PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

TERSANGKA PEMBUNUH ANAK ITU SEMPAT TAK BERANI MASUK RUMAH

saco-indonesia.com, Aksi ayah bunuh anaka telah direkonstruksi di rumahnya Komplek Perumahan Bumi Citra Lestari (BCL) Jalan Arjuna X Blok B III, Desa Waluya, Cikarang Utara, Kamis(6/2) siang. Tersangka Epi Suhendar yang berusia 29 tahun , juga sempat tertegun dan enggan masuk ke rumah. Namun setelah 15 menit kemudian lelaki bertubuh tambun itu masuk ke rumah.

Dijaga ketat petugas, tersangka Epi telah melakukan 45 adegan dengan lancar. Mulai dari aksi keji membunuh anaknya Ikhsan,3, hingga melukai istrinya Ny Cucun, yang berusia 23 tahun . Tiga saksi telah dihadirkan yakni Andi, Haris dan Dede. Sedangkan Ny Cucun, istri korban juga tak bisa hadir lantaran masih trauma.

Warga setempat juga tak menyangka dengan aksi keji yang dilakukan Epi. Sebab selama ini keluarga tersebut selalu baik-baik saja. Warga hanya bisa mengelus dada saat menyaksikan tersangka masuk dan keluar rumah yang menjadi tragedi berdarah itu.

Kanitserse Polsek Cikarang Utara AKP Bobby Kusumawardana juga mengatakan tersangka mengaku tidak sadar melakukan aksi keji itu. Namun kejiwaan tersangka dinyatakan normal.

Diberitakan sebelumnya, Ikhsan yang berusia 3 tahun , telah dibunuh ayah kandungnya yang takut dipecat lantaran tak dapat memenuhi target dalam bekerja di sebuah perusahaan paralon. Tersangka Epi pun kemudian merencanakan pembunuhan pada anak dan istri serta dirinya sndiri. Namun upaya itu gagal. Sang anak meregang nyawa setelah dihujani 18 tusukan, sementara istrinya Ny Cucun sekarat dihujani 10 tusukan. tersangka sendiri gagal saat akan bunuh diri

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

CARA MERANGKAI BUNGA

saco-indonesia.com,

Merangkai bunga juga dapat menjadi hobi alternatif untuk dapat mengisi waktu lowong

Memanfaatkan waktu yang senjang dengan kegiatan merangkai bunga telah menjadi salah satu pilihan yang sangat menarik. Walaupun kaum sosialita di jaman sekarang ini tidak begitu tertarik dengan kreasi merangkai bunga, namun bukan berarti kegiatan ini sudah ketinggalan gaya.

Kegiatan merangkai bunga juga dapat menjadi salah satu hobi yang sangat menarik dan juga bisa menghasilkan alias menjadi sumber rejeki, tidak sedikit orang yang telah membutuhkan jasa merangkai bunga, baik perangkai bungan untuk hiasan di atas meja, hingga menghias dekorasi ruangan untuk sebuah acara.

Bunga memang telah menjadi instrumen pelengkap yang sempurna untuk dapat memberikan kesan indah, berkarakter dan damai untuk segala kondisi, misalnya di ruang tamu anda, telah menyediakan beberapa vas bungan hasil kreasi sendiri tentu akan dapat menyenangkan pandangan.

Nah, bagi yang berminat untuk dapat mempraktekkannya, berikut ini akan kami sajikan beberapa cara dan teknik dalam merangkai bunga;

1. Menyiapkan dan Memotong Bagian Bunga

Persiapkanlah bunga yang akan dirangkai dan pastikan bahwa setiap bunga tersebut juga sudah Anda potong setidaknya pada bagian pangkal daun. Hal ini telah memungkinkan agar daun tersebut tidak mengganggu air di vas, sehingga membantu untuk menjaga dapat bunga untuk tetap segar. Potonglah bagian bunga dengan cara miring ke atas atau kebawah, hal ini juga memungkinkan agar bunga akan menerima nutrisi yang cukup.

2. Memilih Vas Bunga yang Tepat

Bunga dengan ukuran yang lebih kecil cenderung akan terlihat menarik ketika dengan menggunakan vas pendek dan agak besar. Sementara bunga dengan ukuran lebih besar akan terlihat lebih elegan dengan menggunakan vas yang lebih tinggi. Tetapi dalam hal ini Anda masih tetap dapat memotong bagian bunga dengan panjang yang sesuai seperti selera Anda.

3. Membersihkan Vas Rangkaian Bunga

Pastikan vas yang akan Anda gunakan telah dibersihkan dari residu dengan cara dibilas. Jika Anda menggunakan vas yang terbuat dari kaca, maka Anda juga dapat menambahkan berbagai media didalamnya, seperti pasir, kerikil, atau manik-manik kaca pada bagian bawah vas. Hal ini telah dilakukan untuk dapat membantu mendukung bagian batang bunga dan juga untuk dapat memberikan nuansa yang menarik dari hasil pengaturan rangkaian bunga yang akan dibuat.

4. Mengisi Vas Dengan Air Bersuhu Kamar

Upayakan untuk dapat mengisi vas dengan air yang hangat, atau paling tidak bersuhu kamar. Hal ini dimaksudkan agar bunga yang masih kuncup cepat mekar, serta tetap segar dan tahan lama.

5. Menata Bunga Sesuai Ukurannya

Dalam menata bunga, maka upayakanlah agar bunga yang lebih besar dan lebih dominan harus yang paling pertama menjadi proritas untuk di rangkai. Cobalah untuk dapat menempatkan bunga-bunga di sudut yang berbeda untuk dapat membuat sebagian besar dari bentuk masing-masing dan memberikan pengaturan terlihat seimbang. Anda kemudian harus menambahkan bunga-bunga kecil dan akhirnya dedaunan untuk dapat mengisi kesenjangan dan menonjolkan perpaduan warna dari pengaturan tersebut.

Itulah tahapan-tahapan cara merangkai bunga yang bisa Anda implementasikan untuk dapat memperindah suasana ruangan rumah Anda.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

MANFAAT BUAH ANGGUR UNTUK DIET

Manfaat buah anggur untuk diet : Banyak alternatif buah-buahan yang bisa anda jadikan sebagai alternatif untuk dapat menjadikan tubuh langsing dan menjaga berat badan tetap ideal. Salah satunya adalah buah anggur. Mengkonsumsi buah anggur secara rutin dan teratur terbukti bisa untuk membantu menurunkan berat badan dan menjaganya agar tetap ideal.

Manfaat buah anggur untuk turunkan badan dan tekan obesitas

Sebuah penelitian untuk dapat mengetahui manfaat buah anggur telah dilakukan oleh dua ilmuan dari Purdue Uneversity yaitu Kee-Hong Kim dan Jung Yeon Kwon. Mereka telah menemukan bahwa senyawa dalam minuman anggur merah, buah anggur dan beberapa jenis buah lainya yang mirip dengan struktur resveratrol. Senyawa ini telah mampu memblok proses seluler yang memungkinkan sel-sel lemak untuk berkembang.

Kedua ilmuan tersebut juga telah melaporkan bahwa dalam anggur terdapat senyawa piceatannol yang telah memiliki kemampuan untuk memblok sel lemak yang belum matang untuk tumbuh dan berkembang. Piceatannol ini juga baik untuk kesehatan tubuh karena dipercaya mampu untuk memerangi kanker, penyakit jantung dan penyakit neurodegeratif. Para ilmuan-pun juga berpendapat, bahwa piceatannol mungkin dapat menjadi salah satu “senjata penting” untuk melawan obesitas

Peranan Piceatannol untuk penderita obesitas

Piceatannol juga merupakan hasil dari perubahan Resveratrol. Perubahan ini telah terjadi dalam tubuh manusia setelah mengkonsumsi makanan yang mengandung senyawa tersebut.

Piceatannol telah memiliki kemampuan untuk dapat merubah ekspresi gen, fungsi gen dan kerja insulin selama adipogenesis yaitu proses awal sel lemak berubah menjadi sel lemak matang. Dengan keberadaan piceatannol, maka proses adipogenesis dapat ditunda atau dihambat.

Kim juga menerangkan, selama periode 10 hari atau lebih, sel-sel lemak yang ada di dalam tubuh biasanya belum terlalu matang, fase ini disebut preadipocytes. Namun setelah melalui beberapa tahapan, sel-sel lemak itu berubah menjadi matang, atau biasa disebut adipocytes.

"Kami juga menganggap, proses adipogenesis adalah target yang tepat untuk menunda atau mencegah akumulasi sel lemak," katanya.

Kim juga menambahkan, piceatannol mampu mengikat reseptor insulin dari sel-sel lemak yang belum matang pada tahap pertama proses adipogenesis. Piceatannol juga bekerja dengan menghalangi jalur sel-sel lemak untuk berproduksi dan tumbuh.

Penelitan tentang Piceatannol yang juga terkandung dalam biji dan kulit anggur, blueberry, markisa dan buah lainnya hingga kini masih dilakukan untuk lebih mengetahui manfaat dan khasiatnya bagi kesehatan tubuh selain dari peranannya untuk dapat menghambat proses pematangan lemak dalam tubuh.

Dengan membaca artikel diatas, tentunya anda tidak perlu ragu lagi untuk meneruskan mengkonsumsi buah anggur, karena manfaat buah anggur untuk diet sudah bisa dibuktikan secara ilmiah.

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

Akademisi sebut Indonesia jadi 'laboratorium' kejahatan

Fenomena kejahatan telah terjadi di Indonesia makin hari nampaknya tidak menunjukkan penurunan berarti. Menurut telaah dua akademisi, yakni Romli Atmasasmita dan Muhammad Mustofa, malah jenis kejahatan di Indonesia makin beragam.

Romli juga menjelaskan ihwal makin banyaknya jenis tindak kriminal yang dijalankan di Indonesia salah satunya telah dipicu oleh faktor gagalnya penegakan hukum. Sebabnya adalah, lanjut akademisi Universitas Padjadjaran itu, fungsi penjara hanya diartikan sebagai tempat membayar ganjaran atas perbuatan kejahatan seseorang atau kelompok, ketimbang membangkitkan kembali rasa penyesalan mereka dan mendorongnya menjadi pribadi yang lebih baik selepas menjalani masa tahanan.

"Makanya peneliti dari luar senang riset di sini. Di Indonesia kejahatan apa sih yang tidak ada? Semua ada. Dari terorisme sampai korupsi. Negara ini jadi laboratorium kejahatan," kata Romli dalam diskusi 'Setengah Abad Sistem Pemasyarakatan,' di Gedung Kementerian Hukum dan Hak Asasi Manusia.

Romli juga telah mengingatkan, beragamnya tindak kriminal di Indonesia juga tak lepas dari fenomena kejahatan antarnegara (transnational crime). Dia juga mengatakan, mestinya pemerintah sadar akan bahayanya hal itu dan bakal mengancam masyarakat jika tidak diantisipasi.

Sementara itu Mustofa juga mengatakan, demi untuk menekan kejahatan yang beranak pinak, negara sebagai institusi tertinggi juga harus bisa membuat sebuah keadaan yang tidak memungkinkan sebuah kriminalitas berkembang. Caranya adalah memenuhi hak-hak sosial dan ekonomi masyarakat secara adil dan merata, sesuai janji Undang-Undang Dasar 1945.

"Sejahterakan dulu masyarakat, baru ada alasan untuk dapat memberikan sanksi kalau terjadi pelanggaran," ujar Mustofa yang merupakan pengajar di Universitas Indonesia.

Nepal’s Young Men, Lost to Migration, Then a Quake

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KATHMANDU, Nepal — When the dense pillar of smoke from cremations by the Bagmati River was thinning late last week, the bodies were all coming from Gongabu, a common stopover for Nepali migrant workers headed overseas, and they were all of young men.

Hindu custom dictates that funeral pyres should be lighted by the oldest son of the deceased, but these men were too young to have sons, so they were burned by their brothers or fathers. Sukla Lal, a maize farmer, made a 14-hour journey by bus to retrieve the body of his 19-year-old son, who had been on his way to the Persian Gulf to work as a laborer.

“He wanted to live in the countryside, but he was compelled to leave by poverty,” Mr. Lal said, gazing ahead steadily as his son’s remains smoldered. “He told me, ‘You can live on your land, and I will come up with money, and we will have a happy family.’ ”

Weeks will pass before the authorities can give a complete accounting of who died in the April 25 earthquake, but it is already clear that Nepal cannot afford the losses. The countryside was largely stripped of its healthy young men even before the quake, as they migrated in great waves — 1,500 a day by some estimates — to work as laborers in India, Malaysia or one of the gulf nations, leaving many small communities populated only by elderly parents, women and children. Economists say that at some times of the year, one-quarter of Nepal’s population is working outside the country.

Fatal Police Shootings: Accounts Since Ferguson

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Take the Money and Run

The career criminals in genre novels don’t have money problems. If they need some, they just go out and steal it. But such financial transactions can backfire, which is what happened back in 2004 when the Texas gang in Michael

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.”

Gene Fullmer, a Brawling Middleweight Champion, Dies at 83

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

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

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

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.

Bruce Alger, 96, Dies; Led ‘Mink Coat’ Protest Against Lyndon Johnson

Mr. Alger, who served five terms from Texas, led Republican women in a confrontation with Lyndon B. Johnson that may have cost Richard M. Nixon the 1960 presidential election.

Ex-C.I.A. Official Rebuts Republican Claims on Benghazi Attack in ‘The Great War of Our Time’

WASHINGTON — The former deputy director of the C.I.A. asserts in a forthcoming book that Republicans, in their eagerness to politicize the killing of the American ambassador to Libya, repeatedly distorted the agency’s analysis of events. But he also argues that the C.I.A. should get out of the business of providing “talking points” for administration officials in national security events that quickly become partisan, as happened after the Benghazi attack in 2012.

The official, Michael J. Morell, dismisses the allegation that the United States military and C.I.A. officers “were ordered to stand down and not come to the rescue of their comrades,” and he says there is “no evidence” to support the charge that “there was a conspiracy between C.I.A. and the White House to spin the Benghazi story in a way that would protect the political interests of the president and Secretary Clinton,” referring to the secretary of state at the time, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But he also concludes that the White House itself embellished some of the talking points provided by the Central Intelligence Agency and had blocked him from sending an internal study of agency conclusions to Congress.

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“I finally did so without asking,” just before leaving government, he writes, and after the White House released internal emails to a committee investigating the State Department’s handling of the issue.

A lengthy congressional investigation remains underway, one that many Republicans hope to use against Mrs. Clinton in the 2016 election cycle.

In parts of the book, “The Great War of Our Time” (Twelve), Mr. Morell praises his C.I.A. colleagues for many successes in stopping terrorist attacks, but he is surprisingly critical of other C.I.A. failings — and those of the National Security Agency.

Soon after Mr. Morell retired in 2013 after 33 years in the agency, President Obama appointed him to a commission reviewing the actions of the National Security Agency after the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, a former intelligence contractor who released classified documents about the government’s eavesdropping abilities. Mr. Morell writes that he was surprised by what he found.

“You would have thought that of all the government entities on the planet, the one least vulnerable to such grand theft would have been the N.S.A.,” he writes. “But it turned out that the N.S.A. had left itself vulnerable.”

He concludes that most Wall Street firms had better cybersecurity than the N.S.A. had when Mr. Snowden swept information from its systems in 2013. While he said he found himself “chagrined by how well the N.S.A. was doing” compared with the C.I.A. in stepping up its collection of data on intelligence targets, he also sensed that the N.S.A., which specializes in electronic spying, was operating without considering the implications of its methods.

“The N.S.A. had largely been collecting information because it could, not necessarily in all cases because it should,” he says.

The book is to be released next week.

Mr. Morell was a career analyst who rose through the ranks of the agency, and he ended up in the No. 2 post. He served as President George W. Bush’s personal intelligence briefer in the first months of his presidency — in those days, he could often be spotted at the Starbucks in Waco, Tex., catching up on his reading — and was with him in the schoolhouse in Florida on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the Bush presidency changed in an instant.

Mr. Morell twice took over as acting C.I.A. director, first when Leon E. Panetta was appointed secretary of defense and then when retired Gen. David H. Petraeus resigned over an extramarital affair with his biographer, a relationship that included his handing her classified notes of his time as America’s best-known military commander.

Mr. Morell says he first learned of the affair from Mr. Petraeus only the night before he resigned, and just as the Benghazi events were turning into a political firestorm. While praising Mr. Petraeus, who had told his deputy “I am very lucky” to run the C.I.A., Mr. Morell writes that “the organization did not feel the same way about him.” The former general “created the impression through the tone of his voice and his body language that he did not want people to disagree with him (which was not true in my own interaction with him),” he says.

But it is his account of the Benghazi attacks — and how the C.I.A. was drawn into the debate over whether the Obama White House deliberately distorted its account of the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens — that is bound to attract attention, at least partly because of its relevance to the coming presidential election. The initial assessments that the C.I.A. gave to the White House said demonstrations had preceded the attack. By the time analysts reversed their opinion, Susan E. Rice, now the national security adviser, had made a series of statements on Sunday talk shows describing the initial assessment. The controversy and other comments Ms. Rice made derailed Mr. Obama’s plan to appoint her as secretary of state.

The experience prompted Mr. Morell to write that the C.I.A. should stay out of the business of preparing talking points — especially on issues that are being seized upon for “political purposes.” He is critical of the State Department for not beefing up security in Libya for its diplomats, as the C.I.A., he said, did for its employees.

But he concludes that the assault in which the ambassador was killed took place “with little or no advance planning” and “was not well organized.” He says the attackers “did not appear to be looking for Americans to harm. They appeared intent on looting and conducting some vandalism,” setting fires that killed Mr. Stevens and a security official, Sean Smith.

Mr. Morell paints a picture of an agency that was struggling, largely unsuccessfully, to understand dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa when the Arab Spring broke out in late 2011 in Tunisia. The agency’s analysts failed to see the forces of revolution coming — and then failed again, he writes, when they told Mr. Obama that the uprisings would undercut Al Qaeda by showing there was a democratic pathway to change.

“There is no good explanation for our not being able to see the pressures growing to dangerous levels across the region,” he writes. The agency had again relied too heavily “on a handful of strong leaders in the countries of concern to help us understand what was going on in the Arab street,” he says, and those leaders themselves were clueless.

Moreover, an agency that has always overvalued secretly gathered intelligence and undervalued “open source” material “was not doing enough to mine the wealth of information available through social media,” he writes. “We thought and told policy makers that this outburst of popular revolt would damage Al Qaeda by undermining the group’s narrative,” he writes.

Instead, weak governments in Egypt, and the absence of governance from Libya to Yemen, were “a boon to Islamic extremists across both the Middle East and North Africa.”

Mr. Morell is gentle about most of the politicians he dealt with — he expresses admiration for both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, though he accuses former Vice President Dick Cheney of deliberately implying a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq that the C.I.A. had concluded probably did not exist. But when it comes to the events leading up to the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq, he is critical of his own agency.

Mr. Morell concludes that the Bush White House did not have to twist intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged effort to rekindle the country’s work on weapons of mass destruction.

“The view that hard-liners in the Bush administration forced the intelligence community into its position on W.M.D. is just flat wrong,” he writes. “No one pushed. The analysts were already there and they had been there for years, long before Bush came to office.”

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

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

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.

François Michelin, Head of Tire Company, Dies at 88

Under Mr. Michelin’s leadership, which ended when he left the company in 2002, the Michelin Group became the world’s biggest tire maker, establishing a big presence in the United States and other major markets overseas.

Cher and Marc Jacobs

How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters

Imagine an elite professional services firm with a high-performing, workaholic culture. Everyone is expected to turn on a dime to serve a client, travel at a moment’s notice, and be available pretty much every evening and weekend. It can make for a grueling work life, but at the highest levels of accounting, law, investment banking and consulting firms, it is just the way things are.

Except for one dirty little secret: Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.

Many of them were, at least, at one elite consulting firm studied by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. It’s impossible to know if what she learned at that unidentified consulting firm applies across the world of work more broadly. But her research, published in the academic journal Organization Science, offers a way to understand how the professional world differs between men and women, and some of the ways a hard-charging culture that emphasizes long hours above all can make some companies worse off.

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Ms. Reid interviewed more than 100 people in the American offices of a global consulting firm and had access to performance reviews and internal human resources documents. At the firm there was a strong culture around long hours and responding to clients promptly.

“When the client needs me to be somewhere, I just have to be there,” said one of the consultants Ms. Reid interviewed. “And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting.”

Some people fully embraced this culture and put in the long hours, and they tended to be top performers. Others openly pushed back against it, insisting upon lighter and more flexible work hours, or less travel; they were punished in their performance reviews.

The third group is most interesting. Some 31 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women whose records Ms. Reid examined managed to achieve the benefits of a more moderate work schedule without explicitly asking for it.

They made an effort to line up clients who were local, reducing the need for travel. When they skipped work to spend time with their children or spouse, they didn’t call attention to it. One team on which several members had small children agreed among themselves to cover for one another so that everyone could have more flexible hours.

A male junior manager described working to have repeat consulting engagements with a company near enough to his home that he could take care of it with day trips. “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said, adding that he generally kept weekend work down to two hours of catching up on email.

Despite the limited hours, he said: “I know what clients are expecting. So I deliver above that.” He received a high performance review and a promotion.

What is fascinating about the firm Ms. Reid studied is that these people, who in her terminology were “passing” as workaholics, received performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues. For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads.

It calls to mind the episode of “Seinfeld” in which George Costanza leaves his car in the parking lot at Yankee Stadium, where he works, and gets a promotion because his boss sees the car and thinks he is getting to work earlier and staying later than anyone else. (The strategy goes awry for him, and is not recommended for any aspiring partners in a consulting firm.)

A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were much more likely to request greater flexibility through more formal means, such as returning from maternity leave with an explicitly reduced schedule. Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time, and so may have felt more need to take time to spend with their families through those unofficial methods.

The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.

It would be dangerous to extrapolate too much from a study at one firm, but Ms. Reid said in an interview that since publishing a summary of her research in Harvard Business Review she has heard from people in a variety of industries describing the same dynamic.

High-octane professional service firms are that way for a reason, and no one would doubt that insane hours and lots of travel can be necessary if you’re a lawyer on the verge of a big trial, an accountant right before tax day or an investment banker advising on a huge merger.

But the fact that the consultants who quietly lightened their workload did just as well in their performance reviews as those who were truly working 80 or more hours a week suggests that in normal times, heavy workloads may be more about signaling devotion to a firm than really being more productive. The person working 80 hours isn’t necessarily serving clients any better than the person working 50.

In other words, maybe the real problem isn’t men faking greater devotion to their jobs. Maybe it’s that too many companies reward the wrong things, favoring the illusion of extraordinary effort over actual productivity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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