Ibadah Umroh & Paket Umroh 2015-2016
Izin resmi umrah a.n. sendiri (bukan konsorsium). Hati-hati tertipu travel umrah murahan! ... Travel Umrah Murah Tour Indonesia . Ibadah Umroh & Paket Umroh 2015-2016
Izin resmi umrah a.n. sendiri (bukan konsorsium). Hati-hati tertipu travel umrah murahan! ... Travel Umrah Murah Tour Indonesia . Ibadah Umroh & Paket Umroh 2015-2016
Labbaika Allaahumma labbaik.Labbaika Iaa syariika laka labbaik.Innal hamda wanni'mata laka wal mulk.Laa syariika lak. ("Ya Allah, aku datang karena panggilan-Mu.Tiada sekutu bagi-Mu.Segala nimat dan puji adalah kepunyaan dan kekuasaan-Mu.Tiada sekutu bagi-Mu")
Berduyun-duyun jutaan kaum muslimin dari berbagai penjuru dunia, datang menuju Baitullah untuk memenuhi panggilan-Nya, menjalankan ibadah haji yang merupakan rukun Islam kelima.
Suara tangisan, derai air mata, rintihan doa, desahan zikir dan istigfar bergema di setiap penjuru Masjidil Haram. Inilah ungkapan bahagia kaum muslimin yang mendapat undangan untuk menjadi tamu Allah.
Alangkah bahagianya mereka yang mampu memenuhi panggilan-Nya. Mereka mampu melaksanakan thawaf, shalat dan berdoa di depan ka'bah. Bahkan tak sedikit diantara mereka yang mampu mencium Hajar Aswad di tengah desakan jutaan umat manusia.
Haji, bukanlah ibadah fisik, bukan pula ibadah harta. Namun, haji merupakan ibadah multi dimensi, dimana terdapat dimensi lain yang mesti ada dalam pelaksanaan ibadah haji.
Dalam pelaksanaan ibadah haji, ada empat dimensi yang dibutuhkan untuk mendukung kekhusyuan dan kelancaran ibadah haji tersebut. Adapun keempat dimensi tersebut adalah :
Pertama, Quwwah Jasadiyah (Kekuatan Fisik).
Perjalanan ibadah haji yang kita lakukan adalah perjalanan fisik, misalnya Thawaf (mengelilingi ka'bah) sebanyak tujuh kali putaran, sai (perjalanan antara Shafa dan Marwa), jumrah, dll. Itu semua tentunya membutuhkan kekuatan fisik. Ketika fisik kita lemah dalam melakukan Thawaf, maka kekhusyuan pun akan terganggu. Oleh karena itu, kita dituntut untuk mempersiapkan fisik kita sebelum berangkat ke baitullah. Lakukan olah raga yang cukup dan berikanlah nutrisi (gizi) yang seimbang (pada tubuh kita), agar fisik kita tetap sehat dan kuat dalam melaksanakan ibadah haji.
Kedua, Quwwah Maaliyah (Kekuatan Harta).
Mengeluarkan biaya untuk keperluan haji akan dinilai Allah SWT setara dengan mengeluarkan biaya untuk Perang Sabil, satu dirham akan menjadi tujuh ratus kali lipat (HR. Ibnu Abi Syaibah, Ahmad, Thabrani dan Baihaqi). Dalam melaksanakan ibadah haji, yang dibutuhkan bukan hanya semangat yang tinggi atau fisik yang kuat, namun yang tak kalah pentingnya adalah memiliki harta yang cukup. Cukup untuk bekal selama di tanah suci maupun bekal untuk keluarga yang ditinggalkan. Ketika harta kita cukup untuk berangkat haji, begitu kita berniat, segera siapkan diri kita untuk menuju rumah Allah. Rasulullah saw pernah memberikan nasehat, "Bersegeralah melaksanakan haji, karena sesungguhnya seorang di antara kamu tidak mengetahui apa yang akan merintanginya di masa yang akan datang." (H.R. Ahmad).
Ketiga, Quwwah Ilmiyah (Kekuatan Ilmu).
Dalam pelaksanaan ibadah haji, tentunya harus dilakukan sesuai dengan ilmunya (sunnahnya). Untuk itu, sebelum kita berangkat haji, kita harus menguasai terlebih dahulu materi tentang manasik haji, mulai dari thawaf, sai, jumrah dan lain-lain. Mengapa haji yang kita lakukan harus benar? Karena derajat haji mabrur akan mudah di raih, jika dalam pelaksanaan ibadah haji dilakukan dengan benar (sesuai dengan contoh Rasulullah saw).
Keempat, Quwwah Ruhiyah (Kekuatan Ruhani).
Haji adalah ibadah yang membutuhkan kesadaran yang tinggi agar dapat merasakan betapa indah dan nikmatnya menjadi tamu Allah. Luruskan niat dan tanamkan keikhlasan dalam diri kita, bahwa haji yang kita laksanakan hanya karena Allah semata, bukan ingin mendapatkan titel "Haji" sepulangnya dari makkah atau ingin mendapatkan kedudukan terhormat di masyarakat karena telah berhasil berangkat ke tanah suci. Oleh karena itu, mulai saat ini, tinggalkan segala perbuatan yang dilarang oleh-Nya dan sempurnakanlah segala perintah-Nya, niscaya kita akan mendapat kedudukan tertinggi di surga, sebagaimana sabda Rasulullah saw,
"Orang-orang yang sedang berhaji atau berumroh adalah tamu-tamu Allah dan para peziarah rumah-Nya, jika mereka meminta sesuatu dari-Nya niscaya Ia akan memberinya. Dan jika mereka memohon ampunan dari-Nya niscaya Ia akan mengampuninya. Dan jika mereka berdoa kepada-Nya niscaya Ia akan mengabulkannya. Dan jika mereka bersyafaat (memintakan sesuatu untuk orang lain) kepada-Nya niscaya Ia akan menerima syafaatnya" (H.R. Ibnu Majah).
Itulah empat dimensi yang harus kita siapkan untuk melaksanakan ibadah haji. Tanpa persiapan tersebut, kekhusyuan dan kelancaran pun akan terganggu . Untuk itu, mulai saat ini persiapkanlah diri kita untuk menjadi tamu-tamu Allah dengan memiliki empat komponen diatas, agar kita mampu meraih kekhuyuan yang optimal.
Wallaahu a'lam.
Sumber : http://www.percikaniman.org
Baca Juga Artikel Lainnya : PENGERTIAN IBADAH HAJI DAN UMRAH
IBADAH HAJI ADALAH IBADAH YANG MULTI DIMENSIsaco-indonesia.com,
Memasang Batu hias Pada Dinding Bangunan
Bangunan jaman sekarang sudah sangat berbeda dengan bangunan jaman dahulu, berbeda dalam artian mengelami perubahan yang sangat baik, meningkat dengan pesat, bahkan relief, ukiran batu yang dahulu telah menjadi suatu alat untuk proses ritual keagamaan kini telah menjadi macam hiasan untuk dapat mempercantik bangunan, baik itu apartemen, perumahan, hotel, bahkan rumah biasa. Beragam batu hias yang digunakan untuk dapat menghias bangunanpun sudah tersedia di pasar. dan sudah bukan hanya kalangan atas yang menggunakan batu hias untuk dapat mempercantik Dinding bangunan.
Sangat disayangkan apabila suatu hal yang sudah umum namun kita belum dapat mengetahui segala tentangnya, mulai dari jenis batu hias yang bagus digunakan untuk dinding, paduan warna yang cocok hingga cara pemasangan batu hias tersebut terhadap dinding bangunan. Untuk proses pemasangan sendiri sebenarnya dapat dilakukan oleh siapapun, sehingga tak perlu menyewa tukang untuk dapat memabantu memasangnya.
Berikut ini beberapa langkah untuk dapat memasang batu hias ke dinding bangunan :
langkah 1
Awali pemasangan harus dengan menetukan pola pemasangan.
Pemasangan rata atau tidak rata (maju-mundur) tergantung selera.
Jika ingin memasang dengan pola permukaan tidak rata, tentukan pola
dan tinggi satu batu dengan batu lainnya.
langkah 2
Pastikan ukuran batu harus sesuai dengan ukuran dinding yang akan ditempeli. Jika
dibutuhkan ukuran khusus, potong batu alam dengan menggunakan alat
pemotong batu atau keramik.
langkah 3
Untuk dapat menempelkan batu pada dinding, tuangkan semen ke bagian
belakang batu. Tuang hati-hati agar cairan semen tidak mengotori
bagian depan. Jika ada sisa air atau adukan semen menempel pada
bagian depan, segera bersihkan.
langkah 4
Berbeda dengan memasang lantai keramik, pemasangan batu alam
tanpa nat akan lebih menarik. Jika menghendaki efek batu
menyambung, hindari mengisikan adukan semen di antara celah batu.
langkah 5
Setelah seluruh batu terpasang, tunggu satu-dua hari sampai semen
kering dan batu menempel erat. Setelahnya, bersihkan dinding dengan
menyemprotkan air pada dinding batu hingga debu dan kotoran hilang.
Jika dibutukan, gunakan sikat kawat untuk dapat merontokkan kotoran yang
membandel.
Editor : Dian Sukmawati
saco-indonesia.com, Setelah polisi berhasil melakukan analisa dan evaluasi (Anev) tahun 2013, dengan nilai angka kriminalitas turun 12 persen namun masih ada kasus perampokan.
Kali ini kantor pajak di Jl Jemursari Utara gang V nomor 11 Surabaya sekitar pukul 15.15 WIB telah didatangi oleh orang yang tak dikenal. Uang yang digondol oleh enam orang perampok itu merupakan insentif untuk pegawai setempat. Uang itu baru diambil dari Pemkot Surabaya pada Senin siang. Dan sesampai di kantor, uang langsung dirampas oleh pelaku perampokan bersenjata api dan senjata tajam tersebut.
Untungnya, uang Rp 788.522.000 itu telah dipisah menjadi dua. Satu tas berisi Rp 380 juta, yang raib digasak perampok. Dan satu tas lain berisi uang Rp 408,522 juta masih aman karena berada di dalam mobil.
”Uang tersebut juga merupakan uang untuk insentif pegawai. Yakni insentif tiga bulanan,” jawab Isbaniah saat menjalani pemeriksaan di Polsek Wonocolo.
Isbaniah dan beberapa saksi masih menjalani pemeriksaan di Polsek Wonocolo. Sebelumnya, petugas dari unit Identifikasi Polrestabes Surabaya sudah melakukan olah TKP beberapa saat setelah perampokan itu terjadi.
”Kita masih juga masih harus melakukan penyelidikan atas perkara ini. Selain untuk melakukan olah TKP, beberapa saksi juga masih untuk dimintai keterangan terkait peristiwa ini,” ungkap Kapolsek Wonocolo Kompol Naufil Hartono.
UANG RP 380 JUTA DIRAMPOKsaco-indonesia.com,
Jual Notebook Murah
Banyak dari penjual notebook, atau laptop yang juga mengatakan jual notebook murah, itu juga memang benar karena pastinya para penjual itu juga punya alasan tersendiri, sehingga berani menjual notebook nya dengan harga yang murah. salah satunya alasan para penjual notebook dengan harga murah itu karena para penjual itu adalah distributornya sendiri, sehingga berani untuk menjual notebooknya dengan harga distributor.
Dan fgc rentalindo adalah salah satu distributor yang telah menjual notebooknya dengan harga distributor. Selain itu notebook murah ini juga tergantung dari kualitas dan merk, untuk itu fgc rentalindo telah menjual dan menyewakan laptop dan notebook dengan harga yang terjangkau. dan bisa di bilang lebih murah.
Adapun komputer dan laptop harga murah dari berbagai merk seperti Acer, Toshiba dan Asus,tipe ultrabook dan gaming.
Editor : Dian Sukmawati
saco-indonesia.com, Sindikat pencurian kendaraan bermotor (curanmor) telah dibongkar Satuan Reskrim Polres Sukabumi Kota. Dalam pengungkapan kasus ini, polisi telah mengamankan belasan tersangka, seorang di antaranya oknum Anggota TNI yang berperan sebagai penadah sekaligus dalang curanmor. Untuk dapat melumpuhkan komplotan curanmor ini, petugas terpaksa harus mengeluarkan timah panas dan menembus paha salah seorang tersangka.
Dari tangan tersangka, polisi telah berhasil mengamankan sejumlah barang bukti di antaranya puluhan kendaraan bermotor , uang jutaan rupiah dan berbagai jenis kunci leter T. Kini, belasan tersangka telah mendekam di hotel predeo Mapolres Sukabumi Kota untuk dapat mempetanggungjawabkan perbuatannya.
Pengungkapan ini juga merupakan hasil pengembangan dan penyelidikan Satreskrim Polres Sukabumi Kota. Dari hasil penyelidikan telah diketahui tempat berkumpulnya pelaku spesialis pencurian sepeda bermotor yang terletak di Desa Cimanggu Kecamatan Cikembang kabupaten Sukabumi yang dikendalikan oleh salah seorang oknum anggota TNI.
Di lokasi tersebut, polisi telah mengamankan 11 orang. Pada saat ditangkap, mereka juga sempat melawan hingga petugas terpaksa harus melumpuhkan salah seorang tersangka dengan timah panas mengenai paha sebelah kanan.
Rincian barang bukti yakni 20 unit sepeda motor berbagai merk, uang puluhan juta rupiah dari hasil penjualan dan puluhan plat nomor serta alat-alat lainnya untuk dapat melancarkan aksinya.
Kasat Reskrim Polres Sukabumi Kota AKP Sulaeman telah membenarkan adanya penggerebekan yang dilakukan satuan reskrim Sukabumi Kota terhadap sindikan pencurian kendaraan bermotor yang sudah lama menjadi incaran dan target sasaran.
“Kami juga telah menangkap dan mengamankan sedikitnya 11 orang pelaku yang terlibat pencurian sepeda motor. Saat ini para pelaku juga sedang menjalani pemeriksaan untuk kepentingan pengembanga. Soalnya disinyalir masih ada para pelaku yang belum kami tangkap, Dari belasan yang kami tangkap ada oknum anggota TNI yang diduga sebagai otak pelaku sekaligus penadah sepeda bermotor hasil curian,” ungkapnya.
Akibat perbuatannya, tersangka terancam dijerat dengan pasal pasal 363 tentang pencurian dengan pemberatan dan pasal 365 tentang pencurian dengan kekerasan dengan ancaman hukuman maksimal limat tahun kurungan penjara.
Editor : Dian Sukmawati
Hockey is not exactly known as a city game, but played on roller skates, it once held sway as the sport of choice in many New York neighborhoods.
“City kids had no rinks, no ice, but they would do anything to play hockey,” said Edward Moffett, former director of the Long Island City Y.M.C.A. Roller Hockey League, in Queens, whose games were played in city playgrounds going back to the 1940s.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, the league had more than 60 teams, he said. Players included the Mullen brothers of Hell’s Kitchen and Dan Dorion of Astoria, Queens, who would later play on ice for the National Hockey League.
One street legend from the heyday of New York roller hockey was Craig Allen, who lived in the Woodside Houses projects and became one of the city’s hardest hitters and top scorers.
“Craig was a warrior, one of the best roller hockey players in the city in the ’70s,” said Dave Garmendia, 60, a retired New York police officer who grew up playing with Mr. Allen. “His teammates loved him and his opponents feared him.”
Young Craig took up hockey on the streets of Queens in the 1960s, playing pickup games between sewer covers, wearing steel-wheeled skates clamped onto school shoes and using a roll of electrical tape as the puck.
His skill and ferocity drew attention, Mr. Garmendia said, but so did his skin color. He was black, in a sport made up almost entirely by white players.
“Roller hockey was a white kid’s game, plain and simple, but Craig broke the color barrier,” Mr. Garmendia said. “We used to say Craig did more for race relations than the N.A.A.C.P.”
Mr. Allen went on to coach and referee roller hockey in New York before moving several years ago to South Carolina. But he continued to organize an annual alumni game at Dutch Kills Playground in Long Island City, the same site that held the local championship games.
The reunion this year was on Saturday, but Mr. Allen never made it. On April 26, just before boarding the bus to New York, he died of an asthma attack at age 61.
Word of his death spread rapidly among hundreds of his old hockey colleagues who resolved to continue with the event, now renamed the Craig Allen Memorial Roller Hockey Reunion.
The turnout on Saturday was the largest ever, with players pulling on their old equipment, choosing sides and taking once again to the rink of cracked blacktop with faded lines and circles. They wore no helmets, although one player wore a fedora.
Another, Vinnie Juliano, 77, of Long Island City, wore his hearing aids, along with his 50-year-old taped-up quads, or four-wheeled skates with a leather boot. Many players here never converted to in-line skates, and neither did Mr. Allen, whose photograph appeared on a poster hanging behind the players’ bench.
“I’m seeing people walking by wondering why all these rusty, grizzly old guys are here playing hockey,” one player, Tommy Dominguez, said. “We’re here for Craig, and let me tell you, these old guys still play hard.”
Everyone seemed to have a Craig Allen story, from his earliest teams at Public School 151 to the Bryant Rangers, the Woodside Wings, the Woodside Blues and more.
Mr. Allen, who became a yellow-cab driver, was always recruiting new talent. He gained the nickname Cabby for his habit of stopping at playgrounds all over the city to scout players.
Teams were organized around neighborhoods and churches, and often sponsored by local bars. Mr. Allen, for one, played for bars, including Garry Owen’s and on the Fiddler’s Green Jokers team in Inwood, Manhattan.
Play was tough and fights were frequent.
“We were basically street gangs on skates,” said Steve Rogg, 56, a mail clerk who grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and who on Saturday wore his Riedell Classic quads from 1972. “If another team caught up with you the night before a game, they tossed you a beating so you couldn’t play the next day.”
Mr. Garmendia said Mr. Allen’s skin color provoked many fights.
“When we’d go to some ignorant neighborhoods, a lot of players would use slurs,” Mr. Garmendia said, recalling a game in Ozone Park, Queens, where local fans parked motorcycles in a lineup next to the blacktop and taunted Mr. Allen. Mr. Garmendia said he checked a player into the motorcycles, “and the bikes went down like dominoes, which started a serious brawl.”
A group of fans at a game in Brooklyn once stuck a pole through the rink fence as Mr. Allen skated by and broke his jaw, Mr. Garmendia said, adding that carloads of reinforcements soon arrived to defend Mr. Allen.
And at another racially incited brawl, the police responded with six patrol cars and a helicopter.
Before play began on Saturday, the players gathered at center rink to honor Mr. Allen. Billy Barnwell, 59, of Woodside, recalled once how an all-white, all-star squad snubbed Mr. Allen by playing him third string. He scored seven goals in the first game and made first string immediately.
“He’d always hear racial stuff before the game, and I’d ask him, ‘How do you put up with that?’” Mr. Barnwell recalled. “Craig would say, ‘We’ll take care of it,’ and by the end of the game, he’d win guys over. They’d say, ‘This guy’s good.’”
Tribute for a Roller Hockey WarriorBALTIMORE — 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.
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.”
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 RoleUnder 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.
François Michelin, Head of Tire Company, Dies at 88Ms. Crough played the youngest daughter on the hit ’70s sitcom starring David Cassidy and Shirley Jones.
Suzanne Crough, Actress in ‘The Partridge Family,’ Dies at 52WASHINGTON — 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.
“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.”
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Marty Napoleon, 93, Dies; Jazz Pianist Played With Louis ArmstrongBEIJING (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 ChinaHOBART, Tasmania — Few places seem out of reach for China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who has traveled from European capitals to obscure Pacific and Caribbean islands in pursuit of his nation’s strategic interests.
So perhaps it was not surprising when he turned up last fall in this city on the edge of the Southern Ocean to put down a long-distance marker in another faraway region, Antarctica, 2,000 miles south of this Australian port.
Standing on the deck of an icebreaker that ferries Chinese scientists from this last stop before the frozen continent, Mr. Xi pledged that China would continue to expand in one of the few places on earth that remain unexploited by humans.
He signed a five-year accord with the Australian government that allows Chinese vessels and, in the future, aircraft to resupply for fuel and food before heading south. That will help secure easier access to a region that is believed to have vast oil and mineral resources; huge quantities of high-protein sea life; and for times of possible future dire need, fresh water contained in icebergs.
It was not until 1985, about seven decades after Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen raced to the South Pole, that a team representing Beijing hoisted the Chinese flag over the nation’s first Antarctic research base, the Great Wall Station on King George Island.
But now China seems determined to catch up. As it has bolstered spending on Antarctic research, and as the early explorers, especially the United States and Australia, confront stagnant budgets, there is growing concern about its intentions.
China’s operations on the continent — it opened its fourth research station last year, chose a site for a fifth, and is investing in a second icebreaker and new ice-capable planes and helicopters — are already the fastest growing of the 52 signatories to the Antarctic Treaty. That gentlemen’s agreement reached in 1959 bans military activity on the continent and aims to preserve it as one of the world’s last wildernesses; a related pact prohibits mining.
But Mr. Xi’s visit was another sign that China is positioning itself to take advantage of the continent’s resource potential when the treaty expires in 2048 — or in the event that it is ripped up before, Chinese and Australian experts say.
“So far, our research is natural-science based, but we know there is more and more concern about resource security,” said Yang Huigen, director general of the Polar Research Institute of China, who accompanied Mr. Xi last November on his visit to Hobart and stood with him on the icebreaker, Xue Long, or Snow Dragon.
With that in mind, the polar institute recently opened a new division devoted to the study of resources, law, geopolitics and governance in Antarctica and the Arctic, Mr. Yang said.
Australia, a strategic ally of the United States that has strong economic relations with China, is watching China’s buildup in the Antarctic with a mix of gratitude — China’s presence offers support for Australia’s Antarctic science program, which is short of cash — and wariness.
“We should have no illusions about the deeper agenda — one that has not even been agreed to by Chinese scientists but is driven by Xi, and most likely his successors,” said Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former senior official in the Australian Department of Defense.
“This is part of a broader pattern of a mercantilist approach all around the world,” Mr. Jennings added. “A big driver of Chinese policy is to secure long-term energy supply and food supply.”
That approach was evident last month when a large Chinese agriculture enterprise announced an expansion of its fishing operations around Antarctica to catch more krill — small, protein-rich crustaceans that are abundant in Antarctic waters.
“The Antarctic is a treasure house for all human beings, and China should go there and share,” Liu Shenli, the chairman of the China National Agricultural Development Group, told China Daily, a state-owned newspaper. China would aim to fish up to two million tons of krill a year, he said, a substantial increase from what it currently harvests.
Because sovereignty over Antarctica is unclear, nations have sought to strengthen their claims over the ice-covered land by building research bases and naming geographic features. China’s fifth station will put it within reach of the six American facilities, and ahead of Australia’s three.
Chinese mappers have also given Chinese names to more than 300 sites, compared with the thousands of locations on the continent with English names.
In the unspoken competition for Antarctica’s future, scientific achievement can also translate into influence. Chinese scientists are driving to be the first to drill and recover an ice core containing tiny air bubbles that provide a record of climate change stretching as far back as 1.5 million years. It is an expensive and delicate effort at which others, including the European Union and Australia, have failed.
In a breakthrough a decade ago, European scientists extracted an ice core nearly two miles long that revealed 800,000 years of climate history. But finding an ice core going back further would allow scientists to examine a change in the earth’s climate cycles believed to have occurred 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago.
China is betting it has found the best location to drill, at an area called Dome A, or Dome Argus, the highest point on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Though it is considered one of the coldest places on the planet, with temperatures of 130 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, a Chinese expedition explored the area in 2005 and established a research station in 2009.
“The international community has drilled in lots of places, but no luck so far,” said Xiao Cunde, a member of the first party to reach the site and the deputy director of the Institute for Climate Change at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. “We think at Dome A we will have a straight shot at the one-million-year ice core.”
Mr. Xiao said China had already begun drilling and hoped to find what scientists are looking for in four to five years.
To support its Antarctic aspirations, China is building a sophisticated $300 million icebreaker that is expected to be ready in a few years, said Xia Limin, deputy director of the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration in Beijing. It has also bought a high-tech fixed-wing aircraft, outfitted in the United States, for taking sensitive scientific soundings from the ice.
China has chosen the site for its fifth research station at Inexpressible Island, named by a group of British explorers who were stranded at the desolate site in 1912 and survived the winter by excavating a small ice cave.
Mr. Xia said the inhospitable spot was ideal because China did not have a presence in that part of Antarctica, and because the rocky site did not have much snow, making it relatively cheap to build there.
Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of a soon-to-be-released book, “China as a Polar Great Power,” said Chinese scientists also believed they had a good chance of finding mineral and energy resources near the site.
“China is playing a long game in Antarctica and keeping other states guessing about its true intentions and interests are part of its poker hand,” she said. But she noted that China’s interest in finding minerals was presented “loud and clear to domestic audiences” as the main reason it was investing in Antarctica.
Because commercial drilling is banned, estimates of energy and mineral resources in Antarctica rely on remote sensing data and comparisons with similar geological environments elsewhere, said Millard F. Coffin, executive director of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Hobart.
But the difficulty of extraction in such severe conditions and uncertainty about future commodity prices make it unlikely that China or any country would defy the ban on mining anytime soon.
Tourism, however, is already booming. Travelers from China are still a relatively small contingent in the Antarctic compared with the more than 13,000 Americans who visited in 2013, and as yet there are no licensed Chinese tour operators.
But that is about to change, said Anthony Bergin, deputy director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “I understand very soon there will be Chinese tourists on Chinese vessels with all-Chinese crew in the Antarctic,” he said.
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 KnoxvilleAt the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Suzman’s signature accomplishment was the central role he played in creating a global network of surveys on aging.
Richard Suzman, 72, Dies; Researcher Influenced Global Surveys on AgingUNITED NATIONS — Wearing pinstripes and a pince-nez, Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy for Syria, arrived at the Security Council one Tuesday afternoon in February and announced that President Bashar al-Assad had agreed to halt airstrikes over Aleppo. Would the rebels, Mr. de Mistura suggested, agree to halt their shelling?
What he did not announce, but everyone knew by then, was that the Assad government had begun a military offensive to encircle opposition-held enclaves in Aleppo and that fierce fighting was underway. It would take only a few days for rebel leaders, having pushed back Syrian government forces, to outright reject Mr. de Mistura’s proposed freeze in the fighting, dooming the latest diplomatic overture on Syria.
Diplomacy is often about appearing to be doing something until the time is ripe for a deal to be done.
Now, with Mr. Assad’s forces having suffered a string of losses on the battlefield and the United States reaching at least a partial rapprochement with Mr. Assad’s main backer, Iran, Mr. de Mistura is changing course. Starting Monday, he is set to hold a series of closed talks in Geneva with the warring sides and their main supporters. Iran will be among them.
In an interview at United Nations headquarters last week, Mr. de Mistura hinted that the changing circumstances, both military and diplomatic, may have prompted various backers of the war to question how much longer the bloodshed could go on.
“Will that have an impact in accelerating the willingness for a political solution? We need to test it,” he said. “The Geneva consultations may be a good umbrella for testing that. It’s an occasion for asking everyone, including the government, if there is any new way that they are looking at a political solution, as they too claim they want.”
He said he would have a better assessment at the end of June, when he expects to wrap up his consultations. That coincides with the deadline for a final agreement in the Iran nuclear talks.
Whether a nuclear deal with Iran will pave the way for a new opening on peace talks in Syria remains to be seen. Increasingly, though, world leaders are explicitly linking the two, with the European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, suggesting last week that a nuclear agreement could spur Tehran to play “a major but positive role in Syria.”
It could hardly come soon enough. Now in its fifth year, the Syrian war has claimed 220,000 lives, prompted an exodus of more than three million refugees and unleashed jihadist groups across the region. “This conflict is producing a question mark in many — where is it leading and whether this can be sustained,” Mr. de Mistura said.
Part Italian, part Swedish, Mr. de Mistura has worked with the United Nations for more than 40 years, but he is more widely known for his dapper style than for any diplomatic coups. Syria is by far the toughest assignment of his career — indeed, two of the organization’s most seasoned diplomats, Lakhdar Brahimi and Kofi Annan, tried to do the job and gave up — and critics have wondered aloud whether Mr. de Mistura is up to the task.
He served as a United Nations envoy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and before that in Lebanon, where a former minister recalled, with some scorn, that he spent many hours sunbathing at a private club in the hills above Beirut. Those who know him say he has a taste for fine suits and can sometimes speak too soon and too much, just as they point to his diplomatic missteps and hyperbole.
They cite, for instance, a news conference in October, when he raised the specter of Srebrenica, where thousands of Muslims were massacred in 1995 during the Balkans war, in warning that the Syrian border town of Kobani could fall to the Islamic State. In February, he was photographed at a party in Damascus, the Syrian capital, celebrating the anniversary of the Iranian revolution just as Syrian forces, aided by Iran, were pummeling rebel-held suburbs of Damascus; critics seized on that as evidence of his coziness with the government.
Mouin Rabbani, who served briefly as the head of Mr. de Mistura’s political affairs unit and has since emerged as one of his most outspoken critics, said Mr. de Mistura did not have the background necessary for the job. “This isn’t someone well known for his political vision or political imagination, and his closest confidants lack the requisite knowledge and experience,” Mr. Rabbani said.
As a deputy foreign minister in the Italian government, Mr. de Mistura was tasked in 2012 with freeing two Italian marines detained in India for shooting at Indian fishermen. He made 19 trips to India, to little effect. One marine was allowed to return to Italy for medical reasons; the other remains in India.
He said he initially turned down the Syria job when the United Nations secretary general approached him last August, only to change his mind the next day, after a sleepless, guilt-ridden night.
Mr. de Mistura compared his role in Syria to that of a doctor faced with a terminally ill patient. His goal in brokering a freeze in the fighting, he said, was to alleviate suffering. He settled on Aleppo as the location for its “fame,” he said, a decision that some questioned, considering that Aleppo was far trickier than the many other lesser-known towns where activists had negotiated temporary local cease-fires.
“Everybody, at least in Europe, are very familiar with the value of Aleppo,” Mr. de Mistura said. “So I was using that as an icebreaker.”
The cease-fire negotiations, to which he had devoted six months, fell apart quickly because of the government’s military offensive in Aleppo the very day of his announcement at the Security Council. Privately, United Nations diplomats said Mr. de Mistura had been manipulated. To this, Mr. de Mistura said only that he was “disappointed and concerned.”
Tarek Fares, a former rebel fighter, said after a recent visit to Aleppo that no Syrian would admit publicly to supporting Mr. de Mistura’s cease-fire proposal. “If anyone said they went to a de Mistura meeting in Gaziantep, they would be arrested,” is how he put it, referring to the Turkish city where negotiations between the two sides were held.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon remains staunchly behind Mr. de Mistura’s efforts. His defenders point out that he is at the center of one of the world’s toughest diplomatic problems, charged with mediating a conflict in which two of the world’s most powerful nations — Russia, which supports Mr. Assad, and the United States, which has called for his ouster — remain deadlocked.
R. Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official who now teaches at Harvard, credited Mr. de Mistura for trying to negotiate a cease-fire even when the chances of success were exceedingly small — and the chances of a political deal even smaller. For his efforts to work, Professor Burns argued, the world powers will first have to come to an agreement of their own.
“He needs the help of outside powers,” he said. “It starts with backers of Assad. That’s Russia and Iran. De Mistura is there, waiting.”
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