Informasi Biaya Paket Travel Umroh 2015 Satutours ... Jadi apabila anda sedang mencari paket umroh murah desember 2015, anda bisa memilih promo umroh Paket Umroh Satu tours
saco-indonesia.com, Kanker otak merupakan salah satu penyakit yang dapat mematikan dan berbahaya. Kanker otak juga menyerang otak pada bagian luarnya yakni tiga bagian lapis selaput otak dan bagian tulang tengkorak. Pada dasarnya kanker yang telah menyerang bagian tersebut umumnya kanker/tumor jinak. Namun bagian yang telah diserang adalah otak, maka ini juga sangat berbahaya. Karena dapat merusak dan mengganggu fungsi struktur susunan saraf pusat yang telah terletak didalam rongga tengkorak. Dengan berkembangnya tumor tersebut maka jaringan otak akan semakin tertekan. Dan perlu diketahui volume rongga tengkorak juga sangat terbatas sehingga dapat menyebabkan rasa sakit dikepala atau pusing. Jika itu memang dirasakan, maka kemungkinan merupakan gejala awal dari kanker otak.
Berikut ini beberapa gejala dari kanker otak yang perlu kita ketahui:
Sakit kepala yang disertai dengan mual dan sering muntah.
Kemampuan penglihatan semakin menurun.
Perubahan perilaku atau penurunan kesadaran
Adanya gangguan pada saat berbicara
Adanya gangguan pada pendengaran
Gangguan keseimbangan tubuh
Gangguan pada saraf
Anggota gerak melemah atau kejang
Timbulnya ubun-ubun yang menonjal dan besar pada bayi
Editor : dian sukmawati
KANKER OTAK
Dari Negara Rusia serahkan 37 tank amfibi BMP-3F pada Marinir TNI AL
Saco-Indonesia.com - Dari Pemerintah Rusia menyerahkan 37 tank amfibi BMP-3F untuk digunakan pasukan Marinir TNI AL. Total 114 juta USD digelontorkan Kementerian Pertahanan untuk tank canggih dari Rusia ini.
Menteri Pertahanan Purnomo Yusgiantoro menerima kedatangan persenjataan baru di Pusat Latihan Tempur Karang Tekok, Kabupaten Situbondo, Jatim, Senin (27/1).
Penyerahan Tank Amfibi BMP-3F itu dihadiri oleh Panglima TNI Jenderal Moeldoko, Kasal Laksamana Marsetio, Komandan Korps Marinir Mayjen (Mar) A Faridz Washington dan pejabat Kedubes Rusia.
Kepala Dinas Penerangan TNI AL Laksma Untung Suropati menjelaskan Tank Amfibi BMP-3F diproduksi oleh produsen senjata Kurganmashzavod sebagai realisasi pelaksanaan kontrak jual beli antara Kemhan RI dengan Rusia.
Pada 11 Desember 2011 juga telah diserahkan tank serupa sebanyak 17 unit.
Dalam penandatanganan kontrak Mei 2012 lalu, disebutkan beberapa keunggulan tank BNP-3F terbaru ini.
Antara lain komputer balistik yang telah di upgrade dengan sistem digital yang lebih akurat. Selain itu, lubang penembak untuk pasukan sudah disesuaikan dengan senapan serbu SS-1 produksi PT Pindad. Sebelumnya, lubang penembak dikhususkan untuk senjata jenis AK-47.
Ada juga penyempurnaan pada perlindungan terhadap perang nuklir biologi dan kimia. Selain itu sistem pemanas ruangan juga sudah disesuaikan dengan kondisi iklim Indonesia.
Namun untuk senjata penghancur, kendaraan lapis baja ini tidak jauh dari generasi sebelumnya. Meriam kanon kaliber 100mm dengan kecepatan tembak berkisar 250 meter per detik, dan meriam kanon kaliber 30 mm.
Selain itu, Amphibi BMP-3F seri 2 juga dilengkapi 3 pucuk mitraliur PKTM kaliber 7,62. Secara keseluruhan, Tank Amphibi ini berkapasitas 3 kru dan 7 personel pasukan bersenjata lengkap.
Sumber : Merdeka.com
Editor : Maulana Lee
Dari Negara Rusia serahkan 37 tank amfibi BMP-3F pada Marinir TNI AL
LOWONGAN KERJA JANUARI TERBARU DI MULTI DISPLAY DESIGN COMPUTER | BANDUNG
Portal Lowongan Kerja Indonesia. Update Informasi Lowongan Kerja Terbaru Januari 2014 di MULTI DISPLAY DESIGN COMPUTER sebagai Teksnisi Komputer. Perusahaan tersebut sedang membutuhkan tenaga kerja profesional untuk menempati kursi kekosongan. Bagi anda yang berminat untuk menempati kekosongan tersebut, silahkan baca persyaratan pendaftaran dan simak artikel selengkapnya di bawah ini :
Profil Perusahaan : Kami adalah sebuah Toko yang menjual berbagai jenis komputer yang sedang berkembang di Bandung, saat ini membutuhkan kandidat yang handal.
Tag Lowongan Kerja Terbaru Januari 2014 : Bekasi, Bogor, Karawang, Malang, Banda Aceh, Bandar Lampung, Banyuasin, Batam, Baturaja, Bengkalis, Bengkulu, Blambangan Umpu, Bukittinggi, Gedong Tataan, Gunung Sitoli, Gunung Sugih, Gunung Tua, Indralaya, Jambi, Kalianda, Karang Baru, Karang Tinggi, Kayu Agung, Kisaran, Koba, Kota Agung, Kota Bumi, Kota Pinang, Kuala Tungkal, Kutacane, Lahat, Lhokseumawe, Limapuluh, Liwa, Manggar, Manna, Martapura, Medan, Menggala, Metro, Pagaralam, Pandan, Panguruan, Pariaman, Payakumbuh, Pekanbaru, Pematang Siantar, Prabumulih, Pringsewu, Sabang, Salak, Sawahlunto, Selat Panjang, Solok, Stabat, Subulussalam, Sukadana, Tebing Tinggi, Ambarawa, Anyer, Bandung, Bangil, Banjar, Banjarnegara, Bangkalan, Bantul, Banyumas, Banyuwangi, Batang, Batu, Bekasi, Blitar, Blora, Bogor, Bojonegoro, Bondowoso, Boyolali, Bumiayu, Brebes, Caruban, Cianjur, Ciamis, Cibinong, Cikampek, Cikarang, Cilacap, Cilegon, Cirebon, Demak, Depok, Garut, Gresik, Indramayu, Jakarta, Jember, Jepara, Jombang, Kajen, Karanganyar, Kebumen, Kediri, Kendal, Kepanjen, Klaten, Kraksaan, Kudus, Kuningan, Lamongan, Lumajang, Madiun, Magelang, Magetan, Majalengka, Malang, Mojokerto, Mojosari, Mungkid, Ngamprah, Nganjuk, Ngawi, Pacitan, Pamekasan, Pandeglang, Pare, Pati, Pasuruan, Pekalongan, Pelabuhan Ratu, Pemalang, Ponorogo, Probolinggo, Purbalingga, Purwakarta, Purwodadi, Purwokerto, Purworejo, Rangkasbitung, Rembang, Salatiga, Sampang, Semarang, Serang, Sidayu, Sidoarjo, Singaparna, Situbondo, Slawi, Sleman, Soreang, Sragen, Subang, Sukabumi, Sukoharjo, Sumber, Sumedang, Sumenep, Surabaya, Surakarta, Tasikmalaya, Tangerang, Tangerang Selatan, Tegal, Temanggung, Tigaraksa, Trenggalek, Tuban, Tulungagung, Ungaran, Wates, Wlingi, Wonogiri, Wonosari, Wonosobo, Yogyakarta.
Demikianlah Informasi mengenai Lowongan Kerja Januari Terbaru 2014 diBandung / D3 / Jawa Barat / Lowongan Kerja / SMA. Semoga artikel Lowongan Kerja Januari Terbaru di MULTI DISPLAY DESIGN COMPUTER | Bandung dapat bermanfaat untuk menggapai karir anda, dan dapat mengurangi pengangguran yang ada di Indonesia. Terima Kasih.
Baca Portal Lowongan Kerja Indonesia Terbaru Januari Lainnya :
LOWONGAN KERJA JANUARI TERBARU DI MULTI DISPLAY DESIGN COMPUTER | BANDUNG
PENGECATAN BADAN KAPAL
Pengecatan badan kapal juga dapat dilakukan dengan kuas cat, roller maupun unit semprot cat sesuai dengan tingkat daerah kesulitan pengecatan. Jenis cat yang digunakan adalah : cat dasar, cat AC ( anti corrosive/anti karat ) dan cat AF ( anti folling/anti binatang atau tumbuhan laut ). Pengecatan dilakukan setelah badan kapal selesai diblasting. Sebelum dicat, badan kapal harus benar-benar bersih dari debu atau sejenisnya. Karena apabila masih ada debu yang menempel kemudian dicat akan dapat menimbulkan kondensasi yang lama kelamaan akan menyebabkan munculnya blistering ( lubang-lubang kecil karena catnya terkelupas ). Badan kapal dibagi menjadi 3 bagian, yaitu bagian bottom ( bagian yang tercelup air), bottop, dan bagian top side. Urutan pengerjaan coating pada masing – masing bagian berbeda-beda.
Untuk bagian bottom urutannya, yaitu :
- Pembersihan binatang laut yang menempel pada badan kapal dengan cara di scrub.
- Setelah itu badan kapal dicuci menggunakan air tawar dengan tujuan untuk dapat mengurangi kadar garam.
- Kemudian dilakukan sand blasting. Sand blasting ini dibedakan telah menjadi 2 yaitu full blast dan sweep spot. Full blast semua pelat di blasting sampai cat pada pelat terkelupas, sedangkan sweep spot di blasting hanya pada bagian yang berkarat dan bagian yang tidak berkarat cukup di sweep saja. Untuk proses sweep spot lapisan AC (Anti Corrosion ) pada cat sebelumnya harus terkelupas agar cat primer bisa menempel pada pelat.
- Setelah dilakukan blasting langkah selanjutnya adalah pengecetan pada badan kapal dengan cat primer atau disebut lapisan AC ( Anti corrosion ) lapis pertama dengan ketebalan kurang lebih 150 mikron.
- Setelah itu dicat dengan menggunakan sealer atau disebut lapisan AC lapis ke dua dengan ketebalan kurang lebih 100 mikron.
- Kemudian di cat dengan AF ( Anti Foulling ) lapis pertama
- Langkah terakhir adalah pemberian AF ( Anti Foulling ) lapis kedua. Pemberian Anti folling ini bertujuan untuk mengurangi binatang laut yang menempel pada badan kapal.
Untuk pengecatan pada bagian boottop, langkah-langkahnya sama dengan pengecatan pada bagian bottom. Dalam pengecatan, daerah ini juga merupakan daerah yang kritis karena pada daerah ini kadang tercelup air ( saat muatan penuh ) dan kadang tidak tercelup air ( saat muatan kosong ), jadi pemberian AFnya tidak konvensional melainkan menggunakan self polishing. Sedangkan pada bagian top side langkah-langkahnya juga sama, namun pada daerah ini tidak perlu di cat AF karena pada bagian ini tidak tercelup air.
Hal – hal yang perlu diperhatikan dalam coating :
- Campuran cat.
Campuran cat menggunakan 2 komponen yaitu base (cat itu sendiri) dan pengeras, namun ada juga yang menggunakan satu komponen ( rubber )
- Interval antara langkah satu dengan langkah berikutnya antara 4 jam – 3 hari.
- Kelembaban.
Batas maksimal kelembaban kurang lebih 85%
- Dry – wet
- Suhu pelat
- Suhu udara
- Dew point ( selisih antara suhu pelat dengan suhu udara ) maksimal 3o C
- Tekanan ideal yang digunakan kurang lebih 7,5 kg/cm3
- Tebal pengecatan minimal 400 mikron (dengan alat ukur elcometer)
PENGECATAN BADAN KAPAL
RESIDIVIS PENCURIAN DITEMBAK DI TAMBORA
saco-indonesia.com, Seolah tidak bosan untuk merasakan dinginnya sel tahanan, AM alias Asep yang berusia (31) tahun telah kembali ditangkap oleh polisi terkait dalam kasus pencurian dengan kekerasan. Pria yang sehari-hari berprofesi sebagai buruh ini diketahui telah ditahan sebanyak tiga kali.
"Tersangka ini sudah tiga kali ditangkap dengan kasus yang sama. Korbannya biasanya perempuan," kata Kapolsektro Tambora Kompol Dedy Tabrani, di Mapolsek, Selasa (24/12).
Dedy juga menjelaskan, tersangka yang disekujur badannya telah dipenuhi oleh tato ini telah ditangkap saat melakukan aksinya pada Kamis (19/12) sore sekitar pukul 18.45 WIB di Jalan KHM Mansyur, Tanah Sereal, Tambora, Jakarta Barat. Tersangka juga merupakan spesial perampas kalung emas.
"Dari pengakuan tersangka, mereka telah mengincar kalung emas dengan alasan emas gampang untuk dijual," jelas Dedy.
Tersangka yang ditangkap di wilayah Tanah Sereal, Tambora, Jakarta Barat pada Selasa (24/12) siang terpaksa harus dilumpuhkan kakinya. "Tersangka kita lumpuhkan kaki kanannya saat berusaha untuk melarikan diri," ujar Dedy.
Selain menangkap Asep, polisi juga sudah menangkap IW alias Buluk yang juga merupakan rekan tersangka. Keduanya telah dijerat dengan Pasal 365 KUHP dengan ancaman maksimal tujuh tahun penjara.
Editor : Dian Sukmawati
RESIDIVIS PENCURIAN DITEMBAK DI TAMBORA
Jim Fanning, 87, Dies; Lifted Baseball in Canada With Expos
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.
Jim Fanning, 87, Dies; Lifted Baseball in Canada With Expos
Ex-C.I.A. Official Rebuts Republican Claims on Benghazi Attack in ‘The Great War of Our Time’
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.
Photo
Michael J. MorellCredit Mark Wilson/Getty Images
“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.
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“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.
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.”
Ex-C.I.A. Official Rebuts Republican Claims on Benghazi Attack in ‘The Great War of Our Time’
Jayne Meadows, Actress and Steve Allen’s Wife and Co-Star, Dies at 95
Ms. Meadows was the older sister of Audrey Meadows, who played Alice Kramden on “The Honeymooners.”
Jayne Meadows, Actress and Steve Allen’s Wife and Co-Star, Dies at 95
Ellen Turner Dies at 87; Opened Kitchen to Feed the Needy of Knoxville
Ms. Turner and her twin sister founded the Love Kitchen in 1986 in a church basement in Knoxville, Tenn., and it continues to provide clothing and meals.
Ellen Turner Dies at 87; Opened Kitchen to Feed the Needy of Knoxville
Calvin Peete, 71, a Racial Pioneer on the PGA Tour, Is Dead
With 12 tournament victories in his career, Mr. Peete was the most successful black professional golfer before Tiger Woods.
Calvin Peete, 71, a Racial Pioneer on the PGA Tour, Is Dead
Police Rethink Long Tradition on Using Force
WASHINGTON — During a training course on defending against knife attacks, a young Salt Lake City police officer asked a question: “How close can somebody get to me before I’m justified in using deadly force?”
Dennis Tueller, the instructor in that class more than three decades ago, decided to find out. In the fall of 1982, he performed a rudimentary series of tests and concluded that an armed attacker who bolted toward an officer could clear 21 feet in the time it took most officers to draw, aim and fire their weapon.
The next spring, Mr. Tueller published his findings in SWAT magazine and transformed police training in the United States. The “21-foot rule” became dogma. It has been taught in police academies around the country, accepted by courts and cited by officers to justify countless shootings, including recent episodes involving a homeless woodcarver in Seattle and a schizophrenic woman in San Francisco.
Now, amid the largest national debate over policing since the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, a small but vocal set of law enforcement officials are calling for a rethinking of the 21-foot rule and other axioms that have emphasized how to use force, not how to avoid it. Several big-city police departments are already re-examining when officers should chase people or draw their guns and when they should back away, wait or try to defuse the situation
Police Rethink Long Tradition on Using Force
Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Biographer of Clara Barton and Robert E. Lee, Dies at 64
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.
Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Biographer of Clara Barton and Robert E. Lee, Dies at 64
Baltimore Residents Away From Turmoil Consider Their Role
BALTIMORE — In the afternoons, the streets of Locust Point are clean and nearly silent. In front of the rowhouses, potted plants rest next to steps of brick or concrete. There is a shopping center nearby with restaurants, and a grocery store filled with fresh foods.
And the National Guard and the police are largely absent. So, too, residents say, are worries about what happened a few miles away on April 27 when, in a space of hours, parts of this city became riot zones.
“They’re not our reality,” Ashley Fowler, 30, said on Monday at the restaurant where she works. “They’re not what we’re living right now. We live in, not to be racist, white America.”
As Baltimore considers its way forward after the violent unrest brought by the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of injuries he suffered while in police custody, residents in its predominantly white neighborhoods acknowledge that they are sometimes struggling to understand what beyond Mr. Gray’s death spurred the turmoil here. For many, the poverty and troubled schools of gritty West Baltimore are distant troubles, glimpsed only when they pass through the area on their way somewhere else.
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Officers blocked traffic at Pennsylvania and West North Avenues after reports that a gun was discharged in the area.Credit Drew Angerer for The New York Times
And so neighborhoods of Baltimore are facing altogether different reckonings after Mr. Gray’s death. In mostly black communities like Sandtown-Winchester, where some of the most destructive rioting played out last week, residents are hoping businesses will reopen and that the police will change their strategies. But in mostly white areas like Canton and Locust Point, some residents wonder what role, if any, they should play in reimagining stretches of Baltimore where they do not live.
“Most of the people are kind of at a loss as to what they’re supposed to do,” said Dr. Richard Lamb, a dentist who has practiced in the same Locust Point office for nearly 39 years. “I listen to the news reports. I listen to the clergymen. I listen to the facts of the rampant unemployment and the lack of opportunities in the area. Listen, I pay my taxes. Exactly what can I do?”
And in Canton, where the restaurants have clever names like Nacho Mama’s and Holy Crepe Bakery and Café, Sara Bahr said solutions seemed out of reach for a proudly liberal city.
“I can only imagine how frustrated they must be,” said Ms. Bahr, 36, a nurse who was out with her 3-year-old daughter, Sally. “I just wish I knew how to solve poverty. I don’t know what to do to make it better.”
The day of unrest and the overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations that followed led to hundreds of arrests, often for violations of the curfew imposed on the city for five consecutive nights while National Guard soldiers patrolled the streets. Although there were isolated instances of trouble in Canton, the neighborhood association said on its website, many parts of southeast Baltimore were physically untouched by the tumult.
Tensions in the city bubbled anew on Monday after reports that the police had wounded a black man in Northwest Baltimore. The authorities denied those reports and sent officers to talk with the crowds that gathered while other officers clutching shields blocked traffic at Pennsylvania and West North Avenues.
Lt. Col. Melvin Russell, a community police officer, said officers had stopped a man suspected of carrying a handgun and that “one of those rounds was spent.”
Colonel Russell said officers had not opened fire, “so we couldn’t have shot him.”
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Lambi Vasilakopoulos, right, who runs a casual restaurant in Canton, said he was incensed by last week's looting and predicted tensions would worsen.Credit Drew Angerer for The New York Times
The colonel said the man had not been injured but was taken to a hospital as a precaution. Nearby, many people stood in disbelief, despite the efforts by the authorities to quash reports they described as “unfounded.”
Monday’s episode was a brief moment in a larger drama that has yielded anger and confusion. Although many people said they were familiar with accounts of the police harassing or intimidating residents, many in Canton and Locust Point said they had never experienced it themselves. When they watched the unrest, which many protesters said was fueled by feelings that they lived only on Baltimore’s margins, even those like Ms. Bahr who were pained by what they saw said they could scarcely comprehend the emotions associated with it.
But others, like Lambi Vasilakopoulos, who runs a casual restaurant in Canton, said they were incensed by what unfolded last week.
“What happened wasn’t called for. Protests are one thing; looting is another thing,” he said, adding, “We’re very frustrated because we’re the ones who are going to pay for this.”
There were pockets of optimism, though, that Baltimore would enter a period of reconciliation.
“I’m just hoping for peace,” Natalie Boies, 53, said in front of the Locust Point home where she has lived for 50 years. “Learn to love each other; be patient with each other; find justice; and care.”
A skeptical Mr. Vasilakopoulos predicted tensions would worsen.
“It cannot be fixed,” he said. “It’s going to get worse. Why? Because people don’t obey the laws. They don’t want to obey them.”
But there were few fears that the violence that plagued West Baltimore last week would play out on these relaxed streets. The authorities, Ms. Fowler said, would make sure of that.
“They kept us safe here,” she said. “I didn’t feel uncomfortable when I was in my house three blocks away from here. I knew I was going to be O.K. because I knew they weren’t going to let anyone come and loot our properties or our businesses or burn our cars.”
Baltimore Residents Away From Turmoil Consider Their Role
Taiwan party leader affirms eventual reunion with China
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.
Taiwan party leader affirms eventual reunion with China
Jozef Paczynski, Inmate Barber to Auschwitz Commandant, Dies at 95
Mr. Paczynski was one of the concentration camp’s longest surviving inmates and served as the personal barber to its Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss.
Jozef Paczynski, Inmate Barber to Auschwitz Commandant, Dies at 95
Ruth Rendell, Novelist Who Thrilled and Educated, Dies at 85
Ms. Rendell was a prolific writer of intricately plotted mystery novels that combined psychological insight, social conscience and teeth-chattering terror.
Ruth Rendell, Novelist Who Thrilled and Educated, Dies at 85
Obama Finds a Bolder Voice on Race Issues
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.
At an event announcing the creation of a nonprofit focusing on young minority men, President Obama talked about the underlying reasons for recent protests in Baltimore and other cities.
By Associated Press on Publish Date May 4, 2015. Photo by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times.
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.”
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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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President Obama on Monday with Darinel Montero, a student at Bronx International High School who introduced him before remarks at Lehman College in the Bronx.Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
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.”
Obama Finds a Bolder Voice on Race Issues
From T Magazine: Street Lit’s Power Couple
THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.
In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.
One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.
But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.
JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”
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Three of the nearly 50 works of urban fiction published by the Colemans over the last decade, often featuring drug deals, violence, sex and a brash kind of feminism.Credit Marko Metzinger
In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”
That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.
But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.
“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”
THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.
In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.
“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”
They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.
They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”
Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”
The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.
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The roots of street lit, found in the midcentury detective novels of Chester Himes and the ‘60s and ‘70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines.Credit Marko Metzinger
Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”
The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.
Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.
The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”
Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”
Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.
For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”
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The Colemans in their new four-bedroom house in the northern suburbs of Detroit.Credit Courtesy of Ashley and JaQuavis Coleman
Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.
The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.
But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:
WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS
“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”
One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”
From T Magazine: Street Lit’s Power Couple
Hard but Hopeful Home to ‘Lot of Freddies’
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Children playing last week in Sandtown-Winchester, the Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray was raised. One young resident called it “a tough community.”
The neighborhood where Freddie Gray came of age has survived harrowing rates of unemployment, poor health, violent crime and incarceration.
Hard but Hopeful Home to ‘Lot of Freddies’
Sid Tepper Dies at 96; Delivered ‘Red Roses for a Blue Lady’ and Other Songs
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.
Sid Tepper Dies at 96; Delivered ‘Red Roses for a Blue Lady’ and Other Songs