PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

Belum Kesiapan Daus Mini & Istri untuk Menambah anak

Dikaruniai seorang anak bernama Ivander Haykal Firdaus yang lahir pada 2 Januari 2012 lalu, komedian Daus Mini dan Yunita belum ingin menambah anak. Kasih sayang kepada anak menjadi alasan bagi Daus dan Istri.

"Belum (nambah) untuk saat ini," kata Yunita yang didampingi Daus di Studio Epicentrum, Kuningan, Jakarta Selatan, Kamis (30/5).

"Mungkin nanti kalau udah SD. Kalau sebaya takutnya berantem segala macem. Biar dia bilang dulu, pengen adik. Biar kasih sayangnya bisa dapet banget," lanjutnya.

Yunita mengaku masih trauma akan masa kehamilan pertamanya. "Dia pengen satu (anak). Dia dan aku trauma banget. Hamil menyenangkan tapi lumayan trauma, tidur gak enak. Selama 9 bulan lagi," ucapnya lagi.

Daus pun tak masalah terkait anak. Dirinya saat ini masih menyibukkan diri dengan kegiatan entertainment.

"Alhamdulillah masih. Selain ngurus anak, juga bikin artis manajemen ama Budi Anduk, Parto Patrio. Juga bikin program baru," tandasnya.

JALAN THAMRIN BUKA-TUTUP & CONTRA FLOW

saco-indonesia.com, Polda Metro Jaya telah berencana akan menutup Jalan Thamrin menuju Harmoni, Jakarta Pusat. Penutupan tersebut telah dilakukan terkait dalam Simulasi Sistem Pengamanan Pemilihan Umum 2014.

Awalnya, penutupan akan dilakukan mulai pukul 07.00 WIB. Kendati demikian hingga pukul 08.15 WIB jalan tersebut belum ditutup.

Petugas TMC Polda Metro Jaya, Brigadir Tata, juga menjelaskan, rencana penutupan jalan tersebut akan dilakukan bila kondisi lalu lintas padat. Penutupan yang dimaksud, lanjut dia, bukan permanen, melainkan buka-tutup.

“Tutupnya situasional, kalau kondisi kendaraan terlalu padat hingga menghalangi pelaksanaan simulasi maka akan diberlakukan sistem buka-tutup,” jelas Tata saat, Jumat (7/2/2014).

Selain itu, sistem contra flow juga akan diberlakukan dalam kondisi tertentu. Antisipasi lainnya kendaraan menuju Harmoni juga akan dialihkan melalui jalur alternatif seperti Jalan Imam Bonjol, Jakarta Pusat.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

PELAKU BAKAR KORBAN DI ATAS TEMPAT TIDUR SAAT MELAKUKAN PENCURIAN SEPEDA MOTOR

saco-indonesia.com, Pencurian sepeda motor sekaligus pembunuhan sadis telah terjadi di Desa Sungai Pinang kecamatan Tambang kabupaten Kampar Riau. Korban yang bernama Nurhayati yang berusia (38) tahun telah dibunuh lalu dibakar di atas kasur tempat tidur di rumahnya oleh pencuri.

"Kita juga sudah melakukan olah tempat kejadian perkara (TKP) dan memeriksa beberapa saksi," ujar Kapolsek Tambang AKP Sumarno, Senin (30/12).

Dari hasil penyelidikan sementara, Sumarno juga mengatakan belum ada titik terang mengenai indikasi pelaku pembunuhan sadis yang sekaligus pencurian sepeda motor Honda Vario di rumah korban. "Keterangan empat saksi yang telah diperiksa belum ada yang jelas," kata Sumarno.

Sumarno juga telah menduga motif pelaku adalah pencurian membunuh korban mungkin karena ketahuan, "Karena itulah bisa saja pelaku nekat untuk menghabisi nyawa korban," ucap Sumarno.

Selain itu, berdasarkan penuturan empat saksi, korban yang merupakan warga yang baik dan tidak punya musuh. Bahkan, sehari-harinya, korban tergolong ibu rumah tangga yang tak pernah keluar dari rumah. "Makanya para saksi juga bingung mengapa korban bisa dibunuh dengan cara yang sangat sadis," tambah Sumarno.

Walaupun belum ada keterangan saksi yang begitu jelas, Sumarno telah menegaskan, pihaknya juga akan serius mengungkap peristiwa perampokan dan pembunuhan itu. "Saat ini anggota kita masih berada melacak dan memburu pelakunya," pungkas Sumarno.

Seperti diberitakan sebelumnya, Nurhayati yang berusia (38) tahun warga Desa Sungai Pinang, Kampar, Minggu (29/12) sekitar pukul 03.00 dini hari telah ditemukan tewas terbakar di atas kasus dalam kamar oleh kedua anaknya Tri Riski (16) dan Bayu (20).

Pada subuh itu, Riski dan Bayu tersentak bangun dari tidurnya karena telah merasakan asap yang keluar dari kamar orangtuanya. Merasa penasaran kedua anak Nurhayati langsung membuka pintu kamar ibunya yang sedang tidur dalam kamar.

Alangkah terkejutnya Bayu saat melihat ibunya yang tidur di atas kasur sudah terbakar. Melihat peristiwa tragis itu Bayu dan Tri Riski langsung menjerit histeris dan minta pertolongan warga sekitar.

Warga yang terkejut dengan teriakan anak korban berhamburan ke rumah korban. Selanjutnya warga berusaha untuk memadamkan api, setelah api berhasil dipadamkan warga curiga sebab di kamar korban tidak ditemukan bercak darah.

Warga pun bergegas melaporkannya ke Polsek Tambang. Mendapat laporan dari warga Kapolsek Tambang AKP Sumarno bersama anggotanya bergegas datang ke lokasi untuk dapat melakukan olah tempat kejadian perkara (TKP).

Paman korban Ilut kepada wartawan juga mengatakan, korban tinggal di rumah bersama 2 orang anaknya. Sedangkan suami korban bekerja sebagai TKI di Malaysia.

"Tempat tinggal Nurhayati jauh dari keramaian, sebab di situ cuma hanya ada 4 petak rumah," ujar Ilut.

Menurut IIut, ia telah mendapat informasi Nurhayati tewas terbakar dari kedua anak Nurhayati. "Mendapat kabar itu saya bergegas ke lokasi, dan ternyata kondisi Nurhayati sudah hangus terbakar," tuturnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Asus Rilis Sebuah Tablet Android Murah

Saco-Indonesia.com - Asus belum mau berhenti meluncurkan produk tablet dengan harga terjangkau. Di ajang Computex 2013 Taiwan, Senin (3/6/2013), Asus merilis tablet yang dinamakan MeMo Pad HD 7.

Sesuai dengan namanya, produk yang satu ini hadir dengan bentang layar 7 inci. Jenis yang digunakan adalah IPS dan mendukung resolusi 1280 x 800 piksel.

Dari segi prosesor, MeMo Pad HD 7 menggunakan ARM Cortex A7 quad-core. Sayang tidak disebutkan berapa kecepatannya. Kapasitas RAM-nya pun belum dibeberkan.

Dikutip dari Engadget, Senin (3/6/2013), perangkat ini pun sudah dipersenjatai 2 kamera, 5 megapiksel di bagian belakang dan 1,2 megapiksel di bagian depan. Selain itu, MeMo Pad HD 7 hadir dengan Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, speaker SonicMaster, Bluetooth 4.0, dan GPS.

Ada dua versi perangkat yang akan dijual oleh Asus. Versi pertama memiliki media penyimpanan internal berkapasitas 32GB yang dijual dengan harga 150 dollar AS atau sekitar Rp 1,5 juta.

Asus juga menyiapkan versi yang lebih terjangkau lagi, yaitu 8GB dengan harga 130 dollar AS atau sekitar Rp 1,3 juta. Versi yang satu ini dikabarkan hanya akan masuk ke pasar berkembang (emerging market), mungkin termasuk Indonesia.

Ini bukan pertama kalinya Asus meluncurkan tablet 7 inci dengan harga terjangkau. Sebelumnya, perusahaan yang berpusat di Taiwan tersebut bekerjasama dengan Google dalam menghasilkan Nexus 7. Perangkat versi 16GB WiFi Only dijual dengan harga 199 dollar AS.

Asus juga pernah meluncurkan 'saudara' dari produk baru ini, yaitu MeMo Pad 7. Produk yang satu ini sudah beredar di Indonesia dengan harga Rp 1,5 juta.

GEJALA PENYAKIT GINJAL

saco-indonesia.com, PENYAKIT ginjal merupakan penyakit yang harus dihindari oleh semua orang. Pasalnya, penyakit ini juga sulit dideteksi dan sering mengancam nyawa seseorang.

Penyakit ginjal juga dikenal sebagai 'silent disease ' karena sering tak ada tanda-tanda peringatan. Jika tak terdeteksi, hal itu juga hanya akan memperburuk kondisinya dari waktu ke waktu. Bentuk yang lebih kronis penyakit ginjal ialah hilangnya secara progresif fungsi ginjal dalam tubuh selama periode bulan atau tahun. Seringkali, penyakit ini juga hanya didiagnosis dari hasil dari skrining untuk dapat diketahui berada di tingkat mana risiko tinggi penyakit ginjalnya.

Oleh sebab itu, menjadi hal penting bila Anda mengetahui tanda-tanda peringatan agar bisa terhindar dari risiko itu. Namun tak perlu cemas, sebab Kanchan Naikawadi, Direktur, Indus Kesehatan Plus (P) Ltd, telah memberitahu kita tentang berbagai gejala ginjal pada orang dewasa yang tak boleh diabaikan.

Gejala-gejala penyakit ginjal biasanya tak spesifik dan berkaitan dengan gaya hidup, yang bisa dapat menyebabkan orang down atau terpuruk. Umumnya, gejala terkait muncul ketika penyakit sudah parah.

Banyak gejala seperti yang ada di bawah ini yang bisa dihindari jika pengobatan dimulai pada tahap awal. Bahkan, jika tak ada gejala, bagi penderita diabetes, tekanan darah tinggi, riwayat keluarga penyakit ginjal atau di atas usia 60 harus melakukan skirining karena mereka adalah kelompok-kelompok berisiko tinggi. Seperti dalam kasus penderita diabetes, statistik telah menunjukkan bahwa sekira 40 persen cenderung mengembangkan penyakit ginjal kronis.

Untuk dapat mengetahui lebih lanjut, apa sajakah gejala itu. Berikut, Kanchan, akan memaparkan penjelasannya .

Nafsu makan kurang dan penurunan berat badan

Kedua gejala itu juga merupakan gejala paling umum yang sering diabaikan sebagai sesuatu yang serius. Umumnya, kesibukan kita saat bekerja juga merupakan pemicu nafsu makan memburuk, apalagi saat sedang serius menapaki tangga karier Anda. Sementara penururnan berat badan, sayangnya banyak orang yang "welcome" terhadap gejala ini. Padahal kondisi itu adalah dimana penyakit ginjal itu dimulai. Tubuh harus membutuhkan nutrisi dan energi untuk dapat melakukan bahkan tugas yang paling dasar setiap hari, dimana bersumber dari asupan makanan. Karenaya, sangat penting untuk dapat menjaga asupan makanan yang Anda masukkan ke dalam tubuh.

Kaki bengkak, tangan atau pada pergelangan kaki

Ginjal yang seharusnya untuk dapat menghilangkan limbah dan cairan ekstra dalam tubuh. Ketika ginjal gagal untuk bisa menjalankan fungsi mereka, cairan ekstra dalam tubuh Anda akan mulai membangun ruang dan dapat menyebabkan pembengkakan di wajah, tangan, kaki, kaki atau pergelangan kaki karena ada peningkatan retensi air.

Sesak napas dan kelelahan

Selain penyaringan toksin dari tubuh, ginjal juga menghasilkan hormon yang disebut eritropoietin. Hormon-hormon ini yang membantu membawa oksigen sel darah merah ke seluruh tubuh. Bila ginjal berhenti berfungsi, mereka mungkin tak menghasilkan erythropoietin cukup sehingga lebih sedikit sel darah merah untuk bisa membawa oksigen dalam tubuh dan menyebabkan otot-otot dan otak mudah keletihan dengan sangat cepat. Kondisi ini disebut anemia. Biasanya, orang merasa tenaganya terkuras tanpa melakukan apa-apa. Selain itu, ia juga akan sulit menarik napasnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

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

By VINDU GOEL and QUENTIN HARDY

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

Dave Goldberg Was Lifelong Women’s Advocate

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.

Fatal Police Shootings: Accounts Since Ferguson

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Police Rethink Long Tradition on Using Force

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

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

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

With Iran Talks, a Tangled Path to Ending Syria’s War

UNITED NATIONS — Wearing pinstripes and a pince-nez, Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy for Syria, arrived at the Security Council one Tuesday afternoon in February and announced that President Bashar al-Assad had agreed to halt airstrikes over Aleppo. Would the rebels, Mr. de Mistura suggested, agree to halt their shelling?

What he did not announce, but everyone knew by then, was that the Assad government had begun a military offensive to encircle opposition-held enclaves in Aleppo and that fierce fighting was underway. It would take only a few days for rebel leaders, having pushed back Syrian government forces, to outright reject Mr. de Mistura’s proposed freeze in the fighting, dooming the latest diplomatic overture on Syria.

Diplomacy is often about appearing to be doing something until the time is ripe for a deal to be done.

Now, with Mr. Assad’s forces having suffered a string of losses on the battlefield and the United States reaching at least a partial rapprochement with Mr. Assad’s main backer, Iran, Mr. de Mistura is changing course. Starting Monday, he is set to hold a series of closed talks in Geneva with the warring sides and their main supporters. Iran will be among them.

In an interview at United Nations headquarters last week, Mr. de Mistura hinted that the changing circumstances, both military and diplomatic, may have prompted various backers of the war to question how much longer the bloodshed could go on.

“Will that have an impact in accelerating the willingness for a political solution? We need to test it,” he said. “The Geneva consultations may be a good umbrella for testing that. It’s an occasion for asking everyone, including the government, if there is any new way that they are looking at a political solution, as they too claim they want.”

He said he would have a better assessment at the end of June, when he expects to wrap up his consultations. That coincides with the deadline for a final agreement in the Iran nuclear talks.

Whether a nuclear deal with Iran will pave the way for a new opening on peace talks in Syria remains to be seen. Increasingly, though, world leaders are explicitly linking the two, with the European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, suggesting last week that a nuclear agreement could spur Tehran to play “a major but positive role in Syria.”

It could hardly come soon enough. Now in its fifth year, the Syrian war has claimed 220,000 lives, prompted an exodus of more than three million refugees and unleashed jihadist groups across the region. “This conflict is producing a question mark in many — where is it leading and whether this can be sustained,” Mr. de Mistura said.

Part Italian, part Swedish, Mr. de Mistura has worked with the United Nations for more than 40 years, but he is more widely known for his dapper style than for any diplomatic coups. Syria is by far the toughest assignment of his career — indeed, two of the organization’s most seasoned diplomats, Lakhdar Brahimi and Kofi Annan, tried to do the job and gave up — and critics have wondered aloud whether Mr. de Mistura is up to the task.

He served as a United Nations envoy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and before that in Lebanon, where a former minister recalled, with some scorn, that he spent many hours sunbathing at a private club in the hills above Beirut. Those who know him say he has a taste for fine suits and can sometimes speak too soon and too much, just as they point to his diplomatic missteps and hyperbole.

They cite, for instance, a news conference in October, when he raised the specter of Srebrenica, where thousands of Muslims were massacred in 1995 during the Balkans war, in warning that the Syrian border town of Kobani could fall to the Islamic State. In February, he was photographed at a party in Damascus, the Syrian capital, celebrating the anniversary of the Iranian revolution just as Syrian forces, aided by Iran, were pummeling rebel-held suburbs of Damascus; critics seized on that as evidence of his coziness with the government.

Mouin Rabbani, who served briefly as the head of Mr. de Mistura’s political affairs unit and has since emerged as one of his most outspoken critics, said Mr. de Mistura did not have the background necessary for the job. “This isn’t someone well known for his political vision or political imagination, and his closest confidants lack the requisite knowledge and experience,” Mr. Rabbani said.

As a deputy foreign minister in the Italian government, Mr. de Mistura was tasked in 2012 with freeing two Italian marines detained in India for shooting at Indian fishermen. He made 19 trips to India, to little effect. One marine was allowed to return to Italy for medical reasons; the other remains in India.

He said he initially turned down the Syria job when the United Nations secretary general approached him last August, only to change his mind the next day, after a sleepless, guilt-ridden night.

Mr. de Mistura compared his role in Syria to that of a doctor faced with a terminally ill patient. His goal in brokering a freeze in the fighting, he said, was to alleviate suffering. He settled on Aleppo as the location for its “fame,” he said, a decision that some questioned, considering that Aleppo was far trickier than the many other lesser-known towns where activists had negotiated temporary local cease-fires.

“Everybody, at least in Europe, are very familiar with the value of Aleppo,” Mr. de Mistura said. “So I was using that as an icebreaker.”

The cease-fire negotiations, to which he had devoted six months, fell apart quickly because of the government’s military offensive in Aleppo the very day of his announcement at the Security Council. Privately, United Nations diplomats said Mr. de Mistura had been manipulated. To this, Mr. de Mistura said only that he was “disappointed and concerned.”

Tarek Fares, a former rebel fighter, said after a recent visit to Aleppo that no Syrian would admit publicly to supporting Mr. de Mistura’s cease-fire proposal. “If anyone said they went to a de Mistura meeting in Gaziantep, they would be arrested,” is how he put it, referring to the Turkish city where negotiations between the two sides were held.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon remains staunchly behind Mr. de Mistura’s efforts. His defenders point out that he is at the center of one of the world’s toughest diplomatic problems, charged with mediating a conflict in which two of the world’s most powerful nations — Russia, which supports Mr. Assad, and the United States, which has called for his ouster — remain deadlocked.

R. Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official who now teaches at Harvard, credited Mr. de Mistura for trying to negotiate a cease-fire even when the chances of success were exceedingly small — and the chances of a political deal even smaller. For his efforts to work, Professor Burns argued, the world powers will first have to come to an agreement of their own.

“He needs the help of outside powers,” he said. “It starts with backers of Assad. That’s Russia and Iran. De Mistura is there, waiting.”

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.”

Gilbert Haroche, Builder of an Economy Travel Empire, Dies at 87

Mr. Haroche was a founder of Liberty Travel, which grew from a two-man operation to the largest leisure travel operation in the United States.

Negative View of U.S. Race Relations Grows, Poll Finds

Public perceptions of race relations in America have grown substantially more negative in the aftermath of the death of a young black man who was injured while in police custody in Baltimore and the subsequent unrest, far eclipsing the sentiment recorded in the wake of turmoil in Ferguson, Mo., last summer.

Americans are also increasingly likely to say that the police are more apt to use deadly force against a black person, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll finds.

The poll findings highlight the challenges for local leaders and police officials in trying to maintain order while sustaining faith in the criminal justice system in a racially polarized nation.

Sixty-one percent of Americans now say race relations in this country are generally bad. That figure is up sharply from 44 percent after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown and the unrest that followed in Ferguson in August, and 43 percent in December. In a CBS News poll just two months ago, 38 percent said race relations were generally bad. Current views are by far the worst of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The negative sentiment is echoed by broad majorities of blacks and whites alike, a stark change from earlier this year, when 58 percent of blacks thought race relations were bad, but just 35 percent of whites agreed. In August, 48 percent of blacks and 41 percent of whites said they felt that way.

Looking ahead, 44 percent of Americans think race relations are worsening, up from 36 percent in December. Forty-one percent of blacks and 46 percent of whites think so. Pessimism among whites has increased 10 points since December.

Continue reading the main story

Do you think race relations in the United States are generally good or generally bad?

60

40

20

0

White

Black

May '14

May '15

Generally bad

 

 

Continue reading the main story

Do you think race relations in the United States are getting better, getting worse or staying about the same?

Getting worse

Staying the same

Getting better

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

44%

37

17

46

36

16

41

42

15

 

 

The poll finds that profound racial divisions in views of how the police use deadly force remain. Blacks are more than twice as likely to say police in most communities are more apt to use deadly force against a black person — 79 percent of blacks say so compared with 37 percent of whites. A slim majority of whites say race is not a factor in a police officer’s decision to use deadly force.

Overall, 44 percent of Americans say deadly force is more likely to be used against a black person, up from 37 percent in August and 40 percent in December.

Blacks also remain far more likely than whites to say they feel mostly anxious about the police in their community. Forty-two percent say so, while 51 percent feel mostly safe. Among whites, 8 in 10 feel mostly safe.

One proposal to address the matter — having on-duty police officers wear body cameras — receives overwhelming support. More than 9 in 10 whites and blacks alike favor it.

Continue reading the main story

How would you describe your feelings about the police in your community? Would you say they make you feel mostly safe or mostly anxious?

Mostly safe

Mostly anxious

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

75%

21

3

81

16

3

51

42

7

 

 

Continue reading the main story

In general, do you think the police in most communities are more likely to use deadly force against a black person, or more likely to use it against a white person, or don’t you think race affects police use of deadly force?

Police more likely to use deadly force against a black person

Police more likely to use deadly force against a white person

Race DOES NOT affect police use of deadly force

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

44%

37%

79%

2%

2%

1%

46%

53%

16%

9%

8%

4%

 

 

Continue reading the main story

Do you favor or oppose on-duty police officers wearing video cameras that would record events and actions as they occur?

Favor

Oppose

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

92%

93%

93%

6%

5%

5%

2%

2%

2%

 

 

Asked specifically about the situation in Baltimore, most Americans expressed at least some confidence that the investigation by local authorities would be conducted fairly. But while nearly two-thirds of whites think so, fewer than half of blacks agree. Still, more blacks are confident now than were in August regarding the investigation in Ferguson. On Friday, six members of the police force involved in the arrest of Mr. Gray were charged with serious offenses, including manslaughter. The poll was conducted Thursday through Sunday; results from before charges were announced are similar to those from after.

Reaction to the recent turmoil in Baltimore, however, is similar among blacks and whites. Most Americans, 61 percent, say the unrest after Mr. Gray’s death was not justified. That includes 64 percent of whites and 57 percent of blacks.

Continue reading the main story

As you may know, a Baltimore man, Freddie Gray, recently died after being in the custody of the Baltimore police. How much confidence do you have that the investigation by local authorities into this matter will be conducted fairly?

A lot

Some

Not much

None at all

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

29%

31

22

14

5

31

33

20

11

5

20

26

30

22

 

 

In general, do you think the unrest in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray was justified, or do you think the unrest was not justified?

Justified

Not justified

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

28%

61

11

26

64

11

37

57

6

 

 

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.

William Sokolin, Wine Seller Who Broke Famed Bottle, Dies at 85

The bottle Mr. Sokolin famously broke was a 1787 Château Margaux, which was said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Sokolin had been hoping to sell it for $519,750.

As Vice Moves More to TV, It Tries to Keep Brash Voice

The live music at the Vice Media party on Friday shook the room. Shane Smith, Vice’s chief executive, was standing near the stage — with a drink in his hand, pants sagging, tattoos showing — watching the rapper-cum-chef Action Bronson make pizzas.

The event was an after-party, a happy-hour bacchanal for the hundreds of guests who had come for Vice’s annual presentation to advertisers and agencies that afternoon, part of the annual frenzy for ad dollars called the Digital Content NewFronts. Mr. Smith had spoken there for all of five minutes before running a slam-bang highlight reel of the company’s shows that had titles like “Weediquette” and “Gaycation.”

In the last year, Vice has secured $500 million in financing and signed deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with established media companies like HBO that are eager to engage the young viewers Vice attracts. Vice said it was now worth at least $4 billion, with nearly $1 billion in projected revenue for 2015. It is a long way from Vice’s humble start as a free magazine in 1994.

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But even as cash flows freely in Vice’s direction, the company is trying to keep its brash, insurgent image. At the party on Friday, it plied guests with beers and cocktails. Its apparently unrehearsed presentation to advertisers was peppered with expletives. At one point, the director Spike Jonze, a longtime Vice collaborator, asked on stage if Mr. Smith had been drinking.

“My assistant tried to cut me off,” Mr. Smith replied. “I’m on buzz control.”

Now, Vice is on the verge of getting its own cable channel, which would give the company a traditional outlet for its slate of non-news programming. If all goes as planned, A&E Networks, the television group owned by Hearst and Disney, will turn over its History Channel spinoff, H2, to Vice.

The deal’s announcement was expected last week, but not all of A&E’s distribution partners — the cable and satellite TV companies that carry the network’s channels — have signed off on the change, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were private.

A cable channel would be a further step in a transformation for Vice, from bad-boy digital upstart to mainstream media company.

Keen for the core audience of young men who come to Vice, media giants like 21st Century Fox, Time Warner and Disney all showed interest in the company last year. Vice ultimately secured $500 million in financing from A&E Networks and Technology Crossover Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has invested in Facebook and Netflix.

Those investments valued Vice at more than $2.5 billion. (In 2013, Fox bought a 5 percent stake for $70 million.)

Then in March, HBO announced that it had signed a multiyear deal to broadcast a daily half-hour Vice newscast. Vice already produces a weekly newsmagazine show, called “Vice,” for the network. That show will extend its run through 2018, with an increase to 35 episodes a year, from 14.

Michael Lombardo, HBO’s president for programming, said when the deal was announced that it was “certainly one of our biggest investments with hours on the air.”

Vice, based in Brooklyn, also recently signed a multiyear $100 million deal with Rogers Communications, a Canadian media conglomerate, to produce original content for TV, smartphone and desktop viewers.

Vice’s finances are private, but according to an internal document reviewed by The New York Times and verified by a person familiar with the company’s financials, the company is on track to make about $915 million in revenue this year.

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It brought in $545 million in a strong first quarter, which included portions of the new HBO deal and the Rogers deal, according to the document. More of its revenue now comes from these types of content partnerships, compared with the branded content deals that made up much of its revenue a year ago, the company said.

Mr. Smith said the company was worth at least $4 billion. If the valuation gets much higher, he said he would consider taking the company public.

“I don’t care about money; we have plenty of money,” Mr. Smith, who is Vice’s biggest shareholder, said in an interview after the presentation on Friday. “I care about strategic deals.”

In the United States, Vice Media had 35.2 million unique visitors across its sites in March, according to comScore.

The third season of Vice’s weekly HBO show has averaged 1.8 million viewers per episode, including reruns, through April 12, according to Brad Adgate, the director of research at Horizon Media. (Vice said the show attracted three million weekly viewers when repeat broadcasts, online and on-demand viewings were included.)

For years, Mr. Smith has criticized traditional TV, calling it slow and unable to draw younger viewers. But if all the deals Vice has struck are to work out, Mr. Smith may have to play more by the rules of traditional media. James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son and a member of Vice’s board, was at the company’s presentation on Friday, as were other top media executives.

“They know they need people like me to help them, but they can’t get out of their own way,” Mr. Smith said in the interview Friday. “My only real frustration is we’re used to being incredibly dynamic, and they’re not incredibly dynamic.”

With its own television channel in the United States, Vice would have something it has long coveted even as traditional media companies are looking beyond TV. Last year, Vice’s deal with Time Warner failed in part because the two companies could not agree on how much control Vice would have over a 24-hour television network.

Vice said it intended to fill its new channel with non-news programming. The company plans to have sports shows, fashion shows, food shows and the “Gaycation” travel show with the actress Ellen Page. It is also in talks with Kanye West about a show.

It remains to be seen whether Vice’s audience will watch a traditional cable channel. Still, Vice has effectively presold all of the ad spots to two of the biggest advertising agencies for the first three years, Mr. Smith said.

In the meantime, Mr. Smith is enjoying Vice’s newfound role as a potential savior of traditional media companies.

“I’m a C.E.O. of a content company,” Mr. Smith said before he caught a flight to Las Vegas for the boxing match on Saturday between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. “If it stops being fun, then why are you doing it?”

Review: ‘Frontline’ Looks at Missteps During the Ebola Outbreak

y NEIL GENZLINGER

Frontline

Frontline An installment of this PBS program looks at the effects of Ebola on Liberia and other countries, as well as the origins of the outbreak.

The program traces the outbreak to its origin, thought to be a tree full of bats in Guinea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a little girl,

And she had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very, very good.

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

Recently, the conservation center turned up another surprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Walker, 92, Dies; Illinois Governor and Later a U.S. Prisoner

As governor, Mr. Walker alienated Republicans and his fellow Democrats, particularly the Democratic powerhouse Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago.