PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

saco-indonesia.com, Petir adalah peristiwa alam yang sering terjadi di bumi, terjadinya seringkali mengikuti peristiwa hujan baik air atau es, peristiwa ini telah dimulai dengan munculnya awan hitam dan lidah api listrik bercahaya terang yang bergerak merambat terus memanjang kearah bumi bagaikan sulur akar dan kemudian diikuti oleh suara menggelegar dan efeknya juga akan sangat fatal bila mengenai mahluk hidup.
PROSES TERJADINYA PETIR

Terdapat 2 teori yang mendasari proses terjadinya petir :

    Proses Ionisasi
    Proses Gesekan antar awan

a. Proses Ionisasi
Petir telah terjadi diakibatkan oleh terkumpulnya ion bebas bermuatan negatif dan positif di awan, ion listrik dihasilkan oleh gesekan antar awan dan kejadian Ionisasi ini telah disebabkan oleh perubahan bentuk air mulai dari cair menjadi gas atau sebaliknya, bahkan perubahan padat (es) telah menjadi cair dan pada tahap pembekuan ini mencapai suhu dibawah 0 derajat yaitu antara -10 sampai -14 derajad celcius
Ion bebas telah menempati permukaan awan dan bergerak mengikuti angin berhembus, bila awan-awan telah terkumpul di suatu tempat maka awan bermuatan akan memiliki beda potensial cukup besar untuk dapat menyambar permukaan bumi maka inilah yang disebut petir.

b. Gesekan antar awan
Pada awalnya awan akan bergerak mengikuti arah angin, selama proses bergeraknya awan ini maka akan saling bergesekan satu dengan yang lainnya , dari proses ini terlahir electron-electron bebas bermutan negatif yang telah memenuhi permukaan awan. proses ini bisa digambarkan secara sederhana pada sebuah penggaris plastik yang digosokkan pada rambut maka penggaris ini akan mampu menarik potongan kertas.
Pada suatu saat awan ini akan terkumpul di sebuah kawasan, saat inilah petir dimungkinkan telah terjadi karena electron-elektron bebas ini telah saling menguatkan satu dengan lainnya. Sehingga telah memiliki cukup beda potensial untuk dapat menyambar permukaan bumi. kedua teori ini mungkin juga masuk akal meski kejadian sebenarnya masih merupakan sebuah misteri.
PERLINDUNGAN TERHADAP BAHAYA PETIR

Manusia selalu mencoba untuk dapat menjinakkan keganasan alam,atau setidaknya menghidarinya, salah satunya adalah Sambaran Petir. dan metode yang pernah dikembangkan:
1. Penangkal Petir Kovensional / Faraday / Frangklin
Kedua ilmuan diatas Faraday dan Frangklin telah mengetengahkan system yang hampir sama , yakni system penyalur arus listrik dengan menghubungkan antara bagian atas bangunan dan grounding. Sedangkan system perlindungan yang telah dihasilkan ujung penerima / Splitzer adalah sama pada rentang 30 ~ 45 ‘ . Perbedaannya adalah system yang telah dikembangkan oleh Faraday bahwa Kabel penghantar terletak pada sisi luar bangunan dengan pertimbangan bahwa kabel penghantar juga berfungsi sebagai penerima sambaran, dan bentuknya Berupa sangkar elektris atau biasa disebut sangkar Faraday.
2. Penangkal Petir Radio Aktif
Penelitian terus terus berkembang dan dihasilkan kesimpulan bahwa petir telah terjadi karena ada muatan listrik di awan dihasilkan oleh proses ionisasi , maka penggagalan proses ionisasi di lakukan dengan cara memakai Zat beradiasi misl. Radiun 226 dan Ameresium 241 , karena 2 bahan ini juga mampu menghamburkan ion radiasinya yang bisa menetralkan muatan listrik awan.
Sedang manfaat lain adalah hamburan ion radiasi akan dapat menambah muatan pada Ujung Finial / Splitzer dan bila mana awan yang bermuatan besar tidak mampu di netralkan oleh zat radiasi kemudian menyambar, maka akan condong mengenai unit radiasi ini .
Keberadaan penangkal petir jenis ini juga sudah dilarang pemakaiannya , berdasarkan kesepakatan internasional dengan pertimbangan mengurangi pemakaian zat beradiasi dimasyarakat yang disinyalir mempunyai efek negatif pada lingkungan hidup dan kesehatan.
3. Penangkal Petir Elektrostatic
Prinsip kerja penangkal petir Elektrostatik adalah dengan mengadopsi sebagian system penangkal petir Radioaktif , yakni dengan menambah muatan pada ujung finial / splitzer agar petir selalu memilih ujung ini untuk disambar .
Perbedaan dari sisten Radioaktif dan Elektrostatik ada pada energi yang dipakai. Untuk Penangkal Petir Radioaktif muatan listrik dihasilkan dari proses hamburan zat beradiasi sedangkan pada penangkal petir elektrostatik energi listrik dihasilkan dari Listrik Awan yang menginduksi permukaan bumi.
CARA KERJA PENANGKAL PETIR NEOFLASH

Mekanisme Kerja
Ketika awan bermuatan listrik telah melintas diatas sebuah bangunan yang terpasang penangkal petir neoFlash, maka elektroda penerima pada bagian samping NeoFLASH ini dapat mengumpulkan dan menyimpan energi listrik awan pada unit kapasitornya . Setelah energi ini cukup besar maka dilepas dan diperbesar beda potensialnya pada bagian Ion Generator.
Pelepasan muatan listrik pada unit Ion Generator ini di picu oleh sambaran, yakni ketika lidah api menyambar permukaan bumi maka semua muatan listrik di bagian ion generator dilepaskan keudara melalui Central Pick Up agar menimbulkan lidah api penuntun keatas ( Streamer leader ) untuk dapat menyambut sambaran petir yang terjadi kemudian menuntunya masuk kedalam satu titik sambar yang terdapat unit Neoflash ini.
Kerja Simultan
Pada unit Penangkal Petir NEOFLASH secara simultan bekerja bergantian dari masing-masing unit penerima induksi , jumlahnya tergantung dari tipe dan modelnya. Bekerjanya secara bergantian dimana bila salah satu bagian unit melepaskan muatan ke udara / streamer maka ada bagian lain yang dalam proses pengisian muatan awan.
Tentu akurasi dan kemampuan Penangkal Petir NeoFlash masih tergantung dari 2 hal pendukung instalasi, yaitu:
1. Kabel Penghantar harus minimal 50 mm
2. Grounding maksimal 5 Ohm
Bila 2 syarat pendukung ini juga sudah terpenuhi maka kemampuan penangkal petir neoflash akan maksimal.
ISTILAH PENANGKAL PETIR & ANTI PETIR

Penangkal Petir dan Anti Petir mungkin itu adalah istilah yang sudah salah kaprah dalam bahasa kita, kesan yang ditimbulkan dua istilah ini adalah aman 100 % terhadap petir, akan tetapi kejadiannya tidak demikian.
Dalam penanganan bahaya petir memang ada beberapa faktor yang sangat mempengaruhi, bilamana kita ingin solusi/penyelesaian total akan bahaya petir, kita harus melihat faktor faktor tersebut.
Sambaran Tidak langsung pada bangunan yakni ketika sambaran mengenai obyek diluar areal perlindungan dari penangkal petir yang terpasang , kemudian arus petir ini akan merambat melalui instalasi listrik , kabel data atau apa saja mengarah ke bangunan. Akhirnya hentakan tegangan dan arus merusak unit peralatan listrik / elektronik kita.
Masalah ini juga semakin runyam disaat ini karena banyak peralatan elektronik dengan menggunakan tegangan kerja kecil , DC , dan sensitif, Khususnya di urusan data transfer.
Maka pada dasarnya pengaman sambaran petir langsung / Eksternal penangkal petir bukan membuat posisi kita aman 100 % terhadap petir, akan tetapi membuat posisi bangunan kita terhindar dari kerusakan fatal akibat sambaran Langsung, serta meminimalisir efek kerusakan pada peralatan elektronik bila ada sambaran menyambar bangunan kita.
mungkin Penyalur Arus Petir adalah istilah tepatnya.
Masih ada kemungkinan lain yakni sambaran petir tidak langsung , yakni sambaran yang pada dasarnya tidak mengenai lokasi bangunan tetapi mengenai jauh diluar lokasi tetapi lonjakan listriknya merambat masuk ke jaringan instalasi listrik di bangunan dan merusak peralatan elektronik, Untuk penanganan sambaran petir tidak langsung dapat digunakan Arrester yakni perangkat yang bisa memotong dan membelokkan lonjakan arus / tegangan petir ke dalam grounding .

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

saco-indonesia.com, Carlo Ancelotti juga menyebut bahwa kartu merah yang telah diterima oleh Cristiano Ronaldo di laga melawan Athletic Bilbao dini hari tadi terlalu berlebihan.

Real Madrid gagal dalam memanfaatkan kekalahan Barcelona untuk naik ke peringkat kedua klasemen usai mereka hanya bisa bermain imbang melawan Bilbao dengan skor 1-1. Laga tersebut juga telah diwarnai oleh kartu merah yang telah diterima oleh Ronaldo di menit ke-75.

"Sulit untuk dapat memberikan penilaian, saya rasa kartu merah yang telah diterima oleh Cristiano Ronaldo agak sedikit berlebihan," tutur sang pelatih menurut laporan AS.

Ancelotti pun kemudian sedikit berkomentar tentang permainan yang telah ditunjukkan oleh Madrid di San Mames.

"Di babak pertama, Athletic banyak menekan kami dan sedikit kesulitan, meski mereka tidak kebobolan lebih dari satu gol. Di babak kedua permainan berjalan dengan sedikit berbeda. Kami juga lebih bisa mengendalikan permainan," pungkasnya. "

Real Madrid kini tetap ada di peringkat ketiga klasemen sementara dengan nilai poin yang sama dengan Barcelona. Sementara itu tampuk kepemimpinan ganti dikuasai oleh Atletico Madrid, yang menang atas Real Sociedad dengan skor 4-0.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Jika ketika melihat gambar di atas Anda berpikir bahwa anjing-anjing kecil itu tengah dikejar dan menjadi santapan singa besar tersebut, Anda salah sangka. Hewan-hewan tersebut tengah bermain bersama karena mereka bersahabat.

Bonedigger adalah singa berusia lima tahun dan memiliki berat sekitar 226 kilogram. Untuk ukuran raja hutan yang ditakuti, Bonedigger tampaknya memiliki teman yang tak biasa, yaitu Milo, seekor anjing jenis Dachshund berusia tujuh tahun yang memiliki berat badan lima kilogram.

Anda mungkin tak percaya, namun keduanya bersahabat sangat dekat. Setelah makan malam, Milo bahkan menjilati sisa makanan dari gigi Bonedigger. Tak hanya Milo, Bonedigger juga berteman dengan beberapa anjing dachschund lain yaitu Bullet dan Angel.

Milo dan Bonedigger telah menjadi sahabat yang tak terpisahkan selama lima tahun. Keduanya tinggal bersama di Garold Wayne Interactive Zoological Park di Wynnewood, Oklahoma. Joe Schreibvogel, ahli hewan yang sering mengunggah videonya di YouTube, adalah orang yang pertama kali memperkenalkan anjing Dachshund miliknya pada Bonedigger ketika singa itu masih berusia empat minggu.

"Para anjing ini menganggap Bonedigger sebagai anjing besar dan mereka mencintainya. Aku juga berpikir bahwa anjing-anjing itu tahu Bonedigger tak seperti singa normal lainnya," ungkap Schreibvogel, seperti dilansir oleh Huffington Post (28/05).

Bonedigger memiliki kelainan tulang yang disebut metabolic bone disease. Karena itulah tampaknya dia dan anjing-anjing lainnya bisa sangat akrab satu sama lain. Milo bahkan mencoba meniru raungan Bonedigger ketika dia 'berbicara' dengan singa lain di taman tersebut. Sumber : www.merdeka.com

saco-indonesia.com,

Fungsi Dan Manfaat Fuel Filter

Agar dapat  menghasilkan tenaga yang prima, mobil juga perlu supply bahan bakar yang sangat baik dan ok tentunya. Baik dari segi kuantitas maupun kualitasnya. Hal yang harus kita perhatikan bahwa tidak semua bahan bakar itu bersih dari kotoran. Kotoran dan air pada bahan bakar akan bisa merusak komponen-komponen sistem bahan bakar, korosi misalnya. Untuk itulah pada sistem bahan bakar telah terdapat komponen yang bernama `saringan bahan bakar` (fuel filter).

Fuel filter merupakan komponen yang harus selalu dibersihkan secara berkala. Biasanya setiap kelipatan 5000 km. Dan, lakukan penggantian fuel filter setiap kelipatan 10.000 km.Penggantian perlu dilakukan rutin mengingat bahan dasar fuel filter adalah kertas. Di kertas inilah juga terdapat pori-pori untuk dapat menyaring bahan bakar. Lama kelamaan pori-pori tersebut kian rapat sehingga bahan bakar sama sekali sulit untuk menembusnya. Dan solusinya harus diganti dengan yang baru.

Bila tidak, mungkin Anda akan terjebak pada kasus yang beberapa kali telah dialami oleh para pengendara mobil. Sepele, tapi bila lengah bisa dapat mengganggu perjalanan Anda. Yaitu, mesin seperti kurang tenaga, terasa lemah meskipun pedal gas diinjak sedalam-dalamnya. Bila gejala awal ini terus dibiarkan tanpa penanganan segera, kejadian berikutnya bisa lebih parah lagi: mesin tersendat-sendat, dan parahnya hal ini akan dapat membuat mobil anda menjadi mogok.

hal ini telah disebabkan, karena fuel filter yang kotor sehingga dapat menghambat aliran bahan bakar ke mesin. Bahkan mungkin bahan bakar tidak bisa mengalir karena pori-pori di fuel filter sudah tertutup sama sekali. Dan ini juga akan sangat bebahaya sekali.

Memeriksa dan mengganti fuel filter akan jauh lebih ringan ketimbang memperbaiki kerusakan yang ditimbulkan bila fuel filter tidak bekerja dengan baik. Sebagai saringan, peran fuel filter bagi kinerja mesin sangat besar. Komponen ini dapat menghentikan kotoran dan air yang terkandung dalam bahan bakar.

beberapa hal yang akan muncul apa bila terjadi kesusakan pada fuel filter yaotu:

1. Dapat menyebabkan pembakaran jadi tidak sempurna. Karena telah mengandung banyak air misalnya. Efek berikutnya adalah tenaga kurang maksimal sementara konsumsi bahan bakar menjadi boros. Juga, emisi gas buangnya akan tidak ramah lingkungan.

2. Akibat dari adanya kandungan air atau kotoran yang ada di bahan bakar juga bisa mengakibatkan kerusakan (keausan) pada komponen-komponen yang dilaluinya. Misalnya, karat pada dinding-dinding cylinder block. Bila keausan ini terjadi, akan memicu kebocoran pada ruang bakar.

3. Dan yang terakhir, yaitu tenaga mesin terasa lemah. Bisa juga membuat oli cepat kotor. Dan bila dibiarkan terus berlanjut, pengaruhnya akan terasa ke mesin. Yang paling sering adalah suara mesin terdengar kasar. Dan lama kelamaan akan membuat mobil menjadi mogok.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

saco-indonesia.com, Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK) akan memanggil Sekretaris Jenderal Mahkamah Konstitusi (MK), Janedjri Mahilli Gaffar, terkait penyidikan dalam kasus suap sengketa pemilihan kepala daerah.

Dia juga akan diperiksa sebagai saksi ihwal dugaan suap terhadap Akil Mochtar semasa menjabat Ketua MK.

"Yang bersangkutan akan diperiksa sebagai saksi," kata Kepala Bagian Pemberitaan dan Informasi KPK, Priharsa Nugraha, saat dikonfirmasi, Selasa (24/12/2013).

Selain Janedjri, KPK juga akan memeriksa dua pejabat lelang pada Balai Lelang JBA, Ende Mirawan dan Ganda Purba, dan Jacob Anthonius Margarheta selaku manajer Balai Lelang Seras. Mereka juga akan diperiksa terkait dalam kasus tindak pidana pencucian uang Akil Mochtar.

Akil telah ditangkap tangan KPK setelah menerima uang Dollar Singapura senilai Rp3 miliar dari anggota DPR, Chairunnisa dan Cornelis Nalau, seorang pengusaha, di kompleks Widya Chandra, Jakarta Selatan, 2 Oktober 2013 lalu .

Diduga uang itu telah diberi terkait sengketa Pemilihan Kepala Daerah Gunung Mas, Kalimantan Tengah. Dalam operasi itu, KPK juga turut menangkap Bupati Gunung Mas, Kalimantan Tengah, Hambith Bintih, dan stafnya, Dhani, di Hotel Redtop, Jakarta Pusat.

Setelah itu, Akil juga disangka telah menerima suap sebesar Rp1 miliar dari Tubagus Chairi Wardhana dan pengacara, Susi Tur Andayani, terkait sengketa Pilkada Lebak, Banten.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Mr. Haroche was a founder of Liberty Travel, which grew from a two-man operation to the largest leisure travel operation in the United States.

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.

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.

WASHINGTON — The former deputy director of the C.I.A. asserts in a forthcoming book that Republicans, in their eagerness to politicize the killing of the American ambassador to Libya, repeatedly distorted the agency’s analysis of events. But he also argues that the C.I.A. should get out of the business of providing “talking points” for administration officials in national security events that quickly become partisan, as happened after the Benghazi attack in 2012.

The official, Michael J. Morell, dismisses the allegation that the United States military and C.I.A. officers “were ordered to stand down and not come to the rescue of their comrades,” and he says there is “no evidence” to support the charge that “there was a conspiracy between C.I.A. and the White House to spin the Benghazi story in a way that would protect the political interests of the president and Secretary Clinton,” referring to the secretary of state at the time, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But he also concludes that the White House itself embellished some of the talking points provided by the Central Intelligence Agency and had blocked him from sending an internal study of agency conclusions to Congress.

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“I finally did so without asking,” just before leaving government, he writes, and after the White House released internal emails to a committee investigating the State Department’s handling of the issue.

A lengthy congressional investigation remains underway, one that many Republicans hope to use against Mrs. Clinton in the 2016 election cycle.

In parts of the book, “The Great War of Our Time” (Twelve), Mr. Morell praises his C.I.A. colleagues for many successes in stopping terrorist attacks, but he is surprisingly critical of other C.I.A. failings — and those of the National Security Agency.

Soon after Mr. Morell retired in 2013 after 33 years in the agency, President Obama appointed him to a commission reviewing the actions of the National Security Agency after the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, a former intelligence contractor who released classified documents about the government’s eavesdropping abilities. Mr. Morell writes that he was surprised by what he found.

“You would have thought that of all the government entities on the planet, the one least vulnerable to such grand theft would have been the N.S.A.,” he writes. “But it turned out that the N.S.A. had left itself vulnerable.”

He concludes that most Wall Street firms had better cybersecurity than the N.S.A. had when Mr. Snowden swept information from its systems in 2013. While he said he found himself “chagrined by how well the N.S.A. was doing” compared with the C.I.A. in stepping up its collection of data on intelligence targets, he also sensed that the N.S.A., which specializes in electronic spying, was operating without considering the implications of its methods.

“The N.S.A. had largely been collecting information because it could, not necessarily in all cases because it should,” he says.

The book is to be released next week.

Mr. Morell was a career analyst who rose through the ranks of the agency, and he ended up in the No. 2 post. He served as President George W. Bush’s personal intelligence briefer in the first months of his presidency — in those days, he could often be spotted at the Starbucks in Waco, Tex., catching up on his reading — and was with him in the schoolhouse in Florida on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the Bush presidency changed in an instant.

Mr. Morell twice took over as acting C.I.A. director, first when Leon E. Panetta was appointed secretary of defense and then when retired Gen. David H. Petraeus resigned over an extramarital affair with his biographer, a relationship that included his handing her classified notes of his time as America’s best-known military commander.

Mr. Morell says he first learned of the affair from Mr. Petraeus only the night before he resigned, and just as the Benghazi events were turning into a political firestorm. While praising Mr. Petraeus, who had told his deputy “I am very lucky” to run the C.I.A., Mr. Morell writes that “the organization did not feel the same way about him.” The former general “created the impression through the tone of his voice and his body language that he did not want people to disagree with him (which was not true in my own interaction with him),” he says.

But it is his account of the Benghazi attacks — and how the C.I.A. was drawn into the debate over whether the Obama White House deliberately distorted its account of the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens — that is bound to attract attention, at least partly because of its relevance to the coming presidential election. The initial assessments that the C.I.A. gave to the White House said demonstrations had preceded the attack. By the time analysts reversed their opinion, Susan E. Rice, now the national security adviser, had made a series of statements on Sunday talk shows describing the initial assessment. The controversy and other comments Ms. Rice made derailed Mr. Obama’s plan to appoint her as secretary of state.

The experience prompted Mr. Morell to write that the C.I.A. should stay out of the business of preparing talking points — especially on issues that are being seized upon for “political purposes.” He is critical of the State Department for not beefing up security in Libya for its diplomats, as the C.I.A., he said, did for its employees.

But he concludes that the assault in which the ambassador was killed took place “with little or no advance planning” and “was not well organized.” He says the attackers “did not appear to be looking for Americans to harm. They appeared intent on looting and conducting some vandalism,” setting fires that killed Mr. Stevens and a security official, Sean Smith.

Mr. Morell paints a picture of an agency that was struggling, largely unsuccessfully, to understand dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa when the Arab Spring broke out in late 2011 in Tunisia. The agency’s analysts failed to see the forces of revolution coming — and then failed again, he writes, when they told Mr. Obama that the uprisings would undercut Al Qaeda by showing there was a democratic pathway to change.

“There is no good explanation for our not being able to see the pressures growing to dangerous levels across the region,” he writes. The agency had again relied too heavily “on a handful of strong leaders in the countries of concern to help us understand what was going on in the Arab street,” he says, and those leaders themselves were clueless.

Moreover, an agency that has always overvalued secretly gathered intelligence and undervalued “open source” material “was not doing enough to mine the wealth of information available through social media,” he writes. “We thought and told policy makers that this outburst of popular revolt would damage Al Qaeda by undermining the group’s narrative,” he writes.

Instead, weak governments in Egypt, and the absence of governance from Libya to Yemen, were “a boon to Islamic extremists across both the Middle East and North Africa.”

Mr. Morell is gentle about most of the politicians he dealt with — he expresses admiration for both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, though he accuses former Vice President Dick Cheney of deliberately implying a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq that the C.I.A. had concluded probably did not exist. But when it comes to the events leading up to the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq, he is critical of his own agency.

Mr. Morell concludes that the Bush White House did not have to twist intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged effort to rekindle the country’s work on weapons of mass destruction.

“The view that hard-liners in the Bush administration forced the intelligence community into its position on W.M.D. is just flat wrong,” he writes. “No one pushed. The analysts were already there and they had been there for years, long before Bush came to office.”

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.

A 214-pound Queens housewife struggled with a lifelong addiction to food until she shed 72 pounds and became the public face of the worldwide weight-control empire Weight Watchers.

Ms. Pryor, who served more than two decades in the State Department, was the author of well-regarded biographies of the founder of the American Red Cross and the Confederate commander.

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

Mr. Fox, known for his well-honed countrified voice, wrote about things dear to South Carolina and won over Yankee critics.

Over the last five years or so, it seemed there was little that Dean G. Skelos, the majority leader of the New York Senate, would not do for his son.

He pressed a powerful real estate executive to provide commissions to his son, a 32-year-old title insurance salesman, according to a federal criminal complaint. He helped get him a job at an environmental company and employed his influence to help the company get government work. He used his office to push natural gas drilling regulations that would have increased his son’s commissions.

He even tried to direct part of a $5.4 billion state budget windfall to fund government contracts that the company was seeking. And when the company was close to securing a storm-water contract from Nassau County, the senator, through an intermediary, pressured the company to pay his son more — or risk having the senator subvert the bid.

The criminal complaint, unsealed on Monday, lays out corruption charges against Senator Skelos and his son, Adam B. Skelos, the latest scandal to seize Albany, and potentially alter its power structure.

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The repeated and diverse efforts by Senator Skelos, a Long Island Republican, to use what prosecutors said was his political influence to find work, or at least income, for his son could send both men to federal prison. If they are convicted of all six charges against them, they face up to 20 years in prison for each of four of the six counts and up to 10 years for the remaining two.

Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, of Long Island, who serves as chairman of the Republican conference, emerged from a closed-door meeting Monday night to say that conference members agreed that Mr. Skelos should be benefited the “presumption of innocence,” and would stay in his leadership role.

“The leader has indicated he would like to remain as leader,” said Mr. LaValle, “and he has the support of the conference.” The case against Mr. Skelos and his son grew out of a broader inquiry into political corruption by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, that has already changed the face of the state capital. It is based in part, according to the six-count complaint, on conversations secretly recorded by one of two cooperating witnesses, and wiretaps on the cellphones of the senator and his son. Those recordings revealed that both men were concerned about electronic surveillance, and illustrated the son’s unsuccessful efforts to thwart it.

Adam Skelos took to using a “burner” phone, the complaint says, and told his father he wanted them to speak through a FaceTime video call in an apparent effort to avoid detection. They also used coded language at times.

At one point, Adam Skelos was recorded telling a Senate staff member of his frustration in not being able to speak openly to his father on the phone, noting that he could not “just send smoke signals or a little pigeon” carrying a message.

The 43-page complaint, sworn out by Paul M. Takla, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlines a five-year scheme to “monetize” the senator’s official position; it also lays bare the extent to which a father sought to use his position to help his son.

The charges accuse the two men of extorting payments through a real estate developer, Glenwood Management, based on Long Island, and the environmental company, AbTech Industries, in Scottsdale, Ariz., with the expectation that the money paid to Adam Skelos — nearly $220,000 in total — would influence his father’s actions.

Glenwood, one of the state’s most prolific campaign donors, had ties to AbTech through investments in the environmental firm’s parent company by Glenwood’s founding family and a senior executive.

The accusations in the complaint portray Senator Skelos as a man who, when it came to his son, was not shy about twisting arms, even in situations that might give other arm-twisters pause.

Seeking to help his son, Senator Skelos turned to the executive at Glenwood, which develops rental apartments in New York City and has much at stake when it comes to real estate legislation in Albany. The senator urged him to direct business to his son, who sold title insurance.

After much prodding, the executive, Charles C. Dorego, engineered a $20,000 payment to Adam Skelos from a title insurance company even though he did no work for the money. But far more lucrative was a consultant position that Mr. Dorego arranged for Adam Skelos at AbTech, which seeks government contracts to treat storm water. (Mr. Dorego is not identified by name in the complaint, but referred to only as CW-1, for Cooperating Witness 1.)

Senator Skelos appeared to take an active interest in his son’s new line of work. Adam Skelos sent him several drafts of his consulting agreement with AbTech, the complaint says, as well as the final deal that was struck.

“Mazel tov,” his father replied.

Senator Skelos sent relevant news articles to his son, including one about a sewage leak near Albany. When AbTech wanted to seek government contracts after Hurricane Sandy, the senator got on a conference call with his son and an AbTech executive, Bjornulf White, and offered advice. (Like Mr. Dorego, Mr. White is not named in the complaint, but referred to as CW-2.)

The assistance paid off: With the senator’s help, AbTech secured a contract worth up to $12 million from Nassau County, a big break for a struggling small business.

But the money was slow to materialize. The senator expressed impatience with county officials.

Adam Skelos, in a phone call with Mr. White in late December, suggested that his father would seek to punish the county. “I tell you this, the state is not going to do a [expletive] thing for the county,” he said.

Three days later, Senator Skelos pressed his case with the Nassau County executive, Edward P. Mangano, a fellow Republican. “Somebody feels like they’re just getting jerked around the last two years,” the senator said, referring to his son in what the complaint described as “coded language.”

The next day, the senator pursued the matter, as he and Mr. Mangano attended a wake for a slain New York City police officer. Senator Skelos then reassured his son, who called him while he was still at the wake. “All claims that are in will be taken care of,” the senator said.

AbTech’s fortunes appeared to weigh on his son. At one point in January, Adam Skelos told his father that if the company did not succeed, he would “lose the ability to pay for things.”

Making matters worse, in recent months, Senator Skelos and his son appeared to grow wary about who was watching them. In addition to making calls on the burner phone, Adam Skelos said he used the FaceTime video calling “because that doesn’t show up on the phone bill,” as he told Mr. White.

In late February, Adam Skelos arranged a pair of meetings between Mr. White and state senators; AbTech needed to win state legislation that would allow its contract to move beyond its initial stages. But Senator Skelos deemed the plan too risky and caused one of the meetings to be canceled.

In another recorded call, Adam Skelos, promising to be “very, very vague” on the phone, urged his father to allow the meeting. The senator offered a warning. “Right now we are in dangerous times, Adam,” he told him.

A month later, in another phone call that was recorded by the authorities, Adam Skelos complained that his father could not give him “real advice” about AbTech while the two men were speaking over the telephone.

“You can’t talk normally,” he told his father, “because it’s like [expletive] Preet Bharara is listening to every [expletive] phone call. It’s just [expletive] frustrating.”

“It is,” his father agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 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.