PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

MANILA, Saco- Indonesia.com — Di babak kedua Kejuaraan Catur Kontinental Asia Piala Manny Pacquiao 2013, Minggu (19/5/2013) di Pasay City, Manila, Filipina, tiga pecatur remaja putri Indonesia berjaya. WFM Dewi Ardiani Anastasia Citra (19), Nadya Anggraeni Mukmin (17), dan WFM Dita Karenza (13) masing-masing mendapat satu poin setelah mengalahkan lawan-lawannya.

Citra yang memiliki rating 2155 itu mengalahkan Sharmin Shirin Sultana (2005) dari Banglades. Lawan Citra memang memiliki rating lebih rendah dan belum memiliki gelar. Citra memang lebih diunggulkan di babak kedua ini. Yang juga menggembirakan, Nadya (1854) berhasil mengalahkan WIM Bernadette Galas dari Filipina yang memiliki rating lebih tinggi, 2045.

Adapun Dita (1821) menaklukkan Jedara Docena (2019) dari Filipina. Citra, Nadya, dan Dita kalah di babak pertama, Sabtu lalu. Ada enam pecatur putri yang diberangkatkan ke kejuaraan ini. Tiga yang lain adalah WIM Medina Warda Aulia, WIM Chelsie Monica Sihite, dan Yemi Jelsen. Sayang, ketiganya kalah di babak kedua ini.

Medina dan Yemi juga kalah di babak pertama, tapi Chelsie menang. Itu berarti, empat dari enam pecatur putri mengantongi satu poin dalam dua babak ini. Adapun dua pecatur lain masih nol. Masih ada tujuh babak yang harus dimainkan. Kesempatan masih terbuka luas untuk menambah poin.

Di bagian putra, lima pecatur menuai hasil remis. Satu pecatur menang, yakni Hamdani Rudin. Adapun pecatur yang kalah adalah Yoseph Theolifus Taher. Berikut daftarnya: 1. Yoseph Theolifus Taher (0) kalah dari GM John Paul Gomez (2511) dari Filipina; 2. IM Farid Firman Syah (2369) remis versus GM Krishnan Sasikiran (2669) dari India; 3. GM Susanto Megaranto (2531) remis melawan Bai Jinshi (2369) dari China; 4. Masruri Rahman (2165) menahan imbang IM Kirill Kuderinov (2442) dari Kazakhstan; 5. Mohamad Ervan (2162) remis melawan FM Gombosuren Munkhgal (2427) dari Mongolia; 6. CM Muhammad Luthfi Ali (2246) remis melawan FM Tuan Minh Tran (2399) dari Vietnam; 7. FM Hamdani Rudin (2341)mengalahkan Adelardo Pagente (1906) dari Filipina.


Editor :Liwon Maulana(galipat)

Sumber:Kompas.com

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

Saco-Indonesia.com - Jika sedang pegal dan stres karena banyak pikiran, pijat biasanya dijadikan alternatif utama untuk membuat tubuh rileks. Namun ada banyak cara mudah lain yang bisa dilakukan jika beberapa dari Anda ingin rileks tanpa bantuan pijatan. Simak selengkapnya seperti yang dilansir dari Huffington Post berikut ini.

Mendengarkan musik yang menenangkanSebuah penelitian dari tahun 2011 menyebutkan kalau sebuah grup band bernama Marconi Union memiliki lagu yang paling menenangkan berjudul Weightless. Jadi jika ingin rileks, coba dengarkan lagu tersebut.

Memandang ikan dalam akuariumAkuarium bukan sekadar rumah bagi para ikan hias. Sebab menurut peneliti, ikan-ikan dalam akuarium memiliki efek terapi jika dipandang membuat tubuh terasa lebih rileks. Jika tidak punya akuarium di rumah, Anda bisa memandang akuarium virtual di internet karena efeknya tetap sama.

Minum tehCara mudah sekaligus lezat untuk membuat tubuh lebih rileks adalah dengan minum teh. Beberapa teh herbal memang memiliki khasiat kesehatan seperti menurunkan tekanan darah dan menghilangkan stres.

Menarik napas dalam-dalamCemas atau stres sebenarnya bisa diatasi dengan cara menarik napas dalam-dalam. Sebab melalui cara bernapas seperti itu, tubuh mendapat asupan oksigen lebih banyak, darah mengalir lebih lancar, dan pikiran menjadi lebih rileks.

Membayangkan diri terapungTidak perlu pergi berlibur jika ingin rileks, Anda cukup membayangkannya. Misalnya berimajinasi Anda sedang berlibur di pantai dan terapung di lautan. Membayangkan hal yang menyenangkan bisa membuat tubuh lebih rileks.

Itulah beberapa cara paling mudah membuat tubuh rileks. Selamat mencoba!

Editor : Liwon Maulana

Saco-Indonesia.com - Tren operasi plastik memang sudah ada sejak dulu dan bertahan hingga sekarang. Bedanya, bagian yang menjadi target operasi kini lebih bervariasi.

"Kalau dulu operasi hidung, kantung mata, payudara, dagu banyak diminati, saat ini banyak juga yang minta dioperasi kelompak mata hingga alis," papar Guru Besar bidang bedah plastik rekonstruksi dan estetik dari FK UNAIR/RSUD Dr Soetomo, David Perdanakusuma saat ditemui Jumat (24/1/2014) di Surabaya.

Namun David mengakui, operasi hidung dan kantung mata tetap paling diminati. Operasi hidung, lanjut dia, kebanyakan diminati oleh orang-orang yang usianya relatif muda, sementara kantung mata umumnya diminati oleh orang-orang dengan usia relatif tua.

"Hidung orang Indonesia memang kebanyakan tidak terlalu mancung, tetapi justru itu khasnya. Jadi untuk diagnosis pasien operasi hidung, saya jadi menulis "hidung Indonesia" daripada "hidung kurang mancung"," jelas David, sedikit berseloroh.

Sementara itu, operasi kantung mata banyak diminati oleh orang-orang usia relatif tua karena biasanya problem kantung mata mulai timbul di atas usia 45 tahun. Kantung mata mereka biasanya mengendur dan operasi dapat mengencangkannya kembali.

Hak pasien

Menurut David, operasi bedah plastik, khususnya estetik adalah hak dari setiap pasien. Untuk terlihat lebih baik dari segi penampilan diputuskan sendiri oleh pasien, meskipun sebelumnya dokter juga tetap melakukan wawancara tentang alasannya.

"Jika pasien sudah dewasa dan sehat sebenarnya operasi bedah plastik estetik adalah hak pasien," katanya.

David menjelaskan, bedah plastik estetik adalah untuk membuat yang sudah normal menjadi lebih baik. Sedangkan ada pula bedah plastik rekonstruksi yaitu untuk membuat yang cacat mendekati normal.

Tahallul atau bercukur adalah salah satu ritual haji yang sangat penting dan tidak boleh ditinggalkan, terutama dalam Madzhab Syafi’i. Meski bercukur terkesan remeh, namun jika ditinggalkan akan membuat ibadah haji tidak sah. Jika demikian, itu artinya diwajibkan untuk mengulang kembali ibadah tersebut pada tahun berikutnya.

Mengapa hal yang begitu remeh dapat membatalkan sesuatu yang jauh lebih besar? Hal itu mengisyaratkan bahwa kelebihan yang dimiliki oleh manusia dengan otak dan daya ciptanya, semua itu berada dalam kuasa Allah SWT.

Dengan diwajibkannya bercukur dalam rangkaian ibadah haji, Allah sejatinya ingin mengajarkan bahwa manusia tetaplah manusia. Ia harus sadar bahwa selamanya dirinya adalah hamba Allah. Manusia harus bersikap khusyuk, tawadhu’ (rendah hati), dan khudhu’. Tiga sikap itu akan mengantarkan mereka menjadi makhluk yang dicintai oleh Allah SWT.

Rambut adalah simbol dari mahkota seorang insan. Rambut adalah perhiasan seseorang dan menjadi lambang kegagahan dan ketampanan. Bertahallul yaitu mencukur rambut adalah simbol dari meletakkan mahkota seseorang. Artinya, orang tersebut menanggalkan kesombongan yang menjadi seseorang tinggi hati dari orang lain.

Semoga dengan rontoknya ribuan rambut di kepala para hujjaj ketika ia bertahallul, maka rontok juga segala ribuan keangkuhan dan kesombongannya yang akan menjadikannya haji yang tawadlu’ dan rendah diri.

Sumber : Republika.co.id

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With 12 tournament victories in his career, Mr. Peete was the most successful black professional golfer before Tiger Woods.

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.

BEIJING (AP) — The head of Taiwan's Nationalists reaffirmed the party's support for eventual unification with the mainland when he met Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping as part of continuing rapprochement between the former bitter enemies.

Nationalist Party Chairman Eric Chu, a likely presidential candidate next year, also affirmed Taiwan's desire to join the proposed Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank during the meeting in Beijing. China claims Taiwan as its own territory and doesn't want the island to join using a name that might imply it is an independent country.

Chu's comments during his meeting with Xi were carried live on Hong Kong-based broadcaster Phoenix Television.

The Nationalists were driven to Taiwan by Mao Zedong's Communists during the Chinese civil war in 1949, leading to decades of hostility between the sides. Chu, who took over as party leader in January, is the third Nationalist chairman to visit the mainland and the first since 2009.

Relations between the communist-ruled mainland and the self-governing democratic island of Taiwan began to warm in the 1990s, partly out of their common opposition to Taiwan's formal independence from China, a position advocated by the island's Democratic Progressive Party.

Despite increasingly close economic ties, the prospect of political unification has grown increasingly unpopular on Taiwan, especially with younger voters. Opposition to the Nationalists' pro-China policies was seen as a driver behind heavy local electoral defeats for the party last year that led to Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou resigning as party chairman.

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

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

Hired in 1968, a year before their first season, Mr. Fanning spent 25 years with the team, managing them to their only playoff appearance in Canada.

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.

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.”

Mr. Mankiewicz, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for “I Want to Live!,” also wrote episodes of television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”

HOBART, Tasmania — Few places seem out of reach for China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who has traveled from European capitals to obscure Pacific and Caribbean islands in pursuit of his nation’s strategic interests.

So perhaps it was not surprising when he turned up last fall in this city on the edge of the Southern Ocean to put down a long-distance marker in another faraway region, Antarctica, 2,000 miles south of this Australian port.

Standing on the deck of an icebreaker that ferries Chinese scientists from this last stop before the frozen continent, Mr. Xi pledged that China would continue to expand in one of the few places on earth that remain unexploited by humans.

He signed a five-year accord with the Australian government that allows Chinese vessels and, in the future, aircraft to resupply for fuel and food before heading south. That will help secure easier access to a region that is believed to have vast oil and mineral resources; huge quantities of high-protein sea life; and for times of possible future dire need, fresh water contained in icebergs.

It was not until 1985, about seven decades after Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen raced to the South Pole, that a team representing Beijing hoisted the Chinese flag over the nation’s first Antarctic research base, the Great Wall Station on King George Island.

But now China seems determined to catch up. As it has bolstered spending on Antarctic research, and as the early explorers, especially the United States and Australia, confront stagnant budgets, there is growing concern about its intentions.

China’s operations on the continent — it opened its fourth research station last year, chose a site for a fifth, and is investing in a second icebreaker and new ice-capable planes and helicopters — are already the fastest growing of the 52 signatories to the Antarctic Treaty. That gentlemen’s agreement reached in 1959 bans military activity on the continent and aims to preserve it as one of the world’s last wildernesses; a related pact prohibits mining.

But Mr. Xi’s visit was another sign that China is positioning itself to take advantage of the continent’s resource potential when the treaty expires in 2048 — or in the event that it is ripped up before, Chinese and Australian experts say.

“So far, our research is natural-science based, but we know there is more and more concern about resource security,” said Yang Huigen, director general of the Polar Research Institute of China, who accompanied Mr. Xi last November on his visit to Hobart and stood with him on the icebreaker, Xue Long, or Snow Dragon.

With that in mind, the polar institute recently opened a new division devoted to the study of resources, law, geopolitics and governance in Antarctica and the Arctic, Mr. Yang said.

Australia, a strategic ally of the United States that has strong economic relations with China, is watching China’s buildup in the Antarctic with a mix of gratitude — China’s presence offers support for Australia’s Antarctic science program, which is short of cash — and wariness.

“We should have no illusions about the deeper agenda — one that has not even been agreed to by Chinese scientists but is driven by Xi, and most likely his successors,” said Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former senior official in the Australian Department of Defense.

“This is part of a broader pattern of a mercantilist approach all around the world,” Mr. Jennings added. “A big driver of Chinese policy is to secure long-term energy supply and food supply.”

That approach was evident last month when a large Chinese agriculture enterprise announced an expansion of its fishing operations around Antarctica to catch more krill — small, protein-rich crustaceans that are abundant in Antarctic waters.

“The Antarctic is a treasure house for all human beings, and China should go there and share,” Liu Shenli, the chairman of the China National Agricultural Development Group, told China Daily, a state-owned newspaper. China would aim to fish up to two million tons of krill a year, he said, a substantial increase from what it currently harvests.

Because sovereignty over Antarctica is unclear, nations have sought to strengthen their claims over the ice-covered land by building research bases and naming geographic features. China’s fifth station will put it within reach of the six American facilities, and ahead of Australia’s three.

Chinese mappers have also given Chinese names to more than 300 sites, compared with the thousands of locations on the continent with English names.

In the unspoken competition for Antarctica’s future, scientific achievement can also translate into influence. Chinese scientists are driving to be the first to drill and recover an ice core containing tiny air bubbles that provide a record of climate change stretching as far back as 1.5 million years. It is an expensive and delicate effort at which others, including the European Union and Australia, have failed.

In a breakthrough a decade ago, European scientists extracted an ice core nearly two miles long that revealed 800,000 years of climate history. But finding an ice core going back further would allow scientists to examine a change in the earth’s climate cycles believed to have occurred 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago.

China is betting it has found the best location to drill, at an area called Dome A, or Dome Argus, the highest point on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Though it is considered one of the coldest places on the planet, with temperatures of 130 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, a Chinese expedition explored the area in 2005 and established a research station in 2009.

“The international community has drilled in lots of places, but no luck so far,” said Xiao Cunde, a member of the first party to reach the site and the deputy director of the Institute for Climate Change at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. “We think at Dome A we will have a straight shot at the one-million-year ice core.”

Mr. Xiao said China had already begun drilling and hoped to find what scientists are looking for in four to five years.

To support its Antarctic aspirations, China is building a sophisticated $300 million icebreaker that is expected to be ready in a few years, said Xia Limin, deputy director of the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration in Beijing. It has also bought a high-tech fixed-wing aircraft, outfitted in the United States, for taking sensitive scientific soundings from the ice.

China has chosen the site for its fifth research station at Inexpressible Island, named by a group of British explorers who were stranded at the desolate site in 1912 and survived the winter by excavating a small ice cave.

Mr. Xia said the inhospitable spot was ideal because China did not have a presence in that part of Antarctica, and because the rocky site did not have much snow, making it relatively cheap to build there.

Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of a soon-to-be-released book, “China as a Polar Great Power,” said Chinese scientists also believed they had a good chance of finding mineral and energy resources near the site.

“China is playing a long game in Antarctica and keeping other states guessing about its true intentions and interests are part of its poker hand,” she said. But she noted that China’s interest in finding minerals was presented “loud and clear to domestic audiences” as the main reason it was investing in Antarctica.

Because commercial drilling is banned, estimates of energy and mineral resources in Antarctica rely on remote sensing data and comparisons with similar geological environments elsewhere, said Millard F. Coffin, executive director of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Hobart.

But the difficulty of extraction in such severe conditions and uncertainty about future commodity prices make it unlikely that China or any country would defy the ban on mining anytime soon.

Tourism, however, is already booming. Travelers from China are still a relatively small contingent in the Antarctic compared with the more than 13,000 Americans who visited in 2013, and as yet there are no licensed Chinese tour operators.

But that is about to change, said Anthony Bergin, deputy director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “I understand very soon there will be Chinese tourists on Chinese vessels with all-Chinese crew in the Antarctic,” he said.

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.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

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