PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

saco-indonesia.com, M Ryan Dermawijaya yang berusia (15) tahun , siswa kelas 3 SMPN 14 Kota Tangerang, tewas tersetrum setelah saat ingin mencoba menghidupkan mesin pompa air, Kamis (2/1). Warga Kampung Kelapa RT 01 RW 04, Kelapa Indah, Kecamatan Tangerang itu tidak menyadari jika stop kontak yang dia colokkan sudah dalam keadaan basah karena hujan.

Tetangga korban yang bernama Imit juga menuturkan, peristiwa itu telah terjadi sekitar sekitar pukul 9.30 WIB pagi. Saat itu Ryan sebenarnya juga sudah diperingatkan.

"Padahal anak tersebut juga sudah diperingatkan untuk tidak menghidupkan pompa air karena habis kehujanan rumah listriknya, ujar Imit.

Melihat Ryan seperti itu, Imit bersama tetangga kontrakan telah membawa korban ke rumah sakit Awal Bross di Kebon Nanas, Kota Tangerang. Namun nahas bagi Ryan, nyawanya tidak dapat terselamatkan.

Sementara Hasyim, ayah Ryan, tak menyangka anaknya akan tewas seketika. Sebab, ketika peristiwa itu telah terjadi, dia juga sedang tidak berada di rumah kontrakannya itu.

Saya sedang bertugas, ujar Hasyim yang berprofesi sebagai petugas keamanan di Perumahan Elite Modern Land.

Ryan adalah anak kedua dari empat saudara. Dia dikenal anak yang penurut. "Saya juga tak menyangka pertemuan saya dengan Ryan tadi pagi adalah pertemuan terakhir," katanya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

kami dari perusahaan yang bergerak dibidang jasa sewa mobil . Kami sudah cukup lama bergerak dibidang ini. Kami siap mengantar anda kemanapun yang anda inginkan. Adapun daerah-daerah yang biasanya kami lalui seperti : Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, Dan Bekasi. Namun banyak pula para customer kami yang ingin pergi jauhmisalkan diluar daerah jabodetabek ini seperti : bandung, yogyakarta, puncak, semarang, dan lain-lain.

Selain itu kami memiliki driver-driver yang sangat profesional karena mereka sudah puluhan tahun bergerak sebagai driver dimanapun, selain itu driver kami ini mengetahui semua lingkungan jalanan di dalam kota dan diluar kota. Driver kami sangat sabar dan selalu mementingkan pelayanan serta kepuasaan kepada semua customer kami. Banyak dari mereka mengatakan sangat puas dengan pelayanan driver kami ini.

Kami selalu mengutamakan kepuasaan para customer kami, karena kami adalah sebuah perusahaan rental mobil yang sudah terpercaya oleh ribuan para customer kami. Dari segi pelayanan admin, driver, serta selalu mengevaluasi sistem kinerja dan pelayanan kami setiap saat. Kami selalu menerima kritikan dan keluhan para customer kami, karena sebuah kritikan dan masukan adalah sebuah motivasi kami untuk lebih memperbaiki pelayanan kami setiap saat dan setiap waktu.

Biasanya para customer kami menginginkan perjalananan ke wisata-wisata. Driver kami bisa memberikan solusi-solusi yang baik demi perjalanan anda. Adapaun para customer kami yang ingin diantarkan untuk kepentingan sebagai berikut : 1. Untuk kepentingan pekerjaan, 2. Kepentingan Liburan, 3. Kepentingan Lebaran, 4. Kepentingan Wisata Dalam Kota, 5. Kepentingan Wisata Luar Kota, 6. Dan Lain-Lain. Selain itu jika anda dari luar daerah yang bingung berliburan dimanapun kami bisa memberikan solusi yang terbaik demi customer kami yang kami banggakan.

Kami memahami apa yang customer inginkan, kami selalu berusaha memberikan pelayanan yang terbaik, serta memberikan kepuasan yang lebih kepada para customer kami ini. Armada-armada kami semua model-model terbaru dari Mobil Avanza, Mobil Xenia, Mobil APV, Dan Mobil Inova. Kami berani menjamin kebersian dari setiap mobil kami dari segi berbagai macam teknisi kendaraan kami seperti : Mesin, Ruang Dalam Mobil, AC, Bangku, Dan Lain-Lain. Kebersihan Dan Perawatan kendaraan kami selalu kami cek setiap hari sebelum berangkat menjemput para customer kami.

Anda tak perlu kuatir para driver kami tidak suka mengemudi ugal-ugalan dan mementingkan keselamatan. Jika anda ingin mengorder sewa mobil harian serta bulanan ditempat rental mobil silakan hubungi kami untuk mendapatkan harga sewa mobil yang murah, anda tak perlu kuatir dengan harga di tempat kami. Terimakasih.

saco-indoneia.com, CARA MERAWAT AC RUMAH juga sangat penting diketahui karena tidak dapat dipungkiri lagi di zaman sekarang ini AC juga sudah digunakan oleh semua kalangan, dari kalangan atas sampai kalangan bawah. Hal ini juga dikarenakan kebutuhan sesuai dengan perkembangan zaman dan juga ditunjang dengan harga yang semakin terjangkau. Akan tetapi dengan adanya harga yang terjangkau, alias lebih murah. Dengan sendirinya kualitaspun juga akan berkurang. Untuk itu harus diperlukan cara untuk merawat ac rumah, supaya bisa merawat AC sendiri, agar AC tetap dapat berfungsi sebagai mana mestinya. Untuk orang yang berduit masalah perawatan tidak menjadi masalah, beda dengan yang agak kurang keuangannya, untuk itu di sini ada tips untuk dapat mengurangi biaya perawatan sehingga AC tetap dapat berfungsi dan biaya bisa dikurangi.Dengan mengikuti CARA MERAWAT AC RUMAH maka ikuti berikut ini, mudah-mudahan biaya bisa lebih ekonomis.
Langkah pertama:

AC split terdiri dari 3 bagian : indoor, outdoor, remote control. Bukalah tutup indoor, dan disitu akan didapati filter/saringan, dan ambilah filter tersebut, kalau kotor cucilah sampai bersih (hati-hati jangan sampai rusak). lakukan hal ini paling tidak sebulan sekali. Karena ini merupakan inti dari CARA MERAWAT AC RUMAH

Setelah dibuka filter/saringann maka akan dapat terlihat evaporator. Perhatikan evaporator tersebut, kalau sudah kotor harus segera dibersihkan. Adapun untuk dapat membersihkan evaporator harus dengan menggunakan alat tersendiri yaitu steam ac. Sebelum menggunakan alat ini kita harus mengamankan modul yaitu dengan menutupnya dengan plastik atau sejenisnya supaya tidak terkena air. Sedangkan modul letaknya ada di sebelah kiri evaporator. Nah daripada susah-susah apalagi tidak punya alatnya, lebih baik panggil tukang service yang bisa dipercaya.

Langkah kedua :
Periksa outdoor, singkirkan benda apapun yang telah mengganggu sirkulasi udar, karena akan dapat mempengaruhi kondensasi sehingga AC kurang dingin. Lihatlah pipa yang telah menempel pada outdoor. disitu juga ada dua pipa. Pipa besar dan pipa kecil. Apabila pada pipa kecil terlihat fros/bunga es, itu salah satu tanda froen berkurang dan harus segera ditambah, dalam hal ini juga akan dilakukan oleh yang berpengalaman dalam menangani hal ini. Panggil saja nomor telepon diatas.

Langkah ketiga :
Matikan AC dengan segera pada saat tegangan listrik turun. Untuk dapat mengetahui tegangan listrik itu turun bisa dilihat dengan melihat lampu yang biasanya nyala terang tapi saat tegangan turun lampu akan nyala kurang terang/redup. Selamat mencoba CARA MERAWAT AC RUMAH  ini semoga bisa menjadikan AC rumah anda dingin kembali

PERHATIAN :
Kebersihan AC haruslah selalu dijaga, karena akan dapat mempengaruhi listrik yang digunakan. AC yang selalu bersih pemakaian listriknya lebih irit dibanding AC yang kotor. Hal ini juga dikarenakan AC yang kotor akan susah untuk mencapai titik dingin suatu ruangan sesuai dengan suhu yang diinginkan sehingga kompresor akan hidup terus menerus. Berbeda dengan AC yang bersih< dalam waktu tertentu akan mencapai titik dingin yang diinginkan sehingga kompresorpun akan berhenti bekerja, sehingga arus listrik yang digunakan sangat kecil. Maka penting untuk dapat memperhatikan langkah demi langkah yang ada di dalam CARA MERAWAT AC RUMAH

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Saco-Indonesia.com,-Dalam 15 tahun terakhir, Jody Brotosuseno (39) sudah mencoba berbagai usaha. Peruntungan berbuah di usaha kuliner dengan tulang punggung pada Waroeng Steak and Shake. Kini, ia punya 50 gerai Waroeng Steak and Shake di sejumlah kota.

Ia juga memiliki belasan gerai untuk unit usaha lainnya. Paling sedikit 1.000 pekerja mendapatkan kegiatan sekaligus penghasilan dari seluruh unit usahanya.

Pencapaiannya hari ini tentu tidak diraih dalam semalam. Bersama istrinya, Siti Handayani alias Aniek, Jody berkali-kali merasakan jatuh bangun berwirausaha. Hal itu bukan hal mudah karena modal mereka terbatas dan belum ada investor pada awal membangun usaha.

Memang banyak orang pada awalnya tidak akan percaya Jody bekerja keras membangun bisnis. Hal itu tidak lepas dari latar belakang keluarganya, pemilik jaringan restoran Obonk Steak and Ribs.

Meski ayahnya, Sugondo, pemilik jaringan restoran yang punya lebih dari 60 gerai itu, Jody tidak mendapat perlakuan istimewa. Ia menerima gaji sebagai pegawai biasa di jaringan restoran tersebut. Apalagi Jody bertekad mandiri sejak menikahi Siti Hariani alias Aniek pada 1998.

Dengan gaji itu, Jody dan Aniek tahu mereka butuh pendapatan lebih baik. Dengan ijazah terakhir setingkat SMA, sangat sulit mendapat peluang kerja jika harus melamar ke tempat lain. Jody dan Aniek akhirnya membulatkan tekad menjadi wirausaha. Agar bisa fokus, mereka sepakat meninggalkan bangku kuliah. Jody meninggalkan pendidikannya pada Jurusan Arsitektur, Universitas Atma Jaya Yogyakarta, pada semester delapan.

Sambil bekerja di Obonk, Jody mencoba berjualan aneka makanan. Awalnya berjualan susu segar, lalu roti bakar dan jus buah. Namun, bisnis itu terpaksa berhenti karena peralatannya banyak diambil orang.

Jody juga berjualan kaus partai politik. Pada Pemilu 1999, jumlah partai membengkak dari tiga menjadi 48 partai. Jody melihat peluang itu dan memanfaatkan dengan berjualan kaus berlambang partai politik. Hasil penjualan, antara lain, digunakan untuk mengontrak rumah di kawasan Demangan, Yogyakarta.

Selepas pemilu, Jody dan Aniek berpikir lagi mencari tambahan. Kelahiran anak pertama, Yuga Adiaksa, membuat kebutuhan bertambah. Akhirnya pasangan itu memutuskan berjualan steik, seperti yang sudah dilakukan keluarga Jody. Namun, pasangan itu tidak meniru konsep Obonk Steak.

Mereka memilih mahasiswa dan pelajar sebagai target pasar. Untuk merek usaha, mereka memilih nama Waroeng Steak and Shake. Gerai pertama dibuka di teras rumah mereka karena tidak ada dana untuk menyewa tempat. ”Saya pilih istilah warung untuk menegaskan pesan makan steik di sini tidak mahal,” ujar Jody.

Namun, mereka terbentur modal untuk memulai usaha. Kala itu, Jody dan Aniek hanya punya uang Rp 100.000. Akhirnya, Jody menjual motor dan hasilnya dipakai untuk modal awal Waroeng Steak. Ketika baru mulai, Jody mengurus dapur dan melayani pembeli, sementara Aniek menjadi kasir. Namun, warung itu tidak langsung ramai. ”Pernah sehari cuma dapat bersih Rp 30.000,” ujarnya.

Masukan pelanggan

Pembeli masih sepi, antara lain karena warung itu belum terkenal. Selain itu, masyarakat juga masih menganggap steik makanan mahal. ”Pembeli memberi masukan agar warung saya lebih disukai. Saya dengar masukan mereka,” ujarnya.

Jody membuat spanduk besar dengan warna mencolok di depan gerainya. Di spanduk dicantumkan harga steik yang murah. Ia juga mempromosikan warungnya lewat selebaran. Tidak butuh lama, warung Jody mulai ramai pembeli dari kalangan mahasiswa dan pelajar. ”Malah kami mulai kewalahan,” ujarnya.

Kala itu, Waroeng Steak and Shake baru punya 10 hotplate dan lima meja. Saat ramai, tak jarang pembeli terpaksa menunggu meja kosong. Bahkan, Jody beberapa kali terpaksa mengambil hotplate setelah pembeli selesai makan tetapi masih duduk di meja. Sebab, hotplate akan dipakai untuk memenuhi pesanan pembeli lain.

Pelan-pelan, Jody menambah peralatan. Ia juga merekrut pegawai untuk melayani pembeli yang semakin banyak. ”Setahun sejak buka di Demangan, kami membuka satu cabang lagi,” ujarnya.

Untuk pembukaan gerai kedua, Jody mengajak kerabat dan temannya menanam modal dengan pola bagi hasil. Pola itu dipakainya sampai gerai kedelapan. Di gerai kesembilan dan seterusnya, Jody mendanai sendiri. ”Asal bisa menyesuaikan inovasi dengan kebutuhan pasar, bisa berkembang terus. Masukan pelanggan selalu kami perhatikan,” tuturnya.

Masukan pembeli tetap diandalkan dalam pertimbangan pengembangan usaha. Menu-menu baru dihadirkan untuk menyesuaikan permintaan pelanggan. Meski bermerek Waroeng Steak and Shake, gerai-gerai Jody juga menyediakan menu dengan bahan utama nasi. Padahal, steik biasanya disantap dengan kentang goreng.

Pengembangan

Saat Waroeng Steak and Shake semakin berkembang, Jody kembali membuat keputusan untuk berkonsentrasi penuh. Ia tinggalkan Obonk agar bisa sepenuhnya mengurus Waroeng Steak and Shake. Sejak 2002, ia fokus mengembangkan Waroeng Steak and Shake yang terus menambah gerai.

Konsentrasinya membawa hasil menggembirakan. Kini, ia mengelola 50 gerai Waroeng Steak and Shake di sejumlah kota. Ia juga membuka gerai aneka makanan dengan bendera Festival Kuliner. Bisnis kulinernya dilengkapi dengan Waroeng Penyetan dan Bebaqaran serta delapan gerai waralaba merek lain. Ia juga merambah bisnis olahraga dengan membuka arena futsal.

Meski yakin pasar Indonesia masih terbuka sangat luas, Jody sudah mulai mempersiapkan ekspansi ke luar negeri. Untuk pasar luar negeri, Waroeng Group akan menggunakan pola waralaba. ”Untuk pengembangan pasar Indonesia, kami berusaha dikelola sendiri dengan dana sendiri,” ungkapnya.

Wajar ia yakin bisa mendanai sendiri pembukaan gerai baru. Dalam salah satu kuliah umum di Yogyakarta terungkap, salah satu gerainya di Yogyakarta beromzet rata-rata Rp 500 juta per bulan. Padahal, ia mengoperasikan puluhan gerai.

Namun, tidak semua dinikmati sendiri oleh Jody. Salah satu gerainya di kawasan Gejayan, Yogyakarta, didedikasikan untuk kegiatan amal. Seluruh keuntungan dari gerai itu dipakai untuk mendanai Rumah Tahfidz, pesantren penghafal Al Quran dengan santri hampir 2.000 orang. Selain dari gerai itu, Jody juga menyumbangkan sebagian keuntungan dari unit usaha lainnya untuk mendanai tujuh Rumah Tahfidz yang dikelolanya. ”Saya dibantu teman-teman, tidak menanggung sendiri,” ujarnya merendah.

Jody memang selalu tampak bersahaja dan merendah. Jika bertemu sepintas, sama sekali tidak terlihat sosok orang muda pemilik bisnis beromzet puluhan miliar rupiah per bulan. Bisnis yang dibangun dengan kerja keras sendiri, bukan warisan. Kerja keras dalam 12 tahun mengantarnya dari pemuda yang batal jadi arsitek tetapi menjadi raja steik. (Kris Razianto Mada)

JEDDAH, Saco-Indonesia.com - Ribuan pekerja Indonesia di Jeddah, Arab Saudi, dikabarkan mengamuk di Konsulat Jendral RI, Minggu (9/6/2013) waktu setempat. Mereka membakar beragam perkakas di pintu masuk konsulat, dan berusaha menerobos untuk melakukan pembakaran gedung. Aksi tersebut dipicu kemarahan atas proses dokumen perjalanan.

"Kami masih memeriksa apakah ada korban atau berapa banyak pekerja terluka," kata Duta Besar Indonesia untuk Arab Saudi, Gatot Abdullah Mansyur seperti dikutip Arab News. Dia mengatakan bahwa semua diplomat dan staf konsuler aman.

Kru Pertahanan Sipil, polisi, pasukan khusus dan ambulans Bulan Sabit Merah turun ke tempat kejadian untuk memulihkan ketertiban. Jalan menuju ke konsulat ditutup.

Saksi mata mengatakan api masih menyala hingga pukul 22.00 waktu setempat. Petugas pemadam kebakaran pun masih terlihat berupaya memadamkannya.

Kerusuhan ini adalah buntut insiden pada Sabtu (8/6/2013). Saat itu para pekerja perempuan Indonesia "menyerbu" konsulat untuk mendapatkan dokumen perjalanan. Setidaknya tiga perempuan terluka dan pingsan.

Para pekerja Indonesia di Arab Saudi yang tak memiliki izin bekerja, punya tenggat waktu hingga 3 Juli 2013 untuk "melegalkan" keberadaan dan aktivitas mereka. Dokumen yang harus dipastikan mereka miliki adalah visa kerja.

Perseteruan antara para pekerja, polisi, dan pejabat konsulat diduga dipicu frustasi para pekerja karena lamanya proses pengurusan dokumen dan kurangnya pengorganisasian di konsulat. "Kami telah mengalami masalah dengan konsulat sejak kami tiba dua hari lalu," kata seorang asisten rumah tangga dari Indonesia, yang tidak ingin namanya dipublikasikan. "Kemarin saya jatuh dan terluka karena konsulat tidak tahu apa yang mereka lakukan dan tidak bisa mengendalikan massa."

Pekeja lainnya yang mengaku bekerja di bidang konstruksi, mengeluh dia tidak bisa masuk ke konsulat untuk mengurus dokumen perjalanan. "Percayalah, sekarang saya hanya ingin pulang," kata dia.

Editor :Liwon Maulana

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.”

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.

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.

y NEIL GENZLINGER

Frontline

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Mr. King sang for the Drifters and found success as a solo performer with hits like “Spanish Harlem.”

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Pfaff was an international affairs columnist and author who found Washington’s intervention in world affairs often misguided.