PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2017

saco-indonesia.com, Google baru saja telah mengumumkan di blog Chromium-nya bahwa perusahaannya akan telah memberikan hadiah total Rp 32,8 miliar bagi hacker yang bisa meretas sistem operasinya.

, kegiatan ini juga akan dikemas dalam kompetisi yang bernama Pwnium, sebuah kontes hacking yang sudah menjadi agenda tahunan Google. Di tahun 2014 ini, acara Pwnium juga sudah memasuki tahun keempat dan bakal akan diselenggarakan di bulan Maret mendatang.

Pada konferensi keamanan CanSecWest di Vancouver , British Columbia, Google telah mengumumkan jika hadiah tersebut akan diberikan pada peretas yang bisa mengeksploitasi Chrome OS secara keseluruhan. Hal ini telah meliputi penjelasan menyeluruh terkait dalam semua bug yang terdapat dalam sistem operasi tersebut.

Selain itu, peserta Pwnium 4 juga akan diberikan pilihan antara meretas HP Chromebook berbasis ARM atau Acer Chromebook berbasis Intel Haswell microarchitecture.

Hacker juga akan mendapatkan uang sebesar USD 110 ribu atau setara Rp 1,3 miliar jika dirinya dapat masuk dan menyusup ke sistem browser Chrome OS. Sedangkan nominal hadiah hingga lebih dari puluhan miliar dapat didapat jika hacker bisa menyusup dan menguasai Chrome OS secara keseluruhan.

Berdasarkan lansiran tersebut, pada ajang Pwnium 3 yang diselenggarakan tahun lalu, telah diketahui hanya ada satu hacker dengan nama sandi 'Pinkie Pie' yang telah berhasil masuk ke dalam sistem browser di Chrome OS dan berhasil mendapatkan hadiah sebesar USD 40 ribu atau setara Rp 486 juta.

Pwnium 4 yang diadakan Google ini sendiri bertujuan untuk dapat menghilangkan lubang yang ada di sistem Chrome OS dan membuat Chrome browser maupun Chrome OS menjadi semakin aman.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

saco-indonesia.com,

Tips Cara Mencegah Diabetes

Penyakit yang telah diakibatkan dengan gaya hidup yang kurang sehat ini bisa dapat dicegah dengan merubah gaya hidup yang tidak sehat tersebut, dengan cara mencegah diabetes berikut ini :

Mempertahankan berat badan ideal

Pada sebagian besar orang para penderita diabetes (biasanya tipe 2) telah memiliki kecenderungan berat badan yang lebih. Obesitas atau kelebihan berat dan juga lemak dalam tubuh juga akan dapat meningkatkan risiko terkena diabetes.

Olahraga secara teratur

Seperti manfaat berjalan kaki yang luar biasa namun olahraga simpel ini juga sering malas dilakukan. Olahraga akan dapat mengontrol berat badan dan meningkatkan aliran darah.

Memeriksakan kondisi kesehatan

Mengingat diabetes sering kali terlambat dilakukan penyembuhan nya, sangat dianjurkan untuk dapat mendeteksi penyakit tersebut sejak dini dengan pemeriksaan teratur. Pada seseorang yang telah berusia diatas 40 tahun, seharusnya telah memiliki jadwal rutin untuk pemeriksaan kadar gula darah setiap 3 tahun sekali.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Nabi Muhammad SAW bersabda, "Haji mabrur itu tidak ada balasannya kecuali surga.” (H.R. Bukhari)

Haji mabrur adalah haji yang diterima oleh Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala. Tanda-tandanya banyak. Di antaranya adalah hendaknya nafkah (biaya) haji tersebut dari hasil usaha yang halal karena nafkah menjadi poros penting dalam kehidupan manusia, terlebih lagi dalam urusan haji.

Bahkan disebutkan bahwa jika seseorang naik haji dengan biaya dari hartanya yang halal, maka akan ada penyeru yang berseru, “Bekalmu halal dan kendaraanmu halal, maka hajimu pun mabrur.” Adapun jika dia berangkat haji dari harta yang haram, maka penyeru tadi akan berseru, “La labbaika wala sa’daika. Bekalmu haram dan nafkahmu haram, maka hajimu tertolak tidak mendapat ganjaran.” atau dengan seruan yang semakna. Jadi, di antara tanda-tanda haji mabrur adalah jika dikerjakandengan biaya dari nafkah dan usaha yang halal.

Begitu pula, di antara tanda-tandanya adalah jika orang yang berhaji mengerjakan manasiknya sesuai dengan tata cara yang disyari’atkan dan diinginkan tanpa mengurangi sedikitpun, dan menjauhi segala larangan Allah selama mengerjakan haji.

Di antara tanda-tandanya pula adalah jika orang yang berhaji itu kembali dalam keadaan pengamalan agamanya lebih baik daripada sebelum berangkat, yaitu dia kembali dalam keadaan bertaubat kepada Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala, istiqamah (konsisten) dalam menjalankan ketaatan-ketaatan kepada-Nya, dan terus-menerus dalam kondisi seperti itu. Dengan begitu, hajinya menjadi titik tolak baginya kepada kea rah kebaikan, dan selalu menjadi peringatan baginya untuk memeperbaiki jalan hidupnya.

Sumber : http://artikel-haji-dan-umrah.blogspot.com

Baca Artikel Lainnya : LARANGAN KETIKA HAJI ATAU UMROH

saco-indonesia.com, Jenazah seorang tenaga kerja wanita asal Kota Binjai, Sumatera Utara telah ditemukan nelayan dalam kondisi yang telah membusuk di dalam peti jenazah yang terapung di perairan laut Bagansiapiapi Sinaboi Provinsi Riau.

"Ketika ditemukan, kondisi mayat sudah membusuk di dalam peti mati dan terapung di laut," kata salah seorang keluarga korban tenaga kerja wanita (TKW) asal Binjai itu, Sri Nilawati, di Binjai, Senin.

Sri Nilawati juga menjelaskan bahwa adiknya itu, Anita Purnama Boru Huahuruk yang berusia (35) tahun , yang juga merupakan warga Jalan Bintara Kelurahan Satria Kota Binjai, yang bekerja di Malaysia sejak beberapa waktu yang lalu.

Mayat adiknya itu pertama kali telah ditemukan oleh nelayan dalam keadaan yang sudah membusuk di dalam peti dan terapung di laut di perairan Bagansiapiapi Sinaboi Provinsi Riau.

TKW yang telah meninggal dunia dengan kondisi mayat membusuk ini telah diketahui berkat informasi yang telah diterima dari polisi Airud Riau yang telah menghubungi mereka.

"Dari situlah kami dapat mengetahui bahwa adikku itu sudah meninggal dunia dalam keadaan membusuk di dalam peti mati," katanya.

Ditemukannya mayat adiknya itu berkat adanya buku paspor, cincin, kalung emas dan nomor hp di dalam dompetnya.

Sri Nilawati juga menjelaskan bahwa korban rencananya di Malaysia bekerja di rumah makan, namun sesampainya di sana ternyata menjadi pembantu rumah tangga.

Korban pergi ke Malaysia pada bulan Agustus 2013 lalu, melalui sebuah agen penyalur tenaga kerja ke luar negeri. "Namun kami tidak mengetahui perusahaan yang memberangkatkannya," katanya.

Sementara itu salah seorang adik korban lainnya, Faisal, juga menyatakan saat dirinya sampai di Bagansiapiapi Sinaboi untuk menjemput, kondisi mayat sudah tidak bisa dilihat karena sudah busuk, namun pihak keluarga yakin itu mayat Anita, karena terdapat tato bunga mawar di pundaknya dan indentitas lainnya.

Kemudian mayat yang dibungkus plastik di dalam peti jenazah itu dibawa pulang untuk segera dikebumikan. Kini keluarga belum tahu apa penyebab kematian korban hingga mayatnya bisa dibuang dan terapung ke laut.

Keluarga juga berharap kepada pemerintah untuk segera mengungkap kematian korban, karena pada saat dia pergi dari rumah dalam keadaan sehat, kata Faisal.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

JAKARTA, Saco-Indonesia.com - Sektor pariwisata memberikan kontribusi penting bagi negara. Di Indonesia, pariwisata menyumbang perekonomian sebesar empat persen. Selain itu, pariwisata menyumbang tenaga kerja di Indonesia sebesar enam sampai tujuh persen.

"Di sektor jasa, pariwisata terbesar kedua setelah Kereta Api Indonesia. Jadi, pariwisata merupakan sektor penting, oleh sebab itu perlu prioritas dalam program nasional," ungkap Menteri Pariwisata dan Ekonomi Kreatif (Menparekraf) Mari Elka Pangestu saat Pengukuhan Pengurus DPP Ikatan Cendekiawan Pariwisata Indonesia (ICPI), di Jakarta, Selasa (4/6/2013).

Setiap tahunnya semakin banyak pengajuan pembukaan Perguruan Tinggi Pariwisata yang baru. Pertumbuhannya mencapai 12 persen di tahun 2010. Menurut Mari, ilmu pariwisata adalah kombinasi dari berbagai ilmu, mulai dari desain, arsitek, ekonomi, dan komunikasi.

Menparekraf mengemukakan selama ini ilmu pariwisata tidak selalu melalui pendidikan non-formal. Ibarat seorang empu atau ahli keris, walau tidak pernah mengikuti sekolah formal, tetapi seorang empu tahu seluk-beluk tentang keris.

Oleh karena itu, tambah Mari, ilmu pariwisata perlu untuk pengembangan sumber daya manusia yang kompeten, terutama untuk kemajuan pariwisata Indonesia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Bartoszewski was given honorary Israeli citizenship for his work to save Jews during World War II and later surprised even himself by being instrumental in reconciling Poland and Germany.

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.

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

BALTIMORE — In the afternoons, the streets of Locust Point are clean and nearly silent. In front of the rowhouses, potted plants rest next to steps of brick or concrete. There is a shopping center nearby with restaurants, and a grocery store filled with fresh foods.

And the National Guard and the police are largely absent. So, too, residents say, are worries about what happened a few miles away on April 27 when, in a space of hours, parts of this city became riot zones.

“They’re not our reality,” Ashley Fowler, 30, said on Monday at the restaurant where she works. “They’re not what we’re living right now. We live in, not to be racist, white America.”

As Baltimore considers its way forward after the violent unrest brought by the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of injuries he suffered while in police custody, residents in its predominantly white neighborhoods acknowledge that they are sometimes struggling to understand what beyond Mr. Gray’s death spurred the turmoil here. For many, the poverty and troubled schools of gritty West Baltimore are distant troubles, glimpsed only when they pass through the area on their way somewhere else.

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And so neighborhoods of Baltimore are facing altogether different reckonings after Mr. Gray’s death. In mostly black communities like Sandtown-Winchester, where some of the most destructive rioting played out last week, residents are hoping businesses will reopen and that the police will change their strategies. But in mostly white areas like Canton and Locust Point, some residents wonder what role, if any, they should play in reimagining stretches of Baltimore where they do not live.

“Most of the people are kind of at a loss as to what they’re supposed to do,” said Dr. Richard Lamb, a dentist who has practiced in the same Locust Point office for nearly 39 years. “I listen to the news reports. I listen to the clergymen. I listen to the facts of the rampant unemployment and the lack of opportunities in the area. Listen, I pay my taxes. Exactly what can I do?”

And in Canton, where the restaurants have clever names like Nacho Mama’s and Holy Crepe Bakery and Café, Sara Bahr said solutions seemed out of reach for a proudly liberal city.

“I can only imagine how frustrated they must be,” said Ms. Bahr, 36, a nurse who was out with her 3-year-old daughter, Sally. “I just wish I knew how to solve poverty. I don’t know what to do to make it better.”

The day of unrest and the overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations that followed led to hundreds of arrests, often for violations of the curfew imposed on the city for five consecutive nights while National Guard soldiers patrolled the streets. Although there were isolated instances of trouble in Canton, the neighborhood association said on its website, many parts of southeast Baltimore were physically untouched by the tumult.

Tensions in the city bubbled anew on Monday after reports that the police had wounded a black man in Northwest Baltimore. The authorities denied those reports and sent officers to talk with the crowds that gathered while other officers clutching shields blocked traffic at Pennsylvania and West North Avenues.

Lt. Col. Melvin Russell, a community police officer, said officers had stopped a man suspected of carrying a handgun and that “one of those rounds was spent.”

Colonel Russell said officers had not opened fire, “so we couldn’t have shot him.”

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The colonel said the man had not been injured but was taken to a hospital as a precaution. Nearby, many people stood in disbelief, despite the efforts by the authorities to quash reports they described as “unfounded.”

Monday’s episode was a brief moment in a larger drama that has yielded anger and confusion. Although many people said they were familiar with accounts of the police harassing or intimidating residents, many in Canton and Locust Point said they had never experienced it themselves. When they watched the unrest, which many protesters said was fueled by feelings that they lived only on Baltimore’s margins, even those like Ms. Bahr who were pained by what they saw said they could scarcely comprehend the emotions associated with it.

But others, like Lambi Vasilakopoulos, who runs a casual restaurant in Canton, said they were incensed by what unfolded last week.

“What happened wasn’t called for. Protests are one thing; looting is another thing,” he said, adding, “We’re very frustrated because we’re the ones who are going to pay for this.”

There were pockets of optimism, though, that Baltimore would enter a period of reconciliation.

“I’m just hoping for peace,” Natalie Boies, 53, said in front of the Locust Point home where she has lived for 50 years. “Learn to love each other; be patient with each other; find justice; and care.”

A skeptical Mr. Vasilakopoulos predicted tensions would worsen.

“It cannot be fixed,” he said. “It’s going to get worse. Why? Because people don’t obey the laws. They don’t want to obey them.”

But there were few fears that the violence that plagued West Baltimore last week would play out on these relaxed streets. The authorities, Ms. Fowler said, would make sure of that.

“They kept us safe here,” she said. “I didn’t feel uncomfortable when I was in my house three blocks away from here. I knew I was going to be O.K. because I knew they weren’t going to let anyone come and loot our properties or our businesses or burn our cars.”

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.”

Mr. Paczynski was one of the concentration camp’s longest surviving inmates and served as the personal barber to its Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Judge Patterson helped to protect the rights of Attica inmates after the prison riot in 1971 and later served on the Federal District Court in Manhattan.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

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

Hard but Hopeful Home to ‘Lot of Freddies’

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