PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

MAIA SANG JUARA

    saco-indonesia.com,

    Aku hanya manusia,
    hanya insan penuh kesalahan, kelemahan di hidupku.
    Tapi aku harus maju,
    tak perduli semua merintangi, menghalangi di depanku.

    Ku yakin aku bisa,
    Dan aku pasti bisa,
     
    Reff:
    “Karna ku sang juara,
    “Karna ku sang juara,
    Akulah sang juara,
    Akulah sang juara.

    Walau badai menghalangi,
    Tuhan pasti ‘slalu  semangati, manguati,  hatiku.
    Ku yakin aku bisa,
    Dan aku pasti bisa,

    Reff:
    “Karna ku sang juara,
    “Karna ku sang juara,
    Akulah sang juara,
    Akulah sang juara.

    Kitalah SANG JUARA!!!

    Editor : Dian Sukmawati

PANIK USAI TABRAK MOTOR, PELAKU LARI TINGGALKAN MOBIL DAN KORBAN

saco-indonesia.com, Akibat panik usai menabrak motor dan melukai pengendaranya, pemilik mobil Avanza telah memilih kabur tanpa membawa kendaraannya. Alhasil, Mastariah yang berusia (55) tahun hanya bisa meringis kesakitan sebelum mendapat pertolongan dari warga sekitar.

Peristiwa tabrakan ini telah berlangsung di Jl Soekarno-Hatta tidak jauh dari jalan layang Sultan Agung-Ryacudu Bandarlampung, Kamis, sekitar pukul 09.00 pagi WIB. Kecelakaan ini telah membuat Mastariah mengalami luka berat. Oleh warga, korban telah dilarikan ke Rumah Sakit Immanuel setelah terseret sekitar 30 meter.

"Pada pukul 09.00 pagi WIB telah terjadi kecelakaan, saat petugas polisi lalu-lintas dari Polresta Bandarlampung sampai di lokasi, sopir mobil yang menabrak itu telah meninggalkan mobil dalam keadaan terkunci," kata Aiptu Imam Zarkoni, anggota piket Unit Laka Lantas Satlantas Polresta Bandarlampung.

Mobil warna hitam dengan nomor polisi BE 2409 YC itu telah menabrak Mastriah saat melintas di lokasi yang sama. Korban yang sehari-hari berprofesi sebagai tukang urut itu tinggal di Jl Sisingamangaraja Kelapa III Gg Arrahmah No. 13 Gedung Air, Bandarlampung.

Dari hasil penelusuran polisi, pelaku diketahui bernama Haidir yang berusia (42) tahun . Saat itu, pelaku tengah melaju dengan kencang dari arah Terminal Rajabasa menuju Panjang. Saat melintas di lokasi kejadian, kendaraannya telah menabrak bagian belakang sepeda motor Honda Astrea dengan nomor polisi BE 7521 BE.

"Setelah menabrak, mobil masih terus berjalan dan baru berhenti setelah terpental masuk ke jalur sebelah kanan sampai masuk ke parit," kata dia.

Usai kejadian tersebut , warga sekitar langsung menolong Mastariah dan membawanya ke rumah sakit. Kegaduhan itu telah memberi kesempatan kepada pengemudi Avanza untuk dapat melarikan diri.

"Kami juga perlu menunggu mobil derek dan kemudian akan melakukan penyidikan ke Samsat Provinsi Lampung untuk dapat mengetahui pemilik dan juga pengemudi mobil itu," katanya pula.

Terpisah, Kepala Satuan Lalu Lintas Polresta Bandarlampung AKP Reza tengah menyelidiki terkait dalam kecelakaan tersebut. Barang bukti yang berupa mobil Avanza dan sepeda motor milik korban telah diamankan di Polresta Bandarlampung.

"Kami juga masih harus melakukan penyelidikan kejadian tabrak lari itu. Identitas pengemudi dan pemilik mobil juga sudah diketahui, nantinya juga akan dilakukan pemeriksaan lebih lanjut," tegasnya.

Ia juga mengungkapkan pelaku pengemudi mobil yang melarikan diri tersebut juga akan dikenakan pasal 359 KUHP dengan ancaman hukuman hingga lima tahun penjara. Pelaku juga bisa dijerat UU No. 22 Tahun 2009 pasal 312, dengan sanksi denda hingga Rp 75 juta dan hukuman penjara hingga tiga tahun.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

MASA PENAHANAN MARIA ELIZABETH TELAH DIPERPANJANG KPK

saco-indonesia.com, Masa penahanan terhadap Direktur Utama PT Indoguna Utama Maria Elizabeth Liman telah diperpanjang. Maria yang telah menjadi tersangka dalam suap pengurusan kuota impor daging sapi di Kementerian Pertanian itu telah diperpanjang penahanannya 40 hari ke depan.

"Iya, ibu tadi telah menandatangani masa perpanjangan penahanannya untuk 40 hari ke depan, per tanggal 5 Januari hingga 14 Februari mendatang," ujar penasihat hukum tersangka, Denny Kailimang di Gedung KPK, Jakarta, Jumat (3/1).

Maria telah ditahan oleh KPK pada Selasa (17/12) lalu, usai diperiksa sebagai tersangka. Saat itu, Maria telah mengungkapkan dirinya adalah korban penipuan Elda Devianne Adiningrat dan Ahmad Fathanah.

Pengacaranya, Denny Kailimang juga mengatakan inisiatif pengajuan kouta impor datang dari Elda dan Fathanah.

"Memang awalnya itu adalah atas dasar inisiatif Elda. Elda juga bisa membantu. Tapi kenyataannya, tak bisa bantu. Setelah itu tak ada hubungan antara Maria dan Elda," ungkap Denny.

KPK juga telah menetapkan tersangka kepada Maria Elizabeth Liman pada Jumat, (19/4). Penetapan tersangka itu setelah KPK mengembangkan penyidikan kasus yang sebelumnya juga sudah menjerat mantan Presiden PKS Luthfi Hasan Ishaaq, Ahmad Fathanah dan dua Direktur PT Indoguna Utama, Juard Effendi dan Arya Abdi Effendi.

Maria disangkakan telah melanggar Pasal 5 ayat 1 huruf a atau b atau Pasal 13 Undang-undang (UU) Nomor 31 Tahun 1999 yang telah diubah dengan UU Nomor 20 Tahun 2001 juncto Pasal 5 ayat ke-1 KUHP. Diduga Maria turut inisiatif memberi uang suap dalam kasus tersebut.

Editor : Dian sukmawati

PANTAI SAWARNA

saco-indonesia.com,

Pantai Sawarna

 
Teman-teman travellers sekarang cerita cerita tentang Pantai Sawarna yuk.., Pantai Sawarna yang terletak di Propinsi Banten ternyata telah mempunyai banyak objek wisata pantai yang sangat menarik untuk dapat di kunjungi teman teman travellers, salah satunya adalah Pantai Sawarna. Pantai Sawarna yang terletak di Desa Sawarna, Kecamatan Bayah, Kabupaten Lebak, Propinsi Banten dan teman-teman trevellers menti ketahui Total jarak dari kota Jakarta sekitar 230 kilometer dengan waktu tempuh selama 6 – 7 jam. Dan lagi yang sobat travellers harus ketahui kenapa dinamakan pantai sawarna? Dulu ada seorang laki-laki yang bernama suwarna dwipa adalah bupati lebak pada waktu jaman belanda, kemudian beliau wafat di sungai sawarna, kemudian nama desa sawarna telah di ambil dari nama bupati belanda tersebut yaitu sawarna, yang bersamaan dengan nama sungai tempat dimana beliau wafat.

 
Sahabat trevelles Pantai Sawarna ini telah menyuguhkan pemandangan alam yang sangat indah. Deburan ombak dan pasir putihnya telah membuat liburan sobat travellers akan sangat mengasyikkan. Pantai Sawarna yang dikelilingi oleh persawahan dan perbukitan dengan pepohonan hijau yang lebat, telah menambah suasana menjadi teduh dan asri travellers.

 
Sobat travellers Memang untuk dapat menuju ke pantai cantik ini tidaklah mudah, karena lokasinya yang sangat jauh dari kota dan kontur jalan yang jelek karena banyak bagian jalan yang rusak dan berlubang, apalagi mulai dari Pelabuhan Ratu sampai ke Pantai Sawarna tersebut jalan nya menanjak dan banyak lubang besarmsehingga benar-menbutuhkan kehati-hatian yang ekstra sobat trevellers. Tapi begitu sampai di Desa Sawarna ini bakal terbayar deh rasa lelah capenya sewaktu di perjalanan tadi yang memakan waktu 7 jam.

 
Selain itu juga terdapat beberapa goa di sekitar kawasan pantai ini yang menambah lengkapnya liburan sobat, Salah satunya Goa Lalay teman-teman travelers, namanya aneh ya.. tau gak kenapa dinamakan goa lalay, lalay itu sendiri dalam bahasa sunda yang berarti kalalawar, karena memang benar di dalam gua lalai ini banyak sekali kalalawarnya sahabat travellers. Kalalawar juga sangat senang bersarang di dalam goa ini.

 
Sebenarnya di Desa Sawarna sendiri, bukan hanya Pantai Sawarna / Pantai Ciantir, yang bisa sobat kunjungi. Ada beberapa pantai cantik lainnya yang bisa sobat travellers telusuri. Seperti Pantai Tanjung Layar yang terkenal dengan sepasang batu besar yang berada di tengah pantai yang termasuk icon dari pantai sawarna sendiri, Pantai Lagoon Pari yang telah memiliki air laut yang jernih dan pasir putihnya dan deburan ombaknya yang lebih tenang karna posisinya yang di lidungi oleh karang yang menjorok ke laut, di banding Pantai Ciantir yang arus ombaknya lebih besar sngat cocok bagi para serfing dan sangat tidak disaran kan untuk berenang sahabat travellers. , dan Pantai Karang Taraje dengan hamparan batu karang yang besar berbentuk seperti tembok pelindung dr ombak besar sehingga dapat memberikan kesan seperti air terjun dan ikan-ikan kecil yang berenang kesana kemari di sekitar karang. Indah banget sahabat travellers
 
 
Ketika berada di pantai ini, Sahabat travellers akan dapat melupakan kepenatan dan keletihan yang kamu alami karena memang pantai Sawarna ini sangat indah. Deburan ombak yang khas dan juga pasir putihnya membuat waktu liburan Anda terasa sangat menyenangkan. Selain pantai dan lautnya yang indah, pemandangan lain yang bisa kamu lihat di sana adalah pematang sawah dan juga perbukitan yang ditumbuhi oleh pohon-pohon hijau semakin membuat kamu merasakan keindahan alam yang sebenarnya

Di desa Sawarna ada pantai lain yang tidak kalah menarik dengan pantai Sawarna. Kalau sobat travellers berlibur ke sana, jangan lupa untuk mengunjungi Pantai Tanjung layar yang sangat terkenal dengan sepasanga batu besar yang terletak di tengah pantainya. Selain pantai Tanjung Layar, masih ada juga pantai Lagoon Pari yang terkenal dengan air lautnya yang jerniih dan pasir pantainya yang putih semua destinasi wisata di sekitaran Desa sawarna patut pokonya sahabat travellers kunjungi, haruus haruus…!!!

Sekian dulu sahabat travellers info menarik tentang keindahan pantai Sawarna. Semoga artikel dari team kami ini akan bisa memberikan manfaat buat kalian dan teman-teman sahabat travellers sekalian.. pokonya pantang pulang sebelum hitam.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Dugaan Penembak Tito Kei adalah Pembunuh Bayaran

JAKARTA, Saco-Indonesia.com — Siapa orang yang menembak Tito Refra Kei, adik John Kei, hingga tewas masih belum diketahui. Namun, diduga pelaku adalah pembunuh bayaran.

"Kita duga ini aksi dilakukan oleh pembunuh bayaran. Untuk mendeteksi aksi pembunuh bayaran itu sulit karena sifatnya individu," kata Presidium Indonesia Police Watch Neta S Pane, saat dihubungi Kompas.com, Senin (3/6/2013).

Menurut Neta, dugaan itu dapat dilihat dari keterampilan pelaku dalam melakukan eksekusinya. Pertama, pelaku dapat melakukan aksinya bahkan pada saat situasi ramai. Padahal, kata Neta, ada orang-orang Tito Kei yang juga berada di lokasi kejadian. Kedua, lanjut Neta, pelaku melakukan penembakan dengan tepat sasaran, meski menggunakan helm dan kondisi saat itu sudah malam.

"Ketiga, kita duga pelaku sudah profesional, sudah melakukan survei dengan datang dari mana, posisi tembak di mana, dan dia harus lari ke mana," ujar Neta.

Selain itu, Neta mengatakan, kemungkinan pelaku sudah memiliki senjata api bukan rakitan sudah cukup lama. "Memang banyak beredar senjata api rakitan. Tapi dalam kasus Tito tidak ada kaitannya karena tentu senjata yang digunakan bukan rakitan, tetapi senjata sudah dimiliki cukup lama sehingga tepat sasaran. Senjata rakitan yang ilegal itu biasa dilakukan pada aksi pencurian seperti di minimarket," ujarnya.

Belajar dari kasus kematian Tito Kei, sambungnya, sudah saatnya jajaran kepolisian di Polda Metro Jaya melakukan deteksi dini terhadap pelaku teror bersenjata itu. Hal ini, kata dia, untuk mencegah potensi kejadian lain yang bisa muncul dari kasus tersebut.

"Polres atau polsek bisa melakukan patroli untuk antisipasi jangan sampai ada aksi penembakan seperti itu," katanya.

Sebelumnya, pelaku tak dikenal dengan memakai helm dan mengenakan jaket mendekati Tito dan rekannya yang tengah bermain kartu di lokasi kejadian. Pelaku kemudian menembak Tito beserta pemilik warung hingga kedua korban tewas. Dalam kejadian itu pelaku melepaskan tembakan dua kali kepada korban.

Setelah melakukan aksinya, pelaku kemudian melarikan diri. Sementara itu, di lokasi kejadian, polisi menemukan satu proyektil peluru dan satu selongsong.

Fatal Police Shootings: Accounts Since Ferguson

Photo

 

 

Cher and Marc Jacobs

Jayne Meadows, Actress and Steve Allen’s Wife and Co-Star, Dies at 95

Ms. Meadows was the older sister of Audrey Meadows, who played Alice Kramden on “The Honeymooners.”

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.

Maya Plisetskaya, Ballerina Who Embodied Bolshoi, Dies at 89

Ms. Plisetskaya, renowned for her fluidity of movement, expressive acting and willful personality, danced on the Bolshoi stage well into her 60s, but her life was shadowed by Stalinism.

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

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

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.

Marcel Pronovost, 84, Dies; Hall of Famer Shared in Five N.H.L. Titles

Pronovost, who played for the Red Wings, was not a prolific scorer, but he was a consummate team player with bruising checks and fearless bursts up the ice that could puncture a defense.

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

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

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

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

Top News China’s Intents Are Questioned as It Builds in Antarctica

HOBART, Tasmania — Few places seem out of reach for China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who has traveled from European capitals to obscure Pacific and Caribbean islands in pursuit of his nation’s strategic interests.

So perhaps it was not surprising when he turned up last fall in this city on the edge of the Southern Ocean to put down a long-distance marker in another faraway region, Antarctica, 2,000 miles south of this Australian port.

Standing on the deck of an icebreaker that ferries Chinese scientists from this last stop before the frozen continent, Mr. Xi pledged that China would continue to expand in one of the few places on earth that remain unexploited by humans.

He signed a five-year accord with the Australian government that allows Chinese vessels and, in the future, aircraft to resupply for fuel and food before heading south. That will help secure easier access to a region that is believed to have vast oil and mineral resources; huge quantities of high-protein sea life; and for times of possible future dire need, fresh water contained in icebergs.

It was not until 1985, about seven decades after Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen raced to the South Pole, that a team representing Beijing hoisted the Chinese flag over the nation’s first Antarctic research base, the Great Wall Station on King George Island.

But now China seems determined to catch up. As it has bolstered spending on Antarctic research, and as the early explorers, especially the United States and Australia, confront stagnant budgets, there is growing concern about its intentions.

China’s operations on the continent — it opened its fourth research station last year, chose a site for a fifth, and is investing in a second icebreaker and new ice-capable planes and helicopters — are already the fastest growing of the 52 signatories to the Antarctic Treaty. That gentlemen’s agreement reached in 1959 bans military activity on the continent and aims to preserve it as one of the world’s last wildernesses; a related pact prohibits mining.

But Mr. Xi’s visit was another sign that China is positioning itself to take advantage of the continent’s resource potential when the treaty expires in 2048 — or in the event that it is ripped up before, Chinese and Australian experts say.

“So far, our research is natural-science based, but we know there is more and more concern about resource security,” said Yang Huigen, director general of the Polar Research Institute of China, who accompanied Mr. Xi last November on his visit to Hobart and stood with him on the icebreaker, Xue Long, or Snow Dragon.

With that in mind, the polar institute recently opened a new division devoted to the study of resources, law, geopolitics and governance in Antarctica and the Arctic, Mr. Yang said.

Australia, a strategic ally of the United States that has strong economic relations with China, is watching China’s buildup in the Antarctic with a mix of gratitude — China’s presence offers support for Australia’s Antarctic science program, which is short of cash — and wariness.

“We should have no illusions about the deeper agenda — one that has not even been agreed to by Chinese scientists but is driven by Xi, and most likely his successors,” said Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former senior official in the Australian Department of Defense.

“This is part of a broader pattern of a mercantilist approach all around the world,” Mr. Jennings added. “A big driver of Chinese policy is to secure long-term energy supply and food supply.”

That approach was evident last month when a large Chinese agriculture enterprise announced an expansion of its fishing operations around Antarctica to catch more krill — small, protein-rich crustaceans that are abundant in Antarctic waters.

“The Antarctic is a treasure house for all human beings, and China should go there and share,” Liu Shenli, the chairman of the China National Agricultural Development Group, told China Daily, a state-owned newspaper. China would aim to fish up to two million tons of krill a year, he said, a substantial increase from what it currently harvests.

Because sovereignty over Antarctica is unclear, nations have sought to strengthen their claims over the ice-covered land by building research bases and naming geographic features. China’s fifth station will put it within reach of the six American facilities, and ahead of Australia’s three.

Chinese mappers have also given Chinese names to more than 300 sites, compared with the thousands of locations on the continent with English names.

In the unspoken competition for Antarctica’s future, scientific achievement can also translate into influence. Chinese scientists are driving to be the first to drill and recover an ice core containing tiny air bubbles that provide a record of climate change stretching as far back as 1.5 million years. It is an expensive and delicate effort at which others, including the European Union and Australia, have failed.

In a breakthrough a decade ago, European scientists extracted an ice core nearly two miles long that revealed 800,000 years of climate history. But finding an ice core going back further would allow scientists to examine a change in the earth’s climate cycles believed to have occurred 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago.

China is betting it has found the best location to drill, at an area called Dome A, or Dome Argus, the highest point on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Though it is considered one of the coldest places on the planet, with temperatures of 130 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, a Chinese expedition explored the area in 2005 and established a research station in 2009.

“The international community has drilled in lots of places, but no luck so far,” said Xiao Cunde, a member of the first party to reach the site and the deputy director of the Institute for Climate Change at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. “We think at Dome A we will have a straight shot at the one-million-year ice core.”

Mr. Xiao said China had already begun drilling and hoped to find what scientists are looking for in four to five years.

To support its Antarctic aspirations, China is building a sophisticated $300 million icebreaker that is expected to be ready in a few years, said Xia Limin, deputy director of the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration in Beijing. It has also bought a high-tech fixed-wing aircraft, outfitted in the United States, for taking sensitive scientific soundings from the ice.

China has chosen the site for its fifth research station at Inexpressible Island, named by a group of British explorers who were stranded at the desolate site in 1912 and survived the winter by excavating a small ice cave.

Mr. Xia said the inhospitable spot was ideal because China did not have a presence in that part of Antarctica, and because the rocky site did not have much snow, making it relatively cheap to build there.

Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of a soon-to-be-released book, “China as a Polar Great Power,” said Chinese scientists also believed they had a good chance of finding mineral and energy resources near the site.

“China is playing a long game in Antarctica and keeping other states guessing about its true intentions and interests are part of its poker hand,” she said. But she noted that China’s interest in finding minerals was presented “loud and clear to domestic audiences” as the main reason it was investing in Antarctica.

Because commercial drilling is banned, estimates of energy and mineral resources in Antarctica rely on remote sensing data and comparisons with similar geological environments elsewhere, said Millard F. Coffin, executive director of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Hobart.

But the difficulty of extraction in such severe conditions and uncertainty about future commodity prices make it unlikely that China or any country would defy the ban on mining anytime soon.

Tourism, however, is already booming. Travelers from China are still a relatively small contingent in the Antarctic compared with the more than 13,000 Americans who visited in 2013, and as yet there are no licensed Chinese tour operators.

But that is about to change, said Anthony Bergin, deputy director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “I understand very soon there will be Chinese tourists on Chinese vessels with all-Chinese crew in the Antarctic,” he said.

Dave Goldberg Was Lifelong Women’s Advocate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen Turner Dies at 87; Opened Kitchen to Feed the Needy of Knoxville

Ms. Turner and her twin sister founded the Love Kitchen in 1986 in a church basement in Knoxville, Tenn., and it continues to provide clothing and meals.

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.”

ay 4, 2015 ‘Game of Thrones’ Q&A: Keisha Castle-Hughes on the Tao of the Sand Snakes

“It was really nice to play with other women and not have this underlying tone of being at each other’s throats.”