PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — The Sundance Film Festival isn't home to many shoot-em-up movies, but action-oriented actors at the festival are facing questions about Hollywood's role in American gun violence.
Guy Pearce, Alexander Skarsgard, Kristen Bell and director Roger Corman were among those discussing the issue at the annual independent-film showcase.
Pearce is in Park City, Utah, to support the family drama "Breathe In," but he's pulled plenty of imaginary triggers in violent films such as "Lockdown" and "Lawless." He says Hollywood may make guns seem more appealing to the broader culture, but there are vast variations in films' approach to violence.
"Hollywood probably does play a role," Pearce said. "It's a broad spectrum though. There are films that use guns flippantly, then there are films that use guns in a way that would make you never want to look at a gun ever again — because of the effect that it's had on the other people in the story at the time. So to sort of just say Hollywood and guns, it's a broad palette that you're dealing with, I think. But I'm sure it does have an effect. As does video games, as do stories on the news. All sorts of things probably seep into the consciousness."
Skarsgard, who blasted away aliens in "Battleship," agreed that Hollywood has some responsibility for how it depicts violence on-screen.
"When (NRA executive director) Wayne LaPierre blames it on Hollywood and says guns have nothing to do with it, there is a reason," he said. "I mean, I'm from Sweden. . We do have violent video games in Sweden. My teenage brother plays them. He watches Hollywood movies. We do have insane people in Sweden and in Canada. But we don't have 30,000 gun deaths a year.
"Yes, there's only 10 million people in Sweden as opposed to over 300 (million) in the United States. But the numbers just don't add up. There are over 300 million weapons in this country. And they help. They do kill people."
Bell, who stars in in the dramatic competition film "The Lifeguard," said the issue is far more complicated than simply blaming Hollywood.
"There's a lot of things that are emphasized in our entertainment industry as plot points or interesting shorelines, but none of them seem to be as affecting the American public as the gun control," she said. "So I don't necessarily know that it's blamable on Hollywood, though I think there's a certain responsibility and we need to re-examine everything that we do."
Bell's co-star, Mamie Gummer, said she's often "perturbed" by on-screen violence.
"I really hate Quentin Tarantino's movies generally, and I thought 'Django Unchained' especially was really tough to bear in light of everything," she said. "Just the deep romanticizing of it, the fetishizing of it is creepy to me. Or maybe it's lost on me. I don't enjoy it."
Bell doesn't mind seeing violent films but advocates for greater awareness of mental illness and for stricter gun control.
"It's such a paradoxical issue. Because those movies don't bother me at all. And it doesn't bother me when I see people shoot guns. Yet I'm fully for more gun control in reality," she said. "Because I'm smart enough to recognize what's reality and what's not. And I think that's an issue that needs to be addressed... A lot of the people that are picking up guns have an inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. And I think that's probably — though I do support gun control, a tighter gun control than we have now — that's an issue that deserves to be addressed because that's probably the root of it."
Ellen Page, who co-stars with Skarsgard in "The East," noted that gun restrictions are much more pervasive in her home country, Canada.
"You can't buy some crazy assault rifle that is made for the military to kill people. And like that to me is just like a no-brainer," she said. "Why should that just be out and be able to be purchased? That does not make me feel safe as a person."
Corman also cited Canada's response to movie violence.
"Canada sees the same motion pictures that we do. They play the same video games that we do. They see the same television that we do. Their crime rate — and specifically their murder rate — is a tiny fraction of ours," he said. The only difference is they have strong gun control laws and we (don't). I wish somebody would ask the head of the NRA how he explains that."
Skarsgard suggested it may be time to revisit the Second Amendment.
"The whole Second Amendment discussion is ridiculous to me. Because that was written over 200 years ago, and it was a militia to have muskets to fight off Brits," he said. "The Brits aren't coming. It's 2013. Things have changed. And for someone to mail-order an assault rifle is crazy to me. They don't belong anywhere but the military to me. You don't need that to protect your home or shoot deer, you know."
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AP Entertainment Writer Ryan Pearson is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ryanwrd .
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AP Movie Writer David Germain contributed to this report.
It is often said that smoking takes years off your life, and now a new study shows just how many: Longtime smokers can expect to lose about 10 years of life expectancy.
But amid those grim findings was some good news for former smokers. Those who quit before they turn 35 can gain most if not all of that decade back, and even those who wait until middle age to kick the habit can add about five years back to their life expectancies.
“There’s the old saw that everyone knows smoking is bad for you,” said Dr. Tim McAfee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But this paints a much more dramatic picture of the horror of smoking. These are real people that are getting 10 years of life expectancy hacked off — and that’s just on average.”
The findings were part of research, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, that looked at government data on more than 200,000 Americans who were followed starting in 1997. Similar studies that were done in the 1980s and the decades prior had allowed scientists to predict the impact of smoking on mortality. But since then many population trends have changed, and it was unclear whether smokers today fared differently from smokers decades ago.
Since the 1960s, the prevalence of smoking over all has declined, falling from about 40 percent to 20 percent. Today more than half of people that ever smoked have quit, allowing researchers to compare the effects of stopping at various ages.
Modern cigarettes contain less tar and medical advances have cut the rates of death from vascular disease drastically. But have smokers benefited from these advances?
Women in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s had lower rates of mortality from smoking than men. But it was largely unknown whether this was a biological difference or merely a matter of different habits: earlier generations of women smoked fewer cigarettes and tended to take up smoking at a later age than men.
Now that smoking habits among women today are similar to those of men, would mortality rates be the same as well?
“There was a big gap in our knowledge,” said Dr. McAfee, an author of the study and the director of the C.D.C.’s Office on Smoking and Public Health.
The new research showed that in fact women are no more protected from the consequences of smoking than men. The female smokers in the study represented the first generation of American women that generally began smoking early in life and continued the habit for decades, and the impact on life span was clear. The risk of death from smoking for these women was 50 percent higher than the risk reported for women in similar studies carried out in the 1980s.
“This sort of puts the nail in the coffin around the idea that women might somehow be different or that they suffer fewer effects of smoking,” Dr. McAfee said.
It also showed that differences between smokers and the population in general are becoming more and more stark. Over the last 20 years, advances in medicine and public health have improved life expectancy for the general public, but smokers have not benefited in the same way.
“If anything, this is accentuating the difference between being a smoker and a nonsmoker,” Dr. McAfee said.
The researchers had information about the participants’ smoking histories and other details about their health and backgrounds, including diet, alcohol consumption, education levels and weight and body fat. Using records from the National Death Index, they calculated their mortality rates over time.
People who had smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes were not classified as smokers. Those who had smoked at least 100 cigarettes but had not had one within five years of the time the data was collected were classified as former smokers.
Not surprisingly, the study showed that the earlier a person quit smoking, the greater the impact. People who quit between 25 and 34 years of age gained about 10 years of life compared to those who continued to smoke. But there were benefits at many ages. People who quit between 35 and 44 gained about nine years, and those who stopped between 45 and 59 gained about four to six years of life expectancy.
From a public health perspective, those numbers are striking, particularly when juxtaposed with preventive measures like blood pressure screenings, colorectal screenings and mammography, the effects of which on life expectancy are more often viewed in terms of days or months, Dr. McAfee said.
“These things are very important, but the size of the benefit pales in comparison to what you can get from stopping smoking,” he said. “The notion that you could add 10 years to your life by something as straightforward as quitting smoking is just mind boggling.”
Health insurance giant WellPoint Inc. gave a lower-than-expected profit outlook for 2013 as it prepares for the federal healthcare overhaul and continues to search for a new chief executive.
WellPoint, which runs Anthem Blue Cross in California and health plans in 13 other states, reported a bigger-than-expected 38% jump in fourth-quarter net income Wednesday, boosted by one-time gains related to an income tax settlement and investments.
But the company said it remains cautious about the year ahead in light of federal budget battles over Medicare and Medicaid and upheaval in the health insurance markets from the federal Affordable Care Act. WellPoint estimated full-year earnings of $7.60 a share, below analysts' expectations of $7.94 a share compiled by FactSet.
The Indianapolis company said the search is still underway for a new CEO to replace Angela Braly, who stepped down in August after major shareholders expressed dissatisfaction with the company's performance. John Cannon, WellPoint's interim chief executive, said the company expects to name a new leader some time in the first quarter.
The company's shares rose $1.03, or 1.6%, to $64.83 in trading Wednesday.
The health insurer said its fourth-quarter net income was $464.2 million, or $1.51 a share, up from $335.3 million, or 96 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding certain one-time items, the company said adjusted fourth-quarter profit was $1.03 a share, up 4% from 99 cents a share in the year-earlier quarter.
WellPoint is the nation's second-largest health insurer, with 36 million customers nationwide, just behind UnitedHealth Group Inc. WellPoint said revenue in the fourth quarter inched up 1% to $15.3 billion compared with a year ago.
The company said it is spending about $300 million this year to bolster its Medicare Advantage business and to prepare for insurance exchanges in California and other states that are opening next January under the federal healthcare law.
WellPoint is also pursuing growth from the federal government's planned expansion of Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor. Last month, WellPoint completed its $4.5-billion acquisition of Medicaid insurer Amerigroup Corp.
Overall, the company said it serves 4.5 million Medicaid patients in 20 states, making it the industry leader. But it said that business has been "underperforming," and in California it was recently hurt by higher-than-expected medical costs for about 90,000 people enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program.
WellPoint said California officials have agreed to increase payments for those patients to reflect the higher costs, but that change is awaiting federal approval.
The company is also a major player in an upcoming program aimed at improving care and lowering costs for patients enrolled in both Medicare and Medi-Cal. Enrollment in that state initiative has been delayed until September.
Hans Massaquoi, a former managing editor of Ebony magazine who wrote a distinctive memoir about his unusual childhood growing up black in Nazi Germany, died in Jacksonville, Fla., on Saturday, his 87th birthday.
He had been hospitalized over the Christmas holidays, said his son, Hans J. Massaquoi Jr.
Inspired by the late Alex Haley, the author of "Roots," Massaquoi decided to share his experience of being "both an insider in Nazi Germany and, paradoxically, an endangered outsider." His autobiography, "Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany," was published in the U.S. in 1999, followed by a German translation.
Massaquoi was born Jan. 19, 1926, in the port city of Hamburg. His mother was a German nurse and his father the son of a Liberian diplomat. When his grandfather was recalled to Liberia, Massaquoi's father decided to return to Africa too, but his mother insisted on staying behind.
Living with his mother, Massaquoi grew up in working-class neighborhoods of Hamburg. There were other black Germans, but not many; some were offspring of European colonial troops who occupied the Rhineland after World War I.
In his book, he recounted a story from 1933, when he was in second grade. Wanting to show what a good German he was, Massaquoi said he cajoled his baby-sitter into sewing a swastika onto his sweater. When his mother spotted it that evening, she snipped it off, but a teacher had already taken a snapshot. Massaquoi, the only dark-skinned child in the photo, is also the only one wearing a swastika.
He wrote that one of his saddest moments as a child was when his homeroom teacher told him he couldn't join the Hitler Youth.
"Of course I wanted to join. I was a kid and most of my friends were joining," he said. "They had cool uniforms and they did exciting things — camping, parades, playing drums."
Germany was at war by the time he was a teenager, and he describes in the book the near-destruction of Hamburg during the Operation Gomorrah bombing attack in the summer of 1943.
Massaquoi had a theory to explain why he avoided deportation to concentration camps during the Nazi reign.
"Unlike Jews, blacks were so few in numbers that they were relegated to low-priority status in the Nazis' lineup for extermination," he said in a 2001 interview with London's Independent newspaper.
After the collapse of Germany at the end of the war, he played saxophone in clubs that catered to the American Merchant Marine and worked as a translator for the British occupying forces.
Eventually he left Germany, first joining his father's family in Liberia, before moving to Chicago on a student visa to attend an aviation mechanics school. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951 and served stateside during the Korean War. Afterward, he became a U.S. citizen, earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois and began a career as a journalist.
He worked first for Jet magazine before moving to Chicago-based Ebony, where he rose to managing editor of the magazine aimed at African American readers.
Chicago author Studs Terkel interviewed Massaquoi for his 1984 book, "The Good War: An Oral History of World War II." By the late 1990s, approaching retirement, Massaquoi decided to tell his own story in an autobiography.
He was surprised by its reception in Germany.
"I had expected some interest there, but this has surpassed all my expectations," he told the Contra Costa Times in 2000. "I think the Germans want to get some closure about those years."
Atari is declaring bankruptcy — twice. Both the U.S. video game company and its French parent have done so, the latest twist for the company which largely invented the video game industry and remains synonymous with it, despite having seen its glory days end by the mid-1980s.
But wait. Even though the Atari name celebrated its fortieth anniversary last year, it’s a mistake to talk about Atari as if it’s a corporate entity which has been around for four decades. (The Los Angeles Times’ Ben Fritz, for instance, refers to it as an “iconic but long-troubled video game maker.”) Instead, it’s a famous name which has drifted from owner to owner. It keeps being applied to different businesses, and yes, for all its fame, it does seem to be a bit of a jinx.
Here’s a quick rundown of what “Atari” has meant at different times (thanks, Wikipedia, for refreshing my memory):
1972-1976: It’s an up-and-coming, innovative startup cofounded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.
1976-1984: It’s part of Warner Communications (which, years later, merged with Time Inc. to form Time Warner, overlord of this website). It’s a massively successful maker of video games and consoles, but then it crashes, along with the rest of the industry.
1984-1996: Atari morphs into a semi-successful maker of PCs when it’s acquired by Tramel Technology, a company started by Jack Tramiel, the ousted founder of Commodore.
1996-1998: Tramiel runs Atari into the ground. After merging with hard-disk maker JTS, the company and brand are largely dormant.
1998-2000: Atari resurfaces under the ownership of toy kingpin Hasbro as a line of games published under the Atari Interactive name.
2000-present: It becomes a corporate entity controlled by French game publisher Infogrames, which increasingly emphasizes the Atari moniker over its own and takes over completely in 2008. In recent years, it’s focused on digital downloads, mobile games and licensing of its familiar brand and logo.
The above chronology doesn’t account for Atari’s original business: arcade games. As far as I can tell, the arcade arm was owned at different times by Warner Communications/Time Warner (twice!), Pac-Man purveyor Namco and arcade icon Midway, among other companies. But use of the Atari brand on arcade hardware petered out in 2001.
Basically, Atari has never been one well-defined thing for more than twelve years, max, at a time. That the name has survived at all is a testament to its power and appeal. And even though the current Atari has fallen on hard times, I’ll bet that the brand survives for at least a few more decades, in one form or another. Several forms, probably.
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Al Green says if things had worked out, it would have been him serenading President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle at the inaugural ball.
Jennifer Hudson sang Green's classic "Let's Stay Together," leaving many to wonder why the soul legend wasn't singing his own hit for the first couple.
In a statement to The Associated Press, his representative said Green had been asked to sing, but scheduling conflicts prevented him from attending Monday's festivities. Green said he'd be honored to sing for the president in the future.
The Presidential Inaugural Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Obama famously sang a snippet of the song at an event last year that Green attended.
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Nekesa Mumbi Moody is the AP's global entertainment and lifestyles editor. Follow her at http://www.twitter.com/nekesamumbi
In the 1970s, women’s health advocates were highly suspicious of mastectomies. They argued that surgeons — in those days, pretty much an all-male club — were far too quick to remove a breast after a diagnosis of cancer, with disfiguring results.
But today, the pendulum has swung the other way. A new generation of women want doctors to take a more aggressive approach, and more and more are asking that even healthy breasts be removed to ward off cancer before it can strike.
Researchers estimate that as many as 15 percent of women with breast cancer — 30,000 a year — opt to have both breasts removed, up from less than 3 percent in the late 1990s. Notably, it appears that the vast majority of these women have never received genetic testing or counseling and are basing the decision on exaggerated fears about their risk of recurrence.
In addition, doctors say an increasing number of women who have never had a cancer diagnosis are demanding mastectomies based on genetic risk. (Cancer databases don’t track these women, so their numbers are unknown.)
“We are confronting almost an epidemic of prophylactic mastectomy,” said Dr. Isabelle Bedrosian, a surgical oncologist at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “I think the medical community has taken notice. We don’t have data that say oncologically this is a necessity, so why are women making this choice?”
One reason may be the never-ending awareness campaigns that have left many women in perpetual fear of the disease. Improvements in breast reconstruction may also be driving the trend, along with celebrities who go public with their decision to undergo preventive mastectomy.
This month Allyn Rose, a 24-year-old Miss America contestant from Washington, D.C., made headlines when she announced plans to have both her healthy breasts removed after the pageant; both her mother and her grandmother died from breast cancer. The television personality Giuliana Rancic, 37, and the actress Christina Applegate, 41, also talked publicly about having double mastectomies after diagnoses of early-stage breast cancer.
“You’re not going to find other organs that people cut out of their bodies because they’re worried about disease,” said the medical historian Dr. Barron H. Lerner, author of “The Breast Cancer Wars” (2001). “Because breast cancer is a disease that is so emotionally charged and gets so much attention, I think at times women feel almost obligated to be as proactive as possible — that’s the culture of breast cancer.”
Most of the data on prophylactic mastectomy come from the University of Minnesota, where researchers tracked contralateral mastectomy trends (removing a healthy breast alongside one with cancer) from 1998 to 2006. Dr. Todd M. Tuttle, chief of surgical oncology, said double mastectomy rates more than doubled during that period and the rise showed no signs of slowing.
From those trends as well as anecdotal reports, Dr. Tuttle estimates that at least 15 percent of women who receive a breast cancer diagnosis will have the second, healthy breast removed. “It’s younger women who are doing it,” he said.
The risk that a woman with breast cancer will develop cancer in the other breast is about 5 percent over 10 years, Dr. Tuttle said. Yet a University of Minnesota study found that women estimated their risk to be more than 30 percent.
“I think there are women who markedly overestimate their risk of getting cancer,” he said.
Most experts agree that double mastectomy is a reasonable option for women who have a strong genetic risk and have tested positive for a breast cancer gene. That was the case with Allison Gilbert, 42, a writer in Westchester County who discovered her genetic risk after her grandmother died of breast cancer and her mother died of ovarian cancer.
Even so, she delayed the decision to get prophylactic mastectomy until her aunt died from an aggressive breast cancer. In August, she had a double mastectomy. (She had her ovaries removed earlier.)
“I feel the women in my family didn’t have a way to avoid their fate,” said Ms. Gilbert, author of the 2011 book “Parentless Parents,” about how losing a parent influences one’s own style of parenting. “Here I was given an incredible opportunity to know what I have and to do something about it and, God willing, be around for my kids longer.”
Even so, she said her decisions were not made lightly. The double mastectomy and reconstruction required an initial 11 1/2-hour surgery and an “intense” recovery. She got genetic counseling, joined support groups and researched her options.
But doctors say many women are not making such informed decisions. Last month, University of Michigan researchers reported on a study of more than 1,446 women who had breast cancer. Four years after their diagnosis, 35 percent were considering removing their healthy breast and 7 percent had already done so.
Notably, most of the women who had a double mastectomy were not at high risk for a cancer recurrence. In fact, studies suggest that most women who have double mastectomies never seek genetic testing or counseling.
“Breast cancer becomes very emotional for people, and they view a breast differently than an arm or a required body part that you use every day,” said Sarah T. Hawley, an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan. “Women feel like it’s a body part over which they totally have a choice, and they say, ‘I want to put this behind me — I don’t want to worry about it anymore.’ ”
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WASHINGTON — With the White House and Congress engaged in their second major battle in 18 months over the debt limit, some lawmakers, economists and analysts are offering a simple solution: Just get rid of it.
The U.S. is one of the few nations with such a borrowing mechanism. And as political fights over raising the limit have escalated in recent years, chilling financial markets and triggering the first-ever U.S. credit rating downgrade, critics said the time has come to make a change in Washington.
"Congress has gone from grandstanding on the debt ceiling to actual use of it as an economic weapon of mass destruction," Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said. "It's extremely dangerous."
Welch and several Democratic House colleagues last week proposed eliminating the debt limit, which has been in place since 1939, to avoid the risk of a default.
They're joined by a growing chorus of analysts who have called the U.S. debt limit "ridiculous," "screwy" and just plain "nuts."
QUIZ: Test your knowledge about the debt limit
"The debt ceiling is a dumb idea with no benefits and potentially catastrophic costs if ever used," Richard Thaler, a professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, wrote in response to a University of Chicago poll of economists released this month.
House Republican leaders, for now at least, want to put off a showdown. They have scheduled a vote for Wednesday on suspending the limit until mid-May. In effect, there would be no debt limit for four months.
The White House backed the short-term plan Tuesday, and House Republican leaders appeared confident that the measure would pass. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) declined to say whether he would take up the bill, but indications were that the Senate would go along with the strategy.
The move would delay the looming threat of a default, but the broader debate over the debt limit and its role would continue to simmer.
In each year's budget, Congress decides how much money should be spent, which also determines how much must be borrowed to cover any shortfall in revenue. So Congress also must frequently increase the debt limit to allow for the borrowing.
The debt limit has been raised 76 times since 1962. It now stands at $16.4 trillion, a level the government will hit as early as mid-February.
The University of Chicago's survey of 38 academic economists found that 84% agreed that "a separate debt ceiling that has to be increased periodically creates unneeded uncertainty and can potentially lead to worse fiscal outcomes." Just 3% disagreed.
"It's a very unusual provision because in most countries, if they vote for a budget, they either have to borrow the money to pay for it or they have to raise taxes or cut someplace else," said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
"Separating out the spending from the actual payment for the spending is just a reckless fiscal policy," Kirkegaard said.
Those sentiments were echoed last week by Fitch Ratings.
The company, one of three leading credit rating firms, called the debt limit "an ineffective and potentially dangerous mechanism for enforcing fiscal discipline." But a Fitch executive said the company was not taking a stand on whether the debt limit should be eliminated.
Still, most Republicans said the debt limit is a vital check on long-term government spending.
The Constitution gives Congress the power "to borrow money on the credit of the United States." And the frequent votes over raising the limit on how much can be borrowed offer "a moment of reflection to consider the policies that have led to the current debt" and consider ways to reduce its growth, the Senate Republican Policy Committee said.
"In the simplest of terms, the debt limit helps hold Washington accountable to hardworking taxpayers, who ultimately foot the bill for Washington's spending habits," Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) said Tuesday during a House hearing on the issue.
Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.
The archdiocese's failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese's chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation's largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders' own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being molested.
In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.
One such case that has previously received little attention is that of Msgr. Peter Garcia, who admitted preying for decades on undocumented children in predominantly Spanish-speaking parishes. After Garcia's discharge from a New Mexico treatment center for pedophile clergy, Mahony ordered him to stay away from California "for the foreseeable future" in order to avoid legal accountability, the files show. "I believe that if Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors," the archbishop wrote to the treatment center's director in July 1986.
The following year, in a letter to Mahony about bringing Garcia back to work in the archdiocese, Curry said he was worried that victims in Los Angeles might see the priest and call police.
"[T]here are numerous — maybe twenty — adolescents or young adults that Peter was involved with in a first degree felony manner. The possibility of one of these seeing him is simply too great," Curry wrote in May 1987.
Garcia returned to the Los Angeles area later that year; the archdiocese did not give him a ministerial assignment because he refused to take medication to suppress his sexual urges. He left the priesthood in 1989, according to the church.
Garcia was never prosecuted and died in 2009. The files show he admitted to a therapist that he had sexually abused boys "on and off" since his 1966 ordination. He assured church officials his victims were unlikely to come forward because of their immigration status. In at least one case, according to a church memo, he threatened to have a boy he had raped deported if he went to police.
The memos are from personnel files for 14 priests submitted to a judge on behalf of a man who claims he was abused by one of the priests, Father Nicholas Aguilar Rivera. The man's attorney, Anthony De Marco, wrote in court papers the files show "a practice of thwarting law enforcement investigations" by the archdiocese. It's not always clear from the records whether the church followed through on all its discussions about eluding police, but in some cases, such as Garcia’s, it did.
Mahony, who retired in 2011, has apologized repeatedly for errors in handling abuse allegations. In a statement Monday, he apologized once again and recounted meetings he's had with about 90 victims of abuse.
"I have a 3 x 5 card for every victim I met with on the altar of my small chapel. I pray for them every single day," he wrote. "As I thumb through those cards I often pause as I am reminded of each personal story and the anguish that accompanies that life story."
"It remains my daily and fervent prayer that God's grace will flood the heart and soul of each victim, and that their life-journey continues forward with ever greater healing," he added. "I am sorry."
Curry did not return calls seeking comment. He currently serves as the archdiocese's auxiliary bishop for Santa Barbara.
The confidential files of at least 75 more accused abusers are slated to become public in coming weeks under the terms of a 2007 civil settlement with more than 500 victims. A private mediator had ordered the names of the church hierarchy redacted from those documents, but after objections from The Times and the Associated Press, a Superior Court judge ruled that the names of Mahony, Curry and others in supervisory roles should not be blacked out.
Garcia's was one of three cases in 1987 in which top church officials discussed ways they could stymie law enforcement. In a letter about Father Michael Wempe, who had acknowledged using a 12-year-old parishioner as what a church official called his "sex partner," Curry recounted extensive conversations with the priest about potential criminal prosecution.
"He is afraid ... records will be sought by the courts at some time and that they could convict him," Curry wrote to Mahony. "He is very aware that what he did comes within the scope of criminal law."
Curry proposed Wempe could go to an out-of-state diocese "if need be." He called it "surprising" that a church-paid counselor hadn't reported Wempe to police and wrote that he and Wempe "agreed it would be better if Mike did not return to him."
Perhaps, Curry added, the priest could be sent to "a lawyer who is also a psychiatrist" thereby putting "the reports under the protection of privilege."
Curry expressed similar concerns to Mahony about Father Michael Baker, who had admitted his abuse of young boys during a private 1986 meeting with the archbishop.
In a memo about Baker's return to ministry, Curry wrote, "I see a difficulty here, in that if he were to mention his problem with child abuse it would put the therapist in the position of having to report him … he cannot mention his past problem."
Mahony's response to the memo was handwritten across the bottom of the page: "Sounds good —please proceed!!" Two decades would pass before authorities gathered enough information to convict Baker and Wempe of abusing boys.
Federal and state prosecutors have investigated possible conspiracy cases against the archdiocese hierarchy. Former Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said in 2007 that his probe into the conduct of high-ranking church officials was on hold until his prosecutors could access the personnel files of all the abusers. The U.S. attorney's office convened a grand jury in 2009, but no charges resulted.
During those investigations, the church was forced by judges to turn over some but not all of the records to prosecutors. The district attorney's office has said its prosecutors plan to review priest personnel files as they are released.
Mahony was appointed archbishop in 1985 after five years leading the Stockton diocese. While there, he had dealt with three allegations of clergy abuse, including one case in which he personally reported the priest to police.
In Los Angeles, he tapped Curry, an Irish-born priest, as vicar of clergy. The records show that sex abuse allegations were handled almost exclusively by the archbishop and his vicar. Memos that crossed their desks included graphic details, such as one letter from another priest accusing Garcia of tying up and raping a young boy in Lancaster.
Mahony personally phoned the priests' therapists about their progress, wrote the priests encouraging letters and dispatched Curry to visit them at a New Mexico facility, Servants of the Paraclete, that treated pedophile priests.
"Each of you there at Jemez Springs is very much in my prayers and I call you to mind each day during my celebration of the Eucharist," Mahony wrote to Wempe.
The month after he was named archbishop, Mahony met with Garcia to discuss his molestation of boys, according to a letter the priest wrote while in therapy. Mahony instructed him to be "very low key" and assured him "no one was looking at him for any criminal action," Garcia recalled in a letter to an official at Servants of the Paraclete.
In a statement Monday on behalf of the archdiocese, a lawyer for the church said its policy in the late 1980s was to let victims and their families decide whether to go to the police.
"Not surprisingly, the families of victims frequently did not wish to report to police and have their child become the center of a public prosecution," lawyer J. Michael Hennigan wrote.
He acknowledged memos written in those years "sometimes focused more on the needs of the perpetrator than on the serious harm that had been done to the victims."
"That is part of the past," Hennigan wrote. "We are embarrassed and at times ashamed by parts of the past. But we are proud of our progress, which is continuing."
Hennigan said that the years in which Mahony dealt with Garcia were "a period of deepening understanding of the nature of the problem of sex abuse both here and in our society in general" and that the archdiocese subsequently changed completely its approach to reports of abuse.
"We now have retired FBI agents who thoroughly investigate every allegation, even anonymous calls. We aggressively assist in the criminal prosecution of offenders," Hennigan wrote.
Mahony and Curry have been questioned under oath in depositions numerous times about their handling of molestation cases. The men, however, have never been asked about attempts to stymie law enforcement, because the personnel files documenting those discussions were only provided to civil attorneys in recent months. De Marco, the lawyer who filed the records in civil court this month, asked a judge last week to order Curry and Mahony to submit to new depositions “regarding their actions, knowledge and intent as referenced in these files.” A hearing on that request is set for February.
In a 2010 deposition, Mahony acknowledged the archdiocese had never called police to report sexual abuse by a priest before 2000. He said church officials were unable to do so because they didn't know the names of the children harmed.
"In my experience, you can only call the police when you've got victims you can talk to," Mahony said.
When an attorney for an alleged victim suggested "the right thing to do" would have been to summon police immediately, Mahony replied, "Well, today it would. But back then that isn't the way those matters were approached."
Since clergy weren't legally required to report suspected child abuse until 1997, Mahony said, the people who should have alerted police about pedophiles like Baker and Wempe were victims' therapists or other "mandatory reporters" of child abuse.
"Psychologists, counselors … they were also the first ones to learn [of abuse] so they were normally the ones who made the reports," he said.
In Garcia's 451-page personnel file, one voice decried the church's failures to protect the victims and condemned the priest as someone who deserved to be behind bars. Father Arturo Gomez, an associate pastor at a predominantly Spanish-speaking church near Olvera Street, wrote to a regional bishop in 1989, saying he was "angry" and "disappointed" at the church's failure to help Garcia's victims. He expressed shock that the bishop, Juan A. Arzube, had told the family of two of the boys that Garcia had thought of taking his own life.
"You seemed to be at that moment more concern[ed] for the criminal rather than the victum! (sic)" Gomez wrote to Arzube in 1989.
Gomez urged church leaders to identify others who may have been harmed by Garcia and to get them help, but was told they didn't know how.
"If I was the father … Peter Garcia would be in prison now; and I would probably have begun a lawsuit against the archdiocese," the priest wrote in the letter. "The parents … of the two boys are more forgiving and compassionate than I would be."
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Samsung (005930) is well known for its clever ads mocking Apple (AAPL) and its fans, but the company has decided to pick on a less powerful target in its newest ad that takes swipes RIM (RIMM) and its BlackBerry smartphones. The ad revolves around an office that is implementing its own bring-your-own-device policy and is meant to show that both the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II are ideal business phones that can enable greater creativity. While most workers in the ad happily switch to Samsung smartphones after the BYOD policy is put in place, one of them insists on clinging to his BlackBerry, which prompts one of his coworkers to ask, “Are you finally going to retire that thing?” The full video is posted below.
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