (untuk haji), sungguh sebaik-baik bekal adalah taqwa”.

40. Mendidik manusia agar berakhlak mulia, yang merupakan sesuatu yang paling berat dalam timbangan amal di hari kiamat nanti, hal ini tampak dari firman-Nya: “Janganlah berdebat (kusir) dalam haji!”. Maka anjuran untuk meninggalkan debat merupakan pendidikan untuk berakhlak mulia. Hal itu juga tampak pada anjuran Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- kepada para sahabatnya untuk tetap tenang ketika meninggalkan Arofah.

41. Mendidik manusia untuk mencintai seluruh Nabi -alaihimus salam-, hal ini tampak dari:

Pemenuhan panggilannya Nabi Ibrohim ketika memanggil manusia untuk haji.

Menziarahi ka’bah yang dibangun olehnya bersama Ismail.

Dan sa’i di jalannya siti hajar ketika mencarikan air untuk Isma’il.

42. Mendidik manusia untuk menjalankan macam-macam ibadah, seperti: Thowaf, sa’i, sholat, mabit, melempar, menyembelih, menggundul, dll. Sehingga seorang muslim terdidik untuk tidak hanya terpaku dalam satu macam ibadah saja, tapi menjadikan agar ibadahnya bervariasi dan merasakan nikmatnya melakukan ibadah.

43. Mendidik manusia untuk mengagungkan Alloh, hal ini tampak dalam beberapa hal berikut:

a. Kepala yang di… dan digundul untuk mendekatkan diri dan bersimpuh kepada Alloh.

b. Hadyu yang disembelih untuk beribadah pada-Nya, dialirkan darahnya karena wajah-Nya, dan nama-Nya juga disebut ketika menyembelihnya.

44. Mendidik manusia untuk mencintai Alloh. Siapapun yang mau merenungi pemandangan jama’ah haji yang mencapai jutaan, dan merenungi bagaimana Alloh memberi mereka rizki, mengatur, menjaga, dan menanggung kebutuhan mereka, ini akan menuntunnya untuk mencintai-Nya. Dengan ini dan poin sebelum ini, akan terkumpul kecintaan dan pengagungan pada Alloh, dan inilah hakekat dari ibadah.

45. Mendidik manusia untuk mengetahui jasa Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- dan para sahabatnya -rodliallohu anhum- dalam menyebarkan agama ke seluruh penjuru dunia. Ketika anda merenungi jumlah jama’ah haji yang sangat besar itu, mereka memiliki daerah, warna, dan bahasa yang beragam, tentu anda akan tahu jasa para pendahulu dalam menyebarkan agama Alloh ini. Lihatlah bagaimana ia bisa sampai ke negara-negara Asia Timur, Afrika, bahkan Eropa. Semoga Alloh membalas mereka dengan balasan yang paling baik atas tugas berat yang diembannya dengan sebaik-baiknya, dan semoga Alloh memgampuni kita atas kekurangan kita dalam meneruskannya, dan kita memohon kepada Alloh agar membantu kita dalam urusan ini.

46. Mendidik manusia untuk berusaha membuat jengkel kaum musyrikin, dengan cara apapun, oleh karena itulah beliau -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- menyariatkan roml ketika thowaf hanya untuk membuat jengkel kaum musyrikin saja, yakni saat mereka mengata-ngatai kaum muslimin ketika datang ke Mekah: “Mereka itu mendatangi kalian, dalam keadaan telah dilemahkan oleh Humma Yatsrib“.

47. Mendidik manusia agar merasakan pengaruh ibadah dalam kehidupan ini. Meski dengan banyaknya jama’ah haji, adanya keramaian, berdesakan, berat, dan lelah, tetap saja jiwa orang-orang itu lembut, dan jarang terjadi masalah, suara tinggi, dan saling marah. Sebabnya adalah -wallohu a’lam-, karena ibadah yang sedang mereka lakukan, mempengaruhi keadaan jiwa mereka, hingga merubahnya menjadi jiwa yang tinggi, yang tidak peduli dengan hal-hal yang remeh.

Beda halnya dengan pemandangan di pasar misalnya, banyak sekali terjadi jeritan, dan suara yang tinggi, banyak pula terjadi masalah dan hal-hal buruk lainnya. Itu semua memberikan pelajaran berharga bagi seorang muslim, tentang adanya perbedaan yang jelas terlihat antara dua keadaan itu.

48. Mendidik manusia untuk selalu sadar tanggung jawab. Ketika terjadi kesalahan dari para jama’ah haji -kadang sebagian kesalahannya dalam hal-hal yang diperkirakan semua orang tahu bahwa itu salah-, ini mendidik muslim untuk sadar tanggung-jawab yang dibebankan di pundaknya untuk memberitahu saudaranya, menyodorkan sesuatu yang bermanfaat bagi mereka, dan menghilangkan kebodohan yang ada pada mereka. Penulis yakin inilah yang bisa memberi manfaat, bukan malah mencemooh atau menuduh yang bukan-bukan pada mereka yang salah.

49. Melatih manusia untuk berjihad, dengan adanya masyaqqoh, lelah, dan keinginan hati  yang tak dituruti. Oleh karena itulah Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- menamainya jihad, sebagaimana dalam sabdanya: “Bagi kalian (para wanita) ada jihad yang tanpa perang, yaitu haji dan umroh” (HR. Bukhori)

50. Mendidik manusia untuk bangga dengan agama dan keislamanya. Ini tampak dari keadaan setan di Hari Arofah, telah disebutkan dalam kitab Al-Muwaththo’ karya Imam Malik, bahwa Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- pernah bersabda: “Tiada suatu haripun, yang saat itu setan terlihat paling kerdil, paling hina, dan paling marah, melebihi Hari Arofah” (dihasankan oleh Ibnu Abdil Barr -rohimahulloh-). Hal ini juga tampak dari bagaimana Alloh membangga-banggakan hambanya yang sedang wukuf di Arofah di hadapan para malaikat, sebagaimana disebutkan dalam shohih muslim.

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Dean Skelos, Albany Senate Leader, Aided Son at All Costs, U.S. Says

Over the last five years or so, it seemed there was little that Dean G. Skelos, the majority leader of the New York Senate, would not do for his son.

He pressed a powerful real estate executive to provide commissions to his son, a 32-year-old title insurance salesman, according to a federal criminal complaint. He helped get him a job at an environmental company and employed his influence to help the company get government work. He used his office to push natural gas drilling regulations that would have increased his son’s commissions.

He even tried to direct part of a $5.4 billion state budget windfall to fund government contracts that the company was seeking. And when the company was close to securing a storm-water contract from Nassau County, the senator, through an intermediary, pressured the company to pay his son more — or risk having the senator subvert the bid.

The criminal complaint, unsealed on Monday, lays out corruption charges against Senator Skelos and his son, Adam B. Skelos, the latest scandal to seize Albany, and potentially alter its power structure.

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The repeated and diverse efforts by Senator Skelos, a Long Island Republican, to use what prosecutors said was his political influence to find work, or at least income, for his son could send both men to federal prison. If they are convicted of all six charges against them, they face up to 20 years in prison for each of four of the six counts and up to 10 years for the remaining two.

Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, of Long Island, who serves as chairman of the Republican conference, emerged from a closed-door meeting Monday night to say that conference members agreed that Mr. Skelos should be benefited the “presumption of innocence,” and would stay in his leadership role.

“The leader has indicated he would like to remain as leader,” said Mr. LaValle, “and he has the support of the conference.” The case against Mr. Skelos and his son grew out of a broader inquiry into political corruption by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, that has already changed the face of the state capital. It is based in part, according to the six-count complaint, on conversations secretly recorded by one of two cooperating witnesses, and wiretaps on the cellphones of the senator and his son. Those recordings revealed that both men were concerned about electronic surveillance, and illustrated the son’s unsuccessful efforts to thwart it.

Adam Skelos took to using a “burner” phone, the complaint says, and told his father he wanted them to speak through a FaceTime video call in an apparent effort to avoid detection. They also used coded language at times.

At one point, Adam Skelos was recorded telling a Senate staff member of his frustration in not being able to speak openly to his father on the phone, noting that he could not “just send smoke signals or a little pigeon” carrying a message.

The 43-page complaint, sworn out by Paul M. Takla, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlines a five-year scheme to “monetize” the senator’s official position; it also lays bare the extent to which a father sought to use his position to help his son.

The charges accuse the two men of extorting payments through a real estate developer, Glenwood Management, based on Long Island, and the environmental company, AbTech Industries, in Scottsdale, Ariz., with the expectation that the money paid to Adam Skelos — nearly $220,000 in total — would influence his father’s actions.

Glenwood, one of the state’s most prolific campaign donors, had ties to AbTech through investments in the environmental firm’s parent company by Glenwood’s founding family and a senior executive.

The accusations in the complaint portray Senator Skelos as a man who, when it came to his son, was not shy about twisting arms, even in situations that might give other arm-twisters pause.

Seeking to help his son, Senator Skelos turned to the executive at Glenwood, which develops rental apartments in New York City and has much at stake when it comes to real estate legislation in Albany. The senator urged him to direct business to his son, who sold title insurance.

After much prodding, the executive, Charles C. Dorego, engineered a $20,000 payment to Adam Skelos from a title insurance company even though he did no work for the money. But far more lucrative was a consultant position that Mr. Dorego arranged for Adam Skelos at AbTech, which seeks government contracts to treat storm water. (Mr. Dorego is not identified by name in the complaint, but referred to only as CW-1, for Cooperating Witness 1.)

Senator Skelos appeared to take an active interest in his son’s new line of work. Adam Skelos sent him several drafts of his consulting agreement with AbTech, the complaint says, as well as the final deal that was struck.

“Mazel tov,” his father replied.

Senator Skelos sent relevant news articles to his son, including one about a sewage leak near Albany. When AbTech wanted to seek government contracts after Hurricane Sandy, the senator got on a conference call with his son and an AbTech executive, Bjornulf White, and offered advice. (Like Mr. Dorego, Mr. White is not named in the complaint, but referred to as CW-2.)

The assistance paid off: With the senator’s help, AbTech secured a contract worth up to $12 million from Nassau County, a big break for a struggling small business.

But the money was slow to materialize. The senator expressed impatience with county officials.

Adam Skelos, in a phone call with Mr. White in late December, suggested that his father would seek to punish the county. “I tell you this, the state is not going to do a [expletive] thing for the county,” he said.

Three days later, Senator Skelos pressed his case with the Nassau County executive, Edward P. Mangano, a fellow Republican. “Somebody feels like they’re just getting jerked around the last two years,” the senator said, referring to his son in what the complaint described as “coded language.”

The next day, the senator pursued the matter, as he and Mr. Mangano attended a wake for a slain New York City police officer. Senator Skelos then reassured his son, who called him while he was still at the wake. “All claims that are in will be taken care of,” the senator said.

AbTech’s fortunes appeared to weigh on his son. At one point in January, Adam Skelos told his father that if the company did not succeed, he would “lose the ability to pay for things.”

Making matters worse, in recent months, Senator Skelos and his son appeared to grow wary about who was watching them. In addition to making calls on the burner phone, Adam Skelos said he used the FaceTime video calling “because that doesn’t show up on the phone bill,” as he told Mr. White.

In late February, Adam Skelos arranged a pair of meetings between Mr. White and state senators; AbTech needed to win state legislation that would allow its contract to move beyond its initial stages. But Senator Skelos deemed the plan too risky and caused one of the meetings to be canceled.

In another recorded call, Adam Skelos, promising to be “very, very vague” on the phone, urged his father to allow the meeting. The senator offered a warning. “Right now we are in dangerous times, Adam,” he told him.

A month later, in another phone call that was recorded by the authorities, Adam Skelos complained that his father could not give him “real advice” about AbTech while the two men were speaking over the telephone.

“You can’t talk normally,” he told his father, “because it’s like [expletive] Preet Bharara is listening to every [expletive] phone call. It’s just [expletive] frustrating.”

“It is,” his father agreed.

Richard Suzman, 72, Dies; Researcher Influenced Global Surveys on Aging

At the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Suzman’s signature accomplishment was the central role he played in creating a global network of surveys on aging.

Tribute for a Roller Hockey Warrior

Hockey is not exactly known as a city game, but played on roller skates, it once held sway as the sport of choice in many New York neighborhoods.

“City kids had no rinks, no ice, but they would do anything to play hockey,” said Edward Moffett, former director of the Long Island City Y.M.C.A. Roller Hockey League, in Queens, whose games were played in city playgrounds going back to the 1940s.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, the league had more than 60 teams, he said. Players included the Mullen brothers of Hell’s Kitchen and Dan Dorion of Astoria, Queens, who would later play on ice for the National Hockey League.

One street legend from the heyday of New York roller hockey was Craig Allen, who lived in the Woodside Houses projects and became one of the city’s hardest hitters and top scorers.

“Craig was a warrior, one of the best roller hockey players in the city in the ’70s,” said Dave Garmendia, 60, a retired New York police officer who grew up playing with Mr. Allen. “His teammates loved him and his opponents feared him.”

Young Craig took up hockey on the streets of Queens in the 1960s, playing pickup games between sewer covers, wearing steel-wheeled skates clamped onto school shoes and using a roll of electrical tape as the puck.

His skill and ferocity drew attention, Mr. Garmendia said, but so did his skin color. He was black, in a sport made up almost entirely by white players.

“Roller hockey was a white kid’s game, plain and simple, but Craig broke the color barrier,” Mr. Garmendia said. “We used to say Craig did more for race relations than the N.A.A.C.P.”

Mr. Allen went on to coach and referee roller hockey in New York before moving several years ago to South Carolina. But he continued to organize an annual alumni game at Dutch Kills Playground in Long Island City, the same site that held the local championship games.

The reunion this year was on Saturday, but Mr. Allen never made it. On April 26, just before boarding the bus to New York, he died of an asthma attack at age 61.

Word of his death spread rapidly among hundreds of his old hockey colleagues who resolved to continue with the event, now renamed the Craig Allen Memorial Roller Hockey Reunion.

The turnout on Saturday was the largest ever, with players pulling on their old equipment, choosing sides and taking once again to the rink of cracked blacktop with faded lines and circles. They wore no helmets, although one player wore a fedora.

Another, Vinnie Juliano, 77, of Long Island City, wore his hearing aids, along with his 50-year-old taped-up quads, or four-wheeled skates with a leather boot. Many players here never converted to in-line skates, and neither did Mr. Allen, whose photograph appeared on a poster hanging behind the players’ bench.

“I’m seeing people walking by wondering why all these rusty, grizzly old guys are here playing hockey,” one player, Tommy Dominguez, said. “We’re here for Craig, and let me tell you, these old guys still play hard.”

Everyone seemed to have a Craig Allen story, from his earliest teams at Public School 151 to the Bryant Rangers, the Woodside Wings, the Woodside Blues and more.

Mr. Allen, who became a yellow-cab driver, was always recruiting new talent. He gained the nickname Cabby for his habit of stopping at playgrounds all over the city to scout players.

Teams were organized around neighborhoods and churches, and often sponsored by local bars. Mr. Allen, for one, played for bars, including Garry Owen’s and on the Fiddler’s Green Jokers team in Inwood, Manhattan.

Play was tough and fights were frequent.

“We were basically street gangs on skates,” said Steve Rogg, 56, a mail clerk who grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and who on Saturday wore his Riedell Classic quads from 1972. “If another team caught up with you the night before a game, they tossed you a beating so you couldn’t play the next day.”

Mr. Garmendia said Mr. Allen’s skin color provoked many fights.

“When we’d go to some ignorant neighborhoods, a lot of players would use slurs,” Mr. Garmendia said, recalling a game in Ozone Park, Queens, where local fans parked motorcycles in a lineup next to the blacktop and taunted Mr. Allen. Mr. Garmendia said he checked a player into the motorcycles, “and the bikes went down like dominoes, which started a serious brawl.”

A group of fans at a game in Brooklyn once stuck a pole through the rink fence as Mr. Allen skated by and broke his jaw, Mr. Garmendia said, adding that carloads of reinforcements soon arrived to defend Mr. Allen.

And at another racially incited brawl, the police responded with six patrol cars and a helicopter.

Before play began on Saturday, the players gathered at center rink to honor Mr. Allen. Billy Barnwell, 59, of Woodside, recalled once how an all-white, all-star squad snubbed Mr. Allen by playing him third string. He scored seven goals in the first game and made first string immediately.

“He’d always hear racial stuff before the game, and I’d ask him, ‘How do you put up with that?’” Mr. Barnwell recalled. “Craig would say, ‘We’ll take care of it,’ and by the end of the game, he’d win guys over. They’d say, ‘This guy’s good.’”

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.

Harvey R. Miller, Renowned Bankruptcy Lawyer, Dies at 82

Mr. Miller, of the firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, represented companies including Lehman Brothers, General Motors and American Airlines, and mentored many of the top Chapter 11 practitioners today.

Don Mankiewicz, Screenwriter in a Family Film Tradition, Dies at 93

Mr. Mankiewicz, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for “I Want to Live!,” also wrote episodes of television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”

Andrew Lesnie, Cinematographer of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ Dies at 59

The magical quality Mr. Lesnie created in shooting the “Babe” films caught the eye of the director Peter Jackson, who chose him to film the fantasy epic.

Fatal Police Shootings: Accounts Since Ferguson

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Jean Nidetch, 91, Dies; Pounds Came Off, and Weight Watchers Was Born

A 214-pound Queens housewife struggled with a lifelong addiction to food until she shed 72 pounds and became the public face of the worldwide weight-control empire Weight Watchers.

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.”

Betsy von Furstenberg, Baroness and Versatile Actress, Dies at 83

Ms. von Furstenberg made her debut in the movies and on the Broadway stage in the early 1950s as a teenager and later reinvented herself as a television actress, writer and philanthropist.

Hard but Hopeful Home to ‘Lot of Freddies’

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Children playing last week in Sandtown-Winchester, the Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray was raised. One young resident called it “a tough community.”

Hard but Hopeful Home to ‘Lot of Freddies’

The neighborhood where Freddie Gray came of age has survived harrowing rates of unemployment, poor health, violent crime and incarceration.

The Uphill Battle to Better Regulate Formaldehyde

WASHINGTON — A decade after emergency trailers meant to shelter Hurricane Katrina victims instead caused burning eyes, sore throats and other more serious ailments, the Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of regulating the culprit: formaldehyde, a chemical that can be found in commonplace things like clothes and furniture.

But an unusual assortment of players, including furniture makers, the Chinese government, Republicans from states with a large base of furniture manufacturing and even some Democrats who championed early regulatory efforts, have questioned the E.P.A. proposal. The sustained opposition has held sway, as the agency is now preparing to ease key testing requirements before it releases the landmark federal health standard.

The E.P.A.’s five-year effort to adopt this rule offers another example of how industry opposition can delay and hamper attempts by the federal government to issue regulations, even to control substances known to be harmful to human health.

Continue reading the main story

 

Document: The Formaldehyde Fight

Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen that can also cause respiratory ailments like asthma, but the potential of long-term exposure to cause cancers like myeloid leukemia is less well understood.

The E.P.A.’s decision would be the first time that the federal government has regulated formaldehyde inside most American homes.

“The stakes are high for public health,” said Tom Neltner, senior adviser for regulatory affairs at the National Center for Healthy Housing, who has closely monitored the debate over the rules. “What we can’t have here is an outcome that fails to confront the health threat we all know exists.”

The proposal would not ban formaldehyde — commonly used as an ingredient in wood glue in furniture and flooring — but it would impose rules that prevent dangerous levels of the chemical’s vapors from those products, and would set testing standards to ensure that products sold in the United States comply with those limits. The debate has sharpened in the face of growing concern about the safety of formaldehyde-treated flooring imported from Asia, especially China.

What is certain is that a lot of money is at stake: American companies sell billions of dollars’ worth of wood products each year that contain formaldehyde, and some argue that the proposed regulation would impose unfair costs and restrictions.

Determined to block the agency’s rule as proposed, these industry players have turned to the White House, members of Congress and top E.P.A. officials, pressing them to roll back the testing requirements in particular, calling them redundant and too expensive.

“There are potentially over a million manufacturing jobs that will be impacted if the proposed rule is finalized without changes,” wrote Bill Perdue, the chief lobbyist at the American Home Furnishings Alliance, a leading critic of the testing requirements in the proposed regulation, in one letter to the E.P.A.

Industry opposition helped create an odd alignment of forces working to thwart the rule. The White House moved to strike out key aspects of the proposal. Subsequent appeals for more changes were voiced by players as varied as Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, and Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, as well as furniture industry lobbyists.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 helped ignite the public debate over formaldehyde, after the deadly storm destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of homes along the Gulf of Mexico, forcing families into temporary trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The displaced storm victims quickly began reporting respiratory problems, burning eyes and other issues, and tests then confirmed high levels of formaldehyde fumes leaking into the air inside the trailers, which in many cases had been hastily constructed.

Public health advocates petitioned the E.P.A. to issue limits on formaldehyde in building materials and furniture used in homes, given that limits already existed for exposure in workplaces. But three years after the storm, only California had issued such limits.

Industry groups like the American Chemistry Council have repeatedly challenged the science linking formaldehyde to cancer, a position championed by David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana, who is a major recipient of chemical industry campaign contributions, and whom environmental groups have mockingly nicknamed “Senator Formaldehyde.”

Continue reading the main story

Typical

laminate

flooring

CLEAR FINISH LAYER

Often made of melamine resin

PATTERN LAYER

Paper printed to resemble wood,

or a thin wood veneer

GLUE

Layers may be bound using

formaldehyde-based glues

CORE LAYER

Fiberboard or other

composite, formed using

formaldehyde-based adhesives

BASE LAYER

Moisture-resistant vapor barrier

What is formaldehyde?

Formaldehyde is a common chemical used in many industrial and household products as an adhesive, bonding agent or preservative. It is classified as a volatile organic compound. The term volatile means that, at room temperature, formaldehyde will vaporize, or become a gas. Products made with formaldehyde tend to release this gas into the air. If breathed in large quantities, it may cause health problems.

WHERE IT IS COMMONLY FOUND

POTENTIAL HEALTH RISKS

Pressed-wood and composite wood products

Wallpaper and paints

Spray foam insulation used in construction

Commercial wood floor finishes

Crease-resistant fabrics

In cigarette smoke, or in the fumes from combustion of other materials, including wood, oil and gasoline.

Exposure to formaldehyde in sufficient amounts may cause eye, throat or skin irritation, allergic reactions, and respiratory problems like coughing, wheezing or asthma.

Long-term exposure to high levels has been associated with cancer in humans and laboratory animals.

Exposure to formaldehyde may affect some people more severely than others.

Sources: Consumer Product Safety Commission; Minnesota Department of Health

 

By The New York Times

By 2010, public health advocates and some industry groups secured bipartisan support in Congress for legislation that ordered the E.P.A. to issue federal rules that largely mirrored California’s restrictions. At the time, concerns were rising over the growing number of lower-priced furniture imports from Asia that might include contaminated products, while also hurting sales of American-made products.

Maneuvering began almost immediately after the E.P.A. prepared draft rules to formally enact the new standards.

White House records show at least five meetings in mid-2012 with industry executives — kitchen cabinet makers, chemical manufacturers, furniture trade associations and their lobbyists, like Brock R. Landry, of the Venable law firm. These parties, along with Senator Vitter’s office, appealed to top administration officials, asking them to intervene to roll back the E.P.A. proposal.

The White House Office of Management and Budget, which reviews major federal regulations before they are adopted, apparently agreed. After the White House review, the E.P.A. “redlined” many of the estimates of the monetary benefits that would be gained by reductions in related health ailments, like asthma and fertility issues, documents reviewed by The New York Times show.

As a result, the estimated benefit of the proposed rule dropped to $48 million a year, from as much as $278 million a year. The much-reduced amount deeply weakened the agency’s justification for the sometimes costly new testing that would be required under the new rules, a federal official involved in the effort said.

“It’s a redlining blood bath,” said Lisa Heinzerling, a Georgetown University Law School professor and a former E.P.A. official, using the Washington phrase to describe when language is stricken from a proposed rule. “Almost the entire discussion of these potential benefits was excised.”

Senator Vitter’s staff was pleased.

“That’s a huge difference,” said Luke Bolar, a spokesman for Mr. Vitter, of the reduced estimated financial benefits, saying the change was “clearly highlighting more mismanagement” at the E.P.A.

The review’s outcome galvanized opponents in the furniture industry. They then targeted a provision that mandated new testing of laminated wood, a cheaper alternative to hardwood. (The California standard on which the law was based did not require such testing.)

But E.P.A. scientists had concluded that these laminate products — millions of which are sold annually in the United States — posed a particular risk. They said that when thin layers of wood, also known as laminate or veneer, are added to furniture or flooring in the final stages of manufacturing, the resulting product can generate dangerous levels of fumes from often-used formaldehyde-based glues.

Industry executives, outraged by what they considered an unnecessary and financially burdensome level of testing, turned every lever within reach to get the requirement removed. It would be particularly onerous, they argued, for small manufacturers that would have to repeatedly interrupt their work to do expensive new testing. The E.P.A. estimated that the expanded requirements for laminate products would cost the furniture industry tens of millions of dollars annually, while the industry said that the proposed rule over all would cost its 7,000 American manufacturing facilities over $200 million each year.

“A lot of people don’t seem to appreciate what a lot of these requirements do to a small operation,” said Dick Titus, executive vice president of the Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association, whose members are predominantly small businesses. “A 10-person shop, for example, just really isn’t equipped to handle that type of thing.”

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Big industry players also weighed in. Executives from companies including La-Z-Boy, Hooker Furniture and Ashley Furniture all flew to Washington for a series of meetings with the offices of lawmakers including House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, and about a dozen other lawmakers, asking several of them to sign a letter prepared by the industry to press the E.P.A. to back down, according to an industry report describing the lobbying visit.

Within a matter of weeks, two letters — using nearly identical language — were sent by House and Senate lawmakers to the E.P.A. — with the industry group forwarding copies of the letters to the agency as well, and then posting them on its website.

The industry lobbyists also held their own meeting at E.P.A. headquarters, and they urged Jim Jones, who oversaw the rule-making process as the assistant administrator for the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, to visit a North Carolina furniture manufacturing plant. According to the trade group, Mr. Jones told them that the visit had “helped the agency shift its thinking” about the rules and how laminated products should be treated.

The resistance was particularly intense from lawmakers like Mr. Wicker of Mississippi, whose state is home to major manufacturing plants owned by Ashley Furniture Industries, the world’s largest furniture maker, and who is one of the biggest recipients in Congress of donations from the industry’s trade association. Asked if the political support played a role, a spokesman for Mr. Wicker replied: “Thousands of Mississippians depend on the furniture manufacturing industry for their livelihoods. Senator Wicker is committed to defending all Mississippians from government overreach.”

Individual companies like Ikea also intervened, as did the Chinese government, which claimed that the new rule would create a “great barrier” to the import of Chinese products because of higher costs.

Perhaps the most surprising objection came from Senator Boxer, of California, a longtime environmental advocate, whose office questioned why the E.P.A.’s rule went further than her home state’s in seeking testing on laminated products. “We did not advocate an outcome, other than safety,” her office said in a statement about why the senator raised concerns. “We said ‘Take a look to see if you have it right.’ ”

Safety advocates say that tighter restrictions — like the ones Ms. Boxer and Mr. Wicker, along with Representative Doris Matsui, a California Democrat, have questioned — are necessary, particularly for products coming from China, where items as varied as toys and Christmas lights have been found to violate American safety standards.

While Mr. Neltner, the environmental advocate who has been most involved in the review process, has been open to compromise, he has pressed the E.P.A. not to back down entirely, and to maintain a requirement that laminators verify that their products are safe.

An episode of CBS’s “60 Minutes” in March brought attention to the issue when it accused Lumber Liquidators, the discount flooring retailer, of selling laminate products with dangerous levels of formaldehyde. The company has disputed the show’s findings and test methods, maintaining that its products are safe.

“People think that just because Congress passed the legislation five years ago, the problem has been fixed,” said Becky Gillette, who then lived in coastal Mississippi, in the area hit by Hurricane Katrina, and was among the first to notice a pattern of complaints from people living in the trailers. “Real people’s faces and names come up in front of me when I think of the thousands of people who could get sick if this rule is not done right.”

An aide to Ms. Matsui rejected any suggestion that she was bending to industry pressure.

“From the beginning the public health has been our No. 1 concern,” said Kyle J. Victor, an aide to Ms. Matsui.

But further changes to the rule are likely, agency officials concede, as they say they are searching for a way to reduce the cost of complying with any final rule while maintaining public health goals. The question is just how radically the agency will revamp the testing requirement for laminated products — if it keeps it at all.

“It’s not a secret to anybody that is the most challenging issue,” said Mr. Jones, the E.P.A. official overseeing the process, adding that the health consequences from formaldehyde are real. “We have to reduce those exposures so that people can live healthy lives and not have to worry about being in their homes.”

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.”

Cher and Marc Jacobs