PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

Kami telah Melayani Jasa Cuci Sofa Cikampek dan Cuci Sofa Cibitung. Layanan Cuci Sofa Terbaik di jakarta, dengan menggunakan metode yang jarang digunakan dalam pencucian sofa dimanapun. Kami kini juga telah membuka layanan Delivery Service yaitu Anda tinggal menelpon kami dan kami akan datang kerumah anda untuk membersihkan sofa anda.

Cuci Kursi Kantor Cibitung

Jasa Cuci Sofa Cibitung juga telah melayani daerah cikampek, kami selalu senantiasa untuk memberikan layanan Cuci Sofa Terbaik di Jakarta. Selain itu kami juga telah melayani Cuci Kursi Kantor untuk daerah cibitung dan cikampek, Anda tidak perlu repot mengusung kursi-kursi kantor anda ketempat kami, team kami yang akan mendatangi kantor anda dan membersihkan kursi kantor anda.

Untuk dapat melihat Kelebihan dari Jasa cuci Sofa yang diberikan, anda dapat melihatnya disini. Layanan Cuci Sofa Terbaik di jakarta hanya bisa anda dapatkan disini.

Saco-Indonesia.com - SITUASI berbahaya dalam kehidupan politik sering mengambil bentuk yang rumit dan halus.

Tidak selalu tentang kekuatan dominan yang mampu menyingkirkan oposisi. Bahaya itu bisa muncul dari keterlibatan masyarakat sipil. Kondisi Indonesia tahun 1960-an dikenal melalui film The Year of Living Dangerously. Di sana, simbol yang dihasilkan kekuatan politik dominan untuk menggalang kekuatan digunakan masyarakat sipil guna meneror masyarakat sipil lainnya. Namun, bahaya politik hampir selalu didorong apa yang terjadi di arena politik negara.

Tahun 2014 adalah the year of politicking dangerously untuk Indonesia yang juga melibatkan masyarakat sipil. Ia akan membuktikan apakah terjadi keadaan yang disebut ilmuwan politik Michael Johnston sebagai warga negara yang terpaksa tak demokra- tis. Kondisi ini lahir pada konteks negara dengan sistem politik formal demokratis, tetapi belum mampu menghadirkan mekanisme akuntabilitas para pejabat publik.  

Warga sipil yang mengambil sikap tak demokratis secara putus asa dan pragmatis memilih wakil rakyat atau pemimpin semata karena orang itu berasal dari daerahnya. Berdasarkan pertimbangan sosial mereka, wakil yang demikian setidaknya akan sedikit  memberikan perhatian atau keuntungan. Pada dasarnya sudah terjadi ketidakpercayaan yang sangat luas pada sistem politik dan para politisi seperti di Indonesia sekarang. Semua partai hampir tak dapat dipercayai. Berdasarkan pandangan seperti itu, rakyat apatis menilai calon dengan berbagai kriteria yang seharusnya secara sehat dikembangkan.

Apatisme warga

Apatisme warga negara merupakan salah satu bentukan sis- tem politik demokratis formal, tetapi tanpa akuntabilitas.  Berbeda dengan pandangan populer, demokrasi secara substansial bukan soal keterwakilan. Demokrasi yang demikian tidak menjamin perbaikan kesejahteraan yang luas. Proses perwakilan penuh problematik.

Bahkan, seandainya partai berusaha mewakili berbagai kepentingan, hal ini bergantung pada kemampuan partai/individu partai dan masyarakat tentang makna keterwakilan. Problemnya bukan menyuarakan kepentingan, melainkan menempatkan kepentingan dalam pertimbangan kepentingan yang beragam.

Bukan waktu yang menentukan kematangan demokrasi, tetapi bagaimana mekanisme membuat proses belajar tidak terdistorsi.  Kemunculan fenomena rakyat yang terpaksa menjadi tak demokratis adalah salah satu akibat dari terjadinya distorsi dalam proses demokratisasi (ke arah yang lebih tinggi).

Demokratisasi secara berbeda di setiap negara memunculkan institusi dan organisasinya sendiri, formal atau informal.  Antara institusi dan organisasi dengan yang muncul belakangan pasti ada berbagai ”jembatan”-nya. Sebagian dari jembatan itu berbahaya bagi demokratisasi.

Pertanyaan dasar bagi penulis tentang demokratisasi adalah apakah praktik yang berlangsung memperkuat atau memperlemah akuntabilitas dari setiap pemain yang menangani sumber daya publik? Jika tidak, akan terjadi penyimpangan sumber daya publik.

Penyimpangan ini dilakukan melalui hubungan dengan wilayah yang sebelumnya dianggap ilegal. Sebagai contoh, hubungan antara penegak hukum dan organisasi kemasyarakatan yang anarkistis, hubungan antara pihak yang memeriksa dan pihak yang diperiksa, hubungan antara peradilan dan broker, pejabat publik dan perusahaan abal-abal, dan sebagainya.

Melalui hubungan-hubungan ini, sumber daya publik keluar dan digunakan tidak semestinya. Lebih berbahaya lagi adalah terjadi penguatan pengorganisasian di antara pihak yang berhubungan secara ilegal atau tidak absah. Nah, apakah mekanisme demokrasi yang ada, yang dijadikan patokan, dapat mengontrol wilayah-wilayah ini.

Proses pemilu, misalnya, sama sekali tidak mampu mengontrol pembalikan wilayah ilegal ini. Hubungan antara lembaga pemerintah dan parlemen   yang  digambarkan seimbang dalam sistem demokrasi  justru memunculkan hubungan konspiratif. Para broker merupakan jembatan medium hubungan ilegal ini.

Kita boleh berdebat tentang apakah di antara calon presiden ada yang berpotensi membawa perbaikan atau tidak. Namun, persoalan dalam pemilu legislatif dapat menjadi batu besar perubahan Indonesia ke arah lebih baik. Sebagai contoh, institusi DPR periode 2009-2014 yang kinerjanya buruk sekali dan sebagian anggotanya terbukti ataupun diduga melakukan pengkhianatan publik,  sekitar 90 persen anggotanya mencalonkan diri kembali.

Jembatan ilegal

Persoalan jembatan ilegal sudah tumbuh begitu banyak dalam sistem demokrasi Indonesia. Demokratisasi adalah proses penguatan negara bersamaan dengan penguatan masyarakat. Pemimpin mendatang, jika ingin melakukan perubahan, harus dapat mengembangkan mekanisme yang menjadi pendorong keterlibatan masyarakat sipil sebagai energi melawan politisi yang ingin mengambil keuntungan diri dan kelompok. Pengetahuan teknokratik tentang hubungan kerja sama institusi negara dan masyarakat sipil sangat dibutuhkan. Penulis berpendapat ini bagian penting menilai para calon.

Akuntabilitas DPR merupakan bagian sangat penting bagi perjalanan bangsa ke depan. Meski penulis sangat skeptis dengan para calon saat ini, siapa tahu ada partai yang membuat langkah besar sebagai komitmen memperbaiki institusi DPR. Penulis, dan (yakin) juga banyak rakyat Indonesia, ingin mendengar konsep mereka lapisan demi lapisan.

Sumber : Kompas.com

Editor : Maulana Lee

saco-indonesia.com,

Fungsi, Keunggulan, dan Kekurangan Rockwool

Fungsi Rockwool

Fungsi umum dari rockwool adalah untuk dapat memberikan isolasi di rumah tinggal atau bangunan komersial. Rockwool juga akan dapat melindungi pipa, kapal, rumah mobile dan peralatan memasak domestik. Meskipun paling umum dikenal untuk dapat menyediakan isolasi di rumah, orang juga akan menggunakan rockwool dan glasswool sebagai media tumbuh hortikultura.

Keunggulan Rockwool

Rockwool juga menyediakan berbagai keuntungan, termasuk tahan api dan serap suara. Karena serat yang tidak mudah terbakar dan telah memiliki titik leleh yang ekstrim lebih dari 2.150 derajat F, isolasi wol batuan bertindak sebagai penghalang api. Karakteristik tahan apinya menunda penyebaran api, yang bisa menambahkan menit berharga untuk dapat melarikan diri saat kebakaran. Batu isolasi wol juga menolak air, anti membusuk dan jamur, termasuk berbagai jenis pertumbuhan bakteri. Karena menolak air, rockwool tidak akan melemah atau kendur. Isi dari rockwool padat, sehingga dapat mengurangi aliran udara dan transmisi gelombang suara.

Keuntungan rockwool :

    Cocok untuk aneka kebutuhan industri
    Memiliki daya konduksi termal yang rendah
    Dapat digunakan pada suhu 100° C sampai 820° C
    Tidak mudah terbakar
    Kedap suara
    Tidak berkarat / berjamur

Aplikasi produk :

    Peredam ruangan genset
    Peredam ruangan studio
    Peredam ruangan diskotik
    Partisi ruangan

Tersedia dalam bentuk : Lembaran, Roll, Batang
Kekurangan rockwool :

Masalah kecil mungkin timbul ketika dalam melaksanakan isolasi/insulation. Ketika dalam menangani rockwool, hindari menyentuh langsung dengan tangan kosong. Meskipun tidak menimbulkan bahaya langsung, dapat menyebabkan gatal-gatal sementara dan ketidaknyamanan.

Juga, debu dapat bertebaran ketika memasang rockwool, sehingga harus memakai masker pelindung dan pelindung mata yang sesuai untuk dapat menghindari kecelakaan atau cedera, dan agar dapat bernafas dengan benar.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

saco-indonesia.com, Album Kikan Namara usai lepas dari Cokelat tak kunjung rampung. Hal itu dikarenakan ia telah ada proyek penggarapan lagu untuk Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK) yang bertajuk Serukan Keadilan dalam menyambut peringatan hari anti korupsi.

"Aku juga masih kerjakan album yang tidak selesai. Sempat kepotong project lagu untuk KPK dalam rangka untuk menyambut hari raya anti korupsi. Judulnya Serukan Keadilan," katanya di Kawasan SCBD, Jakarta Selatan.

Menurut Kikan penggarapan lagu itu telah memiliki tujuan yang jelas, untuk dapat membangkitkan semangat masyarakat yang pesimis dengan kasus korupsi di tanah air. Kikan optimis suatu saat nanti Indonesia akan terbebas dari tindak korupsi.

"Tujuannya jelas, bisa dapat membangkitkan semangat orang yang pesimis sama korupsi bangsa. Bagaimana caranya kita yang muda bisa meyakinkan gelap ini nggak selamanya, terang nanti pasti ada," paparnya.

Dilanjutkan, target dari lagu Serukan Keadilan untuk bisa menanamkan integritas kepada siswa SMP dan SMA. "Aku berharap ada kesinambungan sama program-program lainnya," harapnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

The 6-foot-10 Phillips played alongside the 6-11 Rick Robey on the Wildcats team that won the 1978 N.C.A.A. men’s basketball title.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?”

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

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

At the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Suzman’s signature accomplishment was the central role he played in creating a global network of surveys on aging.

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.”

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.”

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.

Mr. Tepper was not a musical child and had no formal training, but he grew up to write both lyrics and tunes, trading off duties with the other member of the team, Roy C. Bennett.