PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

Tidak Ada Dana, Studi Banding DPRD DKI Terancam Gagal

JAKARTA, Saco-Indonesia.com — Ketua DPRD DKI Jakarta Ferrial Sofyan membenarkan adanya rencana kunjungan kerja DPRD DKI Jakarta ke tiga negara. Namun, kunjungan itu terancam gagal karena keterbatasan anggaran.

"Sampai saat ini belum bisa kita laksanakan itu. Kenapa? Karena terbentur pada biayanya," ujar Ferrial kepada wartawan, Senin (3/6/2013).

Ferrial mengatakan, kunjungan kerja ke luar negri bukanlah sesuatu yang patut dipermasalahkan. Menurutnya, kunjungan tersebut bertujuan untuk menggali referensi proyek pembangunan sejenis dengan proyek yang akan dikerjakan di Jakarta. Ferrial mencontohkan, saat proyek transjakarta pertama kali berjalan, ada tim dari Pemerintah Provinsi DKI dan DPRD yang melakukan kunjungan kerja ke Bogota, Kolombia. Kala itu, Bogota dianggap jadi salah satu kota yang memiliki transportasi jenis bus terintegrasi secara baik bagi masyarakatnya.

"Dalam kasus ini, misalnya monorel. Kita mau tahu yang dibangun bagaimana, apa beban bagi masyarakat terhadap pembangunan monorel itu. Jadi, memang seharusnya dilakukan (studi banding) itu," ujarnya.

Rencana kunjungan kerja DPRD DKI itu bakal dilakukan di Belanda, Malaysia, dan China. Kunjungan tersebut bukan termasuk ke dalam kunjungan kerja ke lima sister city di tiga negara yang telah direncanakan dalam APBD DKI 2013. Adapun kunjungan kerja ke Belanda, Malaysia, dan China itu ternyata tidak dianggarkan dalam APBD DKI 2013. Padahal, sejak satu bulan lalu, pimpinan DPRD DKI telah berkirim surat ke tiap-tiap fraksi di DPRD untuk menunjuk anggotanya yang ikut dalam kunjungan kerja ke tiga negara tersebut.

Editor : Liwon Maulana

Sumber:Kompas.com

3 CARA DIET ALAMI DENGAN MINUMAN

Bagi anda yang telah memilki berat badan yang berlebih atau obesitas sebaiknya segera mempertimbangkan pola hidup anda dikarenakan dengan berat badan yang terlalu besar akan dapat menimbulkan beberapa resiko gangguang kesehatan. Diet umum telah dilakukan untuk bisa mendapatkan berat badan yang ideal. Diet yang sehat memang membutuhkan proses sehingga sebagian sebagian wanita yang tidak sabar menjalankan prosesnya memilih jalan yang instan untuk menggunakan obat-obatan. Obat-obatan yang digunakan untuk diet harus melalui pemeriksaan medis terlebih dahulu karena bagaimanapun kandungan kimia di dalam obat tersebut memiliki pengaruh terhadap tubuh anda. Bagi anda yang ingin melakukan diet dengan obat-obatan, konsultasikan terlebih dahulu kesehatan anda kepada dokter. Walaupun demikian ternyata berdiet tidak harus sulit cukup dengan cara yang alami dan gaya hidup yang membanntu diet cepat sehingga berat badan yang ideal mudah untuk anda dapatkan. Cara diet alami dapat anda lakukan dengan memilih makanan dan

minuman yang tepat.

Berikut adalah minuman yang dapat membantu anda dalam diet secara alami :

1.  Diet Alami Dengan Air Mineral

Air mineral juga dapat membantu anda dalam menurunkan berat badan apalagi jika mengkonsumsinya dalam jumlah dan waktu yang tepat. Setiap hari anda harus membutuhkan 2 liter air, selain memenuhi kecukupan cairan tubuh. Konsumsi air sebanyak 2-3 gelas pada rentan waktu 5-10 menit sebelum makan akan membantu anda dalam menurunkan berat badan. Hal ini telah didukkung oleh Penelitian yang menunjukan dengan minum air putih sebelum makan bisa menurunkan berat badan hingga 2.3 kg selama 12 minggu. Dengan membiasakan minum air putih sebelum makan merupakan kebiasaan diet yang baik dikarenakan air putih memiliki nol kalori. Diet alami dengan minum air putih bisa anda lakukan secara rutin untuk bisa membantu anda dalam mengontrol rasa lapar.

2.  Diet Alami Dengan Air Teh Hijau

Teh hijau terkenal dibeberapa negara asia seperti china dan jepang. Kandungan yang terdapat di dalam teh hijau seperti kafein, saponin, tehobromine, tehophylline dan epigallocathine yang dapat meningkatkan metabolisme tubuh dan mengontrol nafsu makan. Teh hijau juga sangat kaya dengan kandungan polifenol dan flavonoid yang memberikan manfaat untuk kesehatan selain itu mengkonsumsi air teh hijau secara teratur akan membantu anda dalam menurunkan berat badan. Meskipun sekarang banyak yang menawarkan supleman yang terbuat dari teh hijau untuk bisa membantu anda dalam menurunkan berat badan tapi cara yang alami masih bisa anda dapatkan dengan mudah. Anda dapat mengkonsumsi teh hijau dengan cara yang tradisional cukup dengan menyeduhnya, sesekali bisa dicampurkan dengan beberapa sendok teh gula.

3.    Diet Alami Dengan Susu Kedelai

Susu kedelai telah memiliki kecukupan nutrisi seperti kandungann fiber, karbohidrat dan vitamin yang tinggi setara dengan susu sapi. Bagi anda yang sedang diet kandungan lemak yang terdapat di dalam susu kedelai sangat bagus untuk kesehatan ditambah lagi kandungan karbohidrat yang terdapat pada susu kedelai merupakan jenis polisakarida yang tidak larut di dalam air sehingga tidak dicerna tubuh.  Vitamin b kompleks, vitamin A,  E dan K sangat membantu anda dalam memenuhi kebutuhan asupan nutrisi selama diet. Anda dapat meningkatkan asupan susu kedelai diwaktu siang dan malam ketika anda berdiet.

Itulah 3 minuman yang telah memiliki manfaat untuk anda yang sedang berdiet dengan cara alami, diet tidak membutuhkan biaya mahal cukup dengan memilih gizi yang sesuai dengan kebutuhan tubuh anda.

PENTINGNYA MANASIK HAJI

Masyarakat Muslim yang berencana melaksanakan ibadah Haji diminta untuk mempersiapkan segala sesuatunya. Bukan hannya dari segi materi atau kesehatan fisik, tapi juga dari sisi mental serta memahami rukun dan tata cara prosesi ibadah haji. Salah satu persiapan yang sangat penting bagi setiap calon jamaah adalah manasik. Biasanya Kementrian Agama meminta kepada setiap jamaah regular maupun haji hkusus untuk mengikuti manasik yang diselenggarakan oleh kelompok Bimbingan Ibadah Haji ( KBIH ) atau biro perjalanan haji. Dalam manasik, jamaah akan mendapatkan pembekalan mengenai tata cara ibadah, rukun, syarat, wajib, atau hal-hal yang tidak boleh dilakukan di Tanah Suci serta sosialisasi kebijakan pemerintah Arab Saudi. Manasik adalah sebuah keharusan, karena ini pembekalan untuk jamaah, ujar ustadz Muhammad hafidz kepada Republika, selasa (14/6). Manasik , lanjut dia, sangat bermanfaat bagi jamaah. Lewat kuliah singkat ini, jamaah bakal mengetahui apa yang harus dilakukan ketika berada di Tanah Suci. Karena untuk berhaji ataupun umrah, jamaah tidak cukup hanya berbekal niat atau mampu, tapi tidak tahu, ketika sampai di sana dan kembali ke Tanah Air, tidak aka nada perubahan, ujarnya Materi manasik yang diberikan, menurut hafidz, tidak hanya soal haji atau umrah, tapi juga pembekalan mulai dari apa itu Islam, bagaimana ber-islam yang benar dan hal lainnya, termasuk melaksanakan tawaf, sa’I, dan wukuf di Arafah. Pembimbing haji dan umrah, ustadz Ali Nurul Hak menjelaskan, manasik sangat penting agar jamaah mengetahui tujuan berangkat ke Tanah Suci untuk ibadah karena Allah. Supaya Jamaah bisa menjalankan syariah dengan benar. Cara Ibadahnya benar, akhirnya dapat yang baik, katanya. Dalam manasik calon jamaah akan mendapatkan pencerahan mengenai filosofi ibadah, tawaf, sa’I, dan tahallul. Selain itu, juga dijelaskan mengenai ritual ibadah, rukun, wajib dan syarat haji, dan juga tak ketinggalan mengenai regulasi Sekretaris Jenderal Forum Komunikasi Kelompok Bimbingan Ibadah Haji (FKKBIH), Qosim Shaleh mengataka, manasik memiliki multi manfaat, pengenalan lapangan, pendalaman substansi haji, sosialisasi situasi suasana, pengenalan budaya Arab, juga meningkatkan kualitas ilmu calon jamaah serta perluasan cakrawala ilmu pengetahuan. Jamaah yang tidak mengikuti manasik bakal mengalami kesulitan ketika di Tanah Suci. Mereka yang sudah berhaji dua kali pun, terkadang tetap mengalami kesulitan, khususnya dalam menghafal bacaan atau doa-doa penting. Apalagi jamaah yang baru kali pertama melaksanakan haji, tentu saja akan sangat kesulitan. Persiapan psikis jamaah juga penting disamping fisik. Para pembimbing juga mengajarkan agar jamaah mampu menendalikan sifat iri, emosi, takabur, dan lainnya. Setiap jamaah juga diminta bersosialisasi dengan jamaah lainnya. Hal ini penting agar jamaah memiliki akhlakul karimah dan akidah yang baik. Untuk itu dalam manasik, jamaah disarankan saling mengenal satu sama lain. Agar timbul rasa kekeluargaan dan persaudaraan. Sehingga ketika ada masalah bisa diselesaikan dengan kekeluargaan pula. Sebelumnya Wakil Ketua Umum Himpunan Penyelenggara Umrah dan haji, Djadjang Sudradjat mengatakan, pentingnya manasik haji bisa dilihat dari dua sisi pertama, sisi agama. Haji merupakan ibadah dan bagian dari rukun islam. Tentunya, semuanya harus ada syaratnya. Haji pun ada urutannya, mulai dari ihram, wukuf di Arafah, tawaf ifadah, sa’I, tahallul, serta tertib. REPUBLIKA

Sumber : http://www.umrahhajiplus.com

Baca Artikel Lainnya : PEMAHAMAN TERHADAP IBADAH HAJI DAN UMRAH

PENYIKSAAN TKI KOKOM DI SAUDI SULIT DIPROSES

saco-indonesia.com, Konsul Jenderal Indonesia di Jeddah telah mengatakan sulit untuk dapat memproses hukum majikan yang diduga telah menyiksa tenaga kerja Indonesia, Kokom Binti Bama, di Arab Saudi karena kurangnya data dan tidak adanya dokumen resmi.

“Kita sulit untuk memproses hukum, karena dia tidak tahu majikannya di mana, karena Kokom ini kerjanya pindah-pindah dan kerja bebas. Statusnya juga memang ilegal setelah kabur dari majikan pertama,” kata Konsul Pelayanan Warga di KJRI Jeddah, Sunarko, ketika dihubungi Wartawan BBC Indonesia, Christine Franciska.

Seperti yang telah diketahui, Kokom Binti Bama yang berusia 35 tahun , telah ditemukan sekitar tiga bulan yang lalu dan dibawa ke KJRI Jeddah setelah mengalami penyiksaan saat bekerja.

Dia juga sempat lari dari majikan pertama karena gajinya tak dibayar selama lebih dari satu tahun. Setelah bekerja di tempat lain secara ilegal, dia telah mengalami penyiksaan dengan sejumlah memar di wajah dan sekujur tubuh.

Kondisi Kokom ketika ditemukan cukup parah. “Kaki kanan kurang berfungsi dengan baik, penglihatannya agak kabur, dan kupingnya juga digunting,” kata sejumlah aktivis Buruh Migran Indonesia Saudi Arabia.
“Perlu dipertanyakan”

Menurut Sunarko, keadaan Kokom yang kini tinggal di tempat penampungan KJRI sudah membaik.

Pihaknya kini juga sedang memperjuangkan hak-hak berupa gaji pada majikan yang pertama.

“Yang bisa kita upayakan kita menuntut gaji majikan pertama, karena status kerjanya resmi selama satu tahun. Ini juga sedang kita urus hak-haknya. Tetapi majikan pertama ini tidak melakukan penyiksaan, Kokom kabur saja karena tidak dibayar,” kata Sunarko.

Namun Aktivis Buruh Migran Indonesia Saudi Arabia, Abdul Hadi, juga mengatakan penanganan kasus penyiksaan TKI di Arab Saudi oleh pemerintah RI kurang bertanggung jawab dan kurang manusiawi.

“Kasus Klik seperti [Erwiana] di Hong Kong, sebetulnya di sini lebih banyak, tetapi penanganannya perlu dipertanyakan,” katanya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

ARMADA GAGAL BERCINTA

    saco-indonesia.com,

    kau cinta pertamaku
    yang mampu membuatku tergila-gila
    jangan pernah tinggalkanku
    tak bisa aku hidup tanpamu

    hatiku tlah mati rasa
    untuk cinta yang lainnya

    [chorus]
    kumohon janganlah kau mendua
    ku tak ingin gagal bercinta
    kumohon tetaplah tuk setia
    ku tak ingin gagal bercinta

    hanya engkaulah yang aku puja
    untuk selama-lamanya

    kaulah cinta pertamaku
    yang mampu membuatku tergila-gila
    jangan pernah tinggalkanku
    tak bisa aku hidup tanpamu

    hatiku tlah mati rasa
    untuk cinta yang lainnya

    [interlude]
    hatiku tlah mati rasa
    untuk cinta yang lainnya

    [chorus]
    kumohon janganlah kau mendua
    ku tak ingin gagal bercinta
    kumohon tetaplah tuk setia
    ku tak ingin gagal bercinta

    hanya engkaulah yang aku puja
    dan ini bukan hanya di mulut saja
    hanya engkaulah yang aku puja
    untuk selama-lamanya

    Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Jack Ely, Who Sang the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’, Dies at 71

A 2-minute-42-second demo recording captured in one take turned out to be a one-hit wonder for Mr. Ely, who was 19 when he sang the garage-band classic.

Suzanne Crough, Actress in ‘The Partridge Family,’ Dies at 52

Ms. Crough played the youngest daughter on the hit ’70s sitcom starring David Cassidy and Shirley Jones.

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.

Rhapsody, a Lofty Literary Journal, Perused at 39,000 Feet

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Last summer at a writers’ workshop in Oregon, the novelists Anthony Doerr, Karen Russell and Elissa Schappell were chatting over cocktails when they realized they had all published work in the same magazine. It wasn’t one of the usual literary outlets, like Tin House, The Paris Review or The New Yorker. It was Rhapsody, an in-flight magazine for United Airlines.

It seemed like a weird coincidence. Then again, considering Rhapsody’s growing roster of A-list fiction writers, maybe not. Since its first issue hit plane cabins a year and a half ago, Rhapsody has published original works by literary stars like Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Moody, Amy Bloom, Emma Straub and Mr. Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction two weeks ago.

As airlines try to distinguish their high-end service with luxuries like private sleeping chambers, showers, butler service and meals from five-star chefs, United Airlines is offering a loftier, more cerebral amenity to its first-class and business-class passengers: elegant prose by prominent novelists. There are no airport maps or disheartening lists of in-flight meal and entertainment options in Rhapsody. Instead, the magazine has published ruminative first-person travel accounts, cultural dispatches and probing essays about flight by more than 30 literary fiction writers.

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An airline might seem like an odd literary patron. But as publishers and writers look for new ways to reach readers in a shaky retail climate, many have formed corporate alliances with transit companies, including American Airlines, JetBlue and Amtrak, that provide a captive audience.

Mark Krolick, United Airlines’ managing director of marketing and product development, said the quality of the writing in Rhapsody brings a patina of sophistication to its first-class service, along with other opulent touches like mood lighting, soft music and a branded scent.

“The high-end leisure or business-class traveler has higher expectations, even in the entertainment we provide,” he said.

Some of Rhapsody’s contributing writers say they were lured by the promise of free airfare and luxury accommodations provided by United, as well as exposure to an elite audience of some two million first-class and business-class travelers.

“It’s not your normal Park Slope Community Bookstore types who read Rhapsody,” Mr. Moody, author of the 1994 novel “The Ice Storm,” who wrote an introspective, philosophical piece about traveling to the Aran Islands of Ireland for Rhapsody, said in an email. “I’m not sure I myself am in that Rhapsody demographic, but I would like them to buy my books one day.”

In addition to offering travel perks, the magazine pays well and gives writers freedom, within reason, to choose their subject matter and write with style. Certain genres of flight stories are off limits, naturally: no plane crashes or woeful tales of lost luggage or rude flight attendants, and nothing too risqué.

“We’re not going to have someone write about joining the mile-high club,” said Jordan Heller, the editor in chief of Rhapsody. “Despite those restrictions, we’ve managed to come up with a lot of high-minded literary content.”

Guiding writers toward the right idea occasionally requires some gentle prodding. When Rhapsody’s executive editor asked Ms. Russell to contribute an essay about a memorable flight experience, she first pitched a story about the time she was chaperoning a group of teenagers on a trip to Europe, and their delayed plane sat at the airport in New York for several hours while other passengers got progressively drunker.

“He pointed out that disaster flights are not what people want to read about when they’re in transit, and very diplomatically suggested that maybe people want to read something that casts air travel in a more positive light,” said Ms. Russell, whose novel “Swamplandia!” was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.

She turned in a nostalgia-tinged essay about her first flight on a trip to Disney World when she was 6. “The Magic Kingdom was an anticlimax,” she wrote. “What ride could compare to that first flight?”

Ms. Oates also wrote about her first flight, in a tiny yellow propeller plane piloted by her father. The novelist Joyce Maynard told of the constant disappointment of never seeing her books in airport bookstores and the thrill of finally spotting a fellow plane passenger reading her novel “Labor Day.” Emily St. John Mandel, who was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction last year, wrote about agonizing over which books to bring on a long flight.

“There’s nobody that’s looked down their noses at us as an in-flight magazine,” said Sean Manning, the magazine’s executive editor. “As big as these people are in the literary world, there’s still this untapped audience for them of luxury travelers.”

United is one of a handful of companies showcasing work by literary writers as a way to elevate their brands and engage customers. Chipotle has printed original work from writers like Toni Morrison, Jeffrey Eugenides and Barbara Kingsolver on its disposable cups and paper bags. The eyeglass company Warby Parker hosts parties for authors and sells books from 14 independent publishers in its stores.

JetBlue offers around 40 e-books from HarperCollins and Penguin Random House on its free wireless network, allowing passengers to read free samples and buy and download books. JetBlue will start offering 11 digital titles from Simon & Schuster soon. Amtrak recently forged an alliance with Penguin Random House to provide free digital samples from 28 popular titles, which passengers can buy and download over Amtrak’s admittedly spotty wireless service.

Amtrak is becoming an incubator for literary talent in its own right. Last year, it started a residency program, offering writers a free long-distance train trip and complimentary food. More than 16,000 writers applied and 24 made the cut.

Like Amtrak, Rhapsody has found that writers are eager to get onboard. On a rainy spring afternoon, Rhapsody’s editorial staff sat around a conference table discussing the June issue, which will feature an essay by the novelist Hannah Pittard and an unpublished short story by the late Elmore Leonard.

“Do you have that photo of Elmore Leonard? Can I see it?” Mr. Heller, the editor in chief, asked Rhapsody’s design director, Christos Hannides. Mr. Hannides slid it across the table and noted that they also had a photograph of cowboy spurs. “It’s very simple; it won’t take away from the literature,” he said.

Rhapsody’s office, an open space with exposed pipes and a vaulted brick ceiling, sits in Dumbo at the epicenter of literary Brooklyn, in the same converted tea warehouse as the literary journal N+1 and the digital publisher Atavist. Two of the magazine’s seven staff members hold graduate degrees in creative writing. Mr. Manning, the executive editor, has published a memoir and edited five literary anthologies.

Mr. Manning said Rhapsody was conceived from the start as a place for literary novelists to write with voice and style, and nobody had been put off that their work would live in plane cabins and airport lounges.

Still, some contributors say they wish the magazine were more widely circulated.

“I would love it if I could read it,” said Ms. Schappell, a Brooklyn-based novelist who wrote a feature story for Rhapsody’s inaugural issue. “But I never fly first class.”

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.

Obama Finds a Bolder Voice on Race Issues

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

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

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

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

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Obama Speaks of a ‘Sense of Unfairness’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is intentional, Republican operatives said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.