Wakil Ketua Fraksi Partai Keadilan Sejahtera Ecky Awal Mucharram membenarkan pertemuan antara pemerintah dan pimpinan Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat pada Senin (3/6/2013) pagi ini membahas tentang rencana kenaikan harga bahan bakar minyak (BBM).

JAKARTA, Saco-Indonesia.com — Wakil Ketua Fraksi Partai Keadilan Sejahtera Ecky Awal Mucharram membenarkan pertemuan antara pemerintah dan pimpinan Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat pada Senin (3/6/2013) pagi ini membahas tentang rencana kenaikan harga bahan bakar minyak (BBM). Ecky menuturkan bahwa pertemuan dilakukan atas permintaan pemerintah.

"Itu permintaan pemerintah untuk lobi pimpinan. Ini rapat konsultasi tentang APBN-P 2013, ada sesuatu yang harus disinkronkan mungkin," ucap Ecky di Kompleks Parlemen, Senin (3/6/2013).

Ecky mengaku hingga saat ini memang masih banyak fraksi yang menolak rencana kenaikan harga BBM. Salah satunya adalah PKS.

"PKS melihat dinamika politik yang ada sehingga PKS menolak kenaikan BBM," imbuh anggota Komisi XI dari Fraksi PKS itu.

Ecky mengungkapkan, PKS menolak lantaran masih ada hal-hal yang perlu diperbaiki sebelum harga BBM dinaikkan. Ia mencontohkan seperti kebijakan energi alternatif yang perlu diperbaiki.

Seperti diberitakan, para pejabat di sektor keuangan RI mendadak datang ke DPR RI untuk bertemu pimpinan, Senin pagi. Pertemuan diduga membahas tentang rencana memasukkan dana kompensasi dalam rancangan Anggaran Pendapatan dan Belanja Negara Perubahan (RAPBN-P).

Beberapa di antara yang hadir yakni Menteri Koordinator Perekonomian Hatta Rajasa, Menteri Keuangan Chatib Basri, Kepala Bappenas Armida Alisjahbana, Wakil Menteri Keuangan Mahendra Siregar, dan Kepala Badan Kebijakan Fiskal Kemenkeu Bambang Brodjonegoro.

Pemerintah berencana menaikkan harga BBM pada awal Juni 2013. Namun, rencana itu akhirnya ditunda hingga minggu ketiga bulan Juni 2013. Pemerintah dan DPR hingga kini masih menggodok rencana memasukkan dana bantuan langsung sementara masyarakat (BLSM) ke dalam kerangka APBN-P yang nilainya sekitar Rp 11,6 triliun.

saco-indonesia.com Pemerintah Provinsi DKI terus mengebut pengerukan sejumlah kali kecil di Ibu Kota. Sebanyak 170 ekskavator diterjunkan untuk menormalisasi sejumlah kali itu.

JAKARTA, Saco- Indonesia.com — Pemerintah Provinsi DKI terus mengebut pengerukan sejumlah kali kecil di Ibu Kota. Sebanyak 170 ekskavator diterjunkan untuk menormalisasi sejumlah kali itu.

"Kita ingin mengecek kali dan sungai yang ada di Jakarta. Sudah diterjunkan 170 ekskavator. Ada yang kerja siang, ada yang malam," ujar Gubernur DKI Joko Widodo saat mengunjungi Penghubung Sipon, Semanan, Kalideres, Jakarta Barat, Jumat (31/5/2013).

Mantan Wali Kota Surakarta itu mengungkapkan, pihaknya akan menambah sebanyak 15 hingga 20 ekskavator pada Juni 2013 mendatang. Jokowi ingin pengerukan tersebut cepat selesai.

Meski demikian, Jokowi mengakui mendapat kendala dalam penambahan ekskavator. Banyak kali dan sungai yang memiliki ruas sisi yang kecil. Hal itu menyebabkan ekskavator sulit masuk.

"Kalau kanan kiri sudah rumah itu yang kesulitan membuang endapannya. Kesulitan alat berat masuk ke sungai. Jadi tergantung lokasi," ujarnya.

Jokowi menegaskan bahwa Pemprov tidak tebang pilih dalam menangani sejumlah kali dan sungai di Jakarta. Jokowi ingin agar pengerukan kali dan sungai tersebut mengakibatkan air berjalan lancar dan jika hujan, tidak meluap memenuhi permukiman.

Seperti diketahui, proyek pengerukan sungai dan kali di DKI merupakan bagian dari Jakarta Emergency Dredging Initiative (JEDI). Program itu merupakan upaya pengendalian banjir melalui normalisasi sebanyak 13 sungai di DKI Jakarta. Realisasi proyek yang mulai digagas sejak 2008 tersebut dilakukan secara bertahap dan dibagi dalam tujuh paket pengerjaan.

Sesuai rencana, dari tujuh paket, tiga paket dikerjakan Pemprov DKI, dua paket dikerjakan Balai Besar Wilayah Sungai Ciliwung Cisadane (BBWSCC), dan dua lainnya dikerjakan Cipta Karya melalui bantuan dana World Bank. Setelah sempat terpendam, proyek yang tak kunjung dikerjakan oleh gubernur era Foke itu pun dilanjutkan kembali oleh Jokowi.

Editor :Liwon Maulana

Sumber:Kompas.com

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.

In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.

Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.

Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.

The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.

In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory.

“The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”

Last month, the Historical Park posted online three never-before-heard Edison doll recordings, including the two from the Rolfses’ collection. “There are probably more out there, and we’re hoping people will now get them digitized,” Mr. Fabris said.

The technology, which is known as Irene (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), was developed by the particle physicist Carl Haber and the engineer Earl Cornell at Lawrence Berkeley. Irene extracts sound from cylinder and disk records. It can also reconstruct audio from recordings so badly damaged they were deemed unplayable.

“We are now hearing sounds from history that I did not expect to hear in my lifetime,” Mr. Fabris said.

The Rolfses said they were not sure what to expect in August when they carefully packed their two Edison doll cylinders, still attached to their motors, and drove from their home in Hortonville, Wis., to the National Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass. The center had recently acquired Irene technology.

Cylinders carry sound in a spiral groove cut by a phonograph recording needle that vibrates up and down, creating a surface made of tiny hills and valleys. In the Irene set-up, a microscope perched above the shaft takes thousands of high-resolution images of small sections of the grooves.

Stitched together, the images provide a topographic map of the cylinder’s surface, charting changes in depth as small as one five-hundredth the thickness of a human hair. Pitch, volume and timbre are all encoded in the hills and valleys and the speed at which the record is played.

At the conservation center, the preservation specialist Mason Vander Lugt attached one of the cylinders to the end of a rotating shaft. Huddled around a computer screen, the Rolfses first saw the wiggly waveform generated by Irene. Then came the digital audio. The words were at first indistinct, but as Mr. Lugt filtered out more of the noise, the rhyme became clearer.

“That was the Eureka moment,” Mr. Rolfs said.

In 1890, a girl in Edison’s laboratory had recited:

There was a little girl,

And she had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very, very good.

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

Recently, the conservation center turned up another surprise.

In 2010, the Woody Guthrie Foundation received 18 oversize phonograph disks from an anonymous donor. No one knew if any of the dirt-stained recordings featured Guthrie, but Tiffany Colannino, then the foundation’s archivist, had stored them unplayed until she heard about Irene.

Last fall, the center extracted audio from one of the records, labeled “Jam Session 9” and emailed the digital file to Ms. Colannino.

“I was just sitting in my dining room, and the next thing I know, I’m hearing Woody,” she said. In between solo performances of “Ladies Auxiliary,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Dead or Alive,” Guthrie tells jokes, offers some back story, and makes the audience laugh. “It is quintessential Guthrie,” Ms. Colannino said.

The Rolfses’ dolls are back in the display cabinet in Wisconsin. But with audio stored on several computers, they now have a permanent voice.

From sea to shining sea, or at least from one side of the Hudson to the other, politicians you have barely heard of are being accused of wrongdoing. There were so many court proceedings involving public officials on Monday that it was hard to keep up.

In Newark, two underlings of Gov. Chris Christie were arraigned on charges that they were in on the truly deranged plot to block traffic leading onto the George Washington Bridge.

Ten miles away, in Lower Manhattan, Dean G. Skelos, the leader of the New York State Senate, and his son, Adam B. Skelos, were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on accusations of far more conventional political larceny, involving a job with a sewer company for the son and commissions on title insurance and bond work.

The younger man managed to receive a 150 percent pay increase from the sewer company even though, as he said on tape, he “literally knew nothing about water or, you know, any of that stuff,” according to a criminal complaint the United States attorney’s office filed.

The success of Adam Skelos, 32, was attributed by prosecutors to his father’s influence as the leader of the Senate and as a potentate among state Republicans. The indictment can also be read as one of those unfailingly sad tales of a father who cannot stop indulging a grown son. The senator himself is not alleged to have profited from the schemes, except by being relieved of the burden of underwriting Adam.

The bridge traffic caper is its own species of crazy; what distinguishes the charges against the two Skeloses is the apparent absence of a survival instinct. It is one thing not to know anything about water or that stuff. More remarkable, if true, is the fact that the sewer machinations continued even after the former New York Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, was charged in January with taking bribes disguised as fees.

It was by then common gossip in political and news media circles that Senator Skelos, a Republican, the counterpart in the Senate to Mr. Silver, a Democrat, in the Assembly, could be next in line for the criminal dock. “Stay tuned,” the United States attorney, Preet Bharara said, leaving not much to the imagination.

Even though the cat had been unmistakably belled, Skelos father and son continued to talk about how to advance the interests of the sewer company, though the son did begin to use a burner cellphone, the kind people pay for in cash, with no traceable contracts.

That was indeed prudent, as prosecutors had been wiretapping the cellphones of both men. But it would seem that the burner was of limited value, because by then the prosecutors had managed to secure the help of a business executive who agreed to record calls with the Skeloses. It would further seem that the business executive was more attentive to the perils of pending investigations than the politician.

Through the end of the New York State budget negotiations in March, the hopes of the younger Skelos rested on his father’s ability to devise legislation that would benefit the sewer company. That did not pan out. But Senator Skelos did boast that he had haggled with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, in a successful effort to raise a $150 million allocation for Long Island to $550 million, for what the budget called “transformative economic development projects.” It included money for the kind of work done by the sewer company.

The lawyer for Adam Skelos said he was not guilty and would win in court. Senator Skelos issued a ringing declaration that he was unequivocally innocent.

THIS was also the approach taken in New Jersey by Bill Baroni, a man of great presence and eloquence who stopped outside the federal courthouse to note that he had taken risks as a Republican by bucking his party to support paid family leave, medical marijuana and marriage equality. “I would never risk my career, my job, my reputation for something like this,” Mr. Baroni said. “I am an innocent man.”

The lawyer for his co-defendant, Bridget Anne Kelly, the former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, a Republican, said that she would strongly rebut the charges.

Perhaps they had nothing to do with the lane closings. But neither Mr. Baroni nor Ms. Kelly addressed the question of why they did not return repeated calls from the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., begging them to stop the traffic tie-ups, over three days.

That silence was a low moment. But perhaps New York hit bottom faster. Senator Skelos, the prosecutors charged, arranged to meet Long Island politicians at the wake of Wenjian Liu, a New York City police officer shot dead in December, to press for payments to the company employing his son.

Sometimes it seems as though for some people, the only thing to be ashamed of is shame itself.