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.”
Daniel Vasella, the longtime chairman and former chief executive of Novartis, the Swiss drug maker, plans to step down next month, the company said on Wednesday, when it also reported a jump in fourth-quarter profit.
The board is proposing that Jörg Reinhardt, the chairman of the German rival Bayer HealthCare, succeed Mr. Vasella. Joseph Jimenez will remain as chief executive.
Novartis said that its profit rose in the fourth quarter but that sales were flat because of price cuts and competition from cheaper drugs. Net income was $2.08 billion, compared with $1.21 billion in the period a year earlier, when it took a $900 million charge from ending its clinical study into wider uses of the hypertension drug Tekturna.
The results were slightly above most analysts’ expectations.
Mr. Jimenez said Novartis had a strong range of new products coming from research and development — including an infant vaccine for meningitis — and predicted net sales to grow after 2013.
Fourth-quarter sales were almost flat at $14.83 billion, compared with $14.78 billion in the period a year earlier, and sales in 2013 are expected to suffer from the expiration of patents on the hypertension drug Diovan.
Novartis said Gilenya, its once-a-day pill against multiple sclerosis, attained what it called “blockbuster status,” with full-year sales of $1.2 billion in 2012.
Novartis expects the Food and Drug Administration to carry out an inspection in the coming months at its plant in Lincoln, Neb., which was shut down at the end of 2011 after officials found numerous problems with quality control. Mr. Jimenez told reporters in a conference call that in the meantime, the company was relying on third-party manufacturers to ensure the continued supply of products like Excedrin across the United States.
Separately, Abbott Laboratories said on Wednesday that its profit fell 35 percent in the fourth quarter on costs from the spinoff of its drug business into the new company AbbVie.
Abbott completed the split on Jan. 1, leaving it with a business model built around generic drugs, medical implants and nutritional formula. AbbVie will market the company’s branded prescription drugs, including the popular anti-inflammatory drug Humira.
In Abbott’s last quarter as a combined unit, the company earned $1.05 billion, or 66 cents a share, compared with $1.62 billion, or $1.02 a share, in the period a year earlier.
Earnings were weighed down by a number of one-time charges, including $265 million in separation costs. Excluding that and other charges, Abbott would have earned $1.51 a share. Revenue increased 4 percent, to $10.84 billion.
Analysts polled by FactSet expected, on average, earnings per share of 70 cents a share on revenue of $10.61 billion.
Finally, Amgen, the maker of the anemia treatments Aranesp and Epogen, posted a 16 percent drop in fourth-quarter profit as higher costs for production, marketing, research and other items offset higher sales for many of its biologic medicines. The results fell short of Wall Street expectations.
Net income was $788 million, or $1.01 a share, compared with $934 million, or $1.08 a share, in the period a year earlier.
Excluding one-time items, net income would have been $1.40 a share, 4 cents less than analysts expected, on average, according to FactSet.
Revenue rose 11 percent, to $4.42 billion.
Sales were led by the immune disorder treatment Enbrel, up 23 percent, to $1.16 billion, and Neulasta and Neupogen for fighting infection in cancer patients. They had a combined $1.31 billion in sales, down 1 percent.
Sales of Aranesp and Epogen fell 9 percent and 1 percent, to a combined $968 million.
Several newer drugs, like Prolia, Xgeva and Sensipar, had double-digit jumps in revenue.
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."
LG is already prepping its next handset, the Optimus G Pro, for launch, even though the Optimus G — the basis for the Google’s Nexus 4 — appeared just five months ago and is still rolling out in 50 new markets.
The Optimus G Pro is slated for an April release date, according to Japanese carrier NT DoCoMo. The company detailed its smartphone lineup, which includes the Optimus G Pro, on Tuesday. It’s remarkable, because LG hasn’t formally announced the phone yet, and the rumor is that won’t happen until Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.
According to NT DoCoMo, the Optimus G Pro will feature a 5-inch, 1080-display, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 quad-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of built-in storage and 4G LTE connectivity. It’ll run Google’s Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system. Since LG hasn’t officially acknowledged the phone’s existence, we don’t know for certain whether it’ll land in the United States. But, the fact the Optimus G is sold here by AT&T and Sprint — and the Nexus 4 has gotten all kinds of critical acclaim — it’s a safe bet the Optimus G Pro will arrive on our shores sometime this year.
(Reuters) – Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber with his hordes of fans known of Beliebers became the King of Twitter on Tuesday, topping fellow pop star Lady Gaga as the user with the most followers.
Data from TwitterCounter.com showed that the 18-year-old Canadian singer jumped into the lead with 33.33 million followers, topping Lady Gaga’s 33.32 million and ending her two-and-a-half year rule of the microblogging site.
A spokesman from TwitterCounter.com said Lady Gaga has held the top slot on Twitter since August 2010 when she overtook U.S. pop star Britney Spears.
Bieber rose to fame as a baby-faced pop star singing love songs such as “Baby” after being discovered on YouTube in 2008. He has released two No. 1 albums in the past 18 months – the holiday-themed “Under the Mistletoe” and “Believe.”
Bieber was named by Forbes magazine in 2012 as the third-most powerful celebrity in the world and his huge following on Twitter was cited as a reason why marketers need to take notice of the 140-character micro-blogging site.
Lady Gaga has dropped to second in Twitter followed by singer Katy Perry in third with 31.49 million followers then Rihanna and Barack Obama with 26.17 million followers. Britney Spears has slipped to sixth place.
(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith; editing by Patricia Reaney)
(You can see the Twitter top 100 list http://twittercounter.com/pages/100)
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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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LONDON — Last year, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain used his appearance at the World Economic Forum to vent frustration with the European Union, listing some of the policies he would ditch if he could throw off Europe’s regulatory shackles.
“In the name of social protection, the E.U. has promoted unnecessary measures that impose burdens on businesses and governments, and can destroy jobs,” he argued, adding a list of directives that he would like to scrap.
One year later, Mr. Cameron is following through on that pledge. He is promising to renegotiate Britain’s ties to the 27-nation bloc, forge a new and looser relationship, and is expected to say on Wednesday that he would put the outcome of those talks to a referendum.
A speech on Europe, planned for last week, was postponed because of the crisis in Algeria. It has been rescheduled for Wednesday, ahead of a possible visit by Mr. Cameron to Davos, Switzerland.
It was unclear whether Mr. Cameron would attend Davos this year and speak on the same theme. But his tough line on Europe echoes growing British disenchantment with a bloc whose single currency union, which the British never joined, has been in crisis for three years.
Yet, supposing Mr. Cameron were to succeed in scaling down Britain’s involvement, some central questions will arise. Can Britain play a more limited role in Brussels and still retain significant influence there? And what might that mean for Britain’s full participation in one of the world’s biggest single markets?
In their 40-year history of engagement with a unifying Europe, Britons have never embraced the ideal of unity; instead they have seen their ties to the Continent in pragmatic terms. Increasingly, London’s conclusion seems to be that the costs in terms of regulatory burdens and financial contributions are not outweighed by clear benefits.
Mr. Cameron argues that to stabilize support for the European Union in Britain, the relationship must be loosened and focused more on the bloc’s single market of almost 500 million people.
Britain, which is in the second tier of European Union membership, not only stayed out of the euro — and unlike most of the others on the sidelines has no intention of joining — but also does not participate in Europe’s Schengen passport-free travel zone. The British government also announced last year that it would opt out of a range of justice and security policy areas.
A group of Conservative lawmakers argued last week for five treaty changes, including those that would allow any country to block new European Union legislation on financial services, and would repatriate social and employment laws to national capitals. Britain’s euro skeptics are also blunt in their criticism of the bloc’s agricultural, fisheries and regional aid programs
Many would ideally like to keep just one element of European Union membership, access to the single market, though achieving such status looks highly improbable.
Even those who sympathize with Mr. Cameron’s stance argue that a more detached position comes at the price of reduced influence, though they contend the cost of not changing would be higher. They also argue that leverage in some of the policy areas is of limited value anyway.
“There is a trade-off, there is no doubt,” said Mats Persson, director of Open Europe, a research organization that favors a change in Britain’s relationship with the union. “If you reduce the level of E.U. influence in the British economy and society, you will lose some influence over some policy areas.”
But Mr. Persson argues that “if there is no change in Britain’s E.U. relationship, its membership is in question, which would really reduce its influence.”
Others worry that Britain is weakening its own position. Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a research institute in London, says that already “British influence in Brussels is at its lowest level in the 25 years I have been following the E.U.”
And critics argue that standing back from more policy arenas would increase the country’s sense of alienation from the bloc and fuel popular sentiment that things are stacked against Britain. A more detached relationship could also prove a disadvantage in the deal-making culture that prevails in Brussels.
Officially, decisions on legislation in Brussels are made by national governments under a complex series of rules before going to the European Parliament, whose approval is also required. In some cases, like tax policy, all 27 national governments need to agree, though in many others a weighted majority is required.
But relatively few decisions are actually put to a vote by governments. In practice, countries strike informal agreements and compromises, often trading support on one issue for a reciprocal agreement, sometimes in an unrelated area of policy.
For example, Britain once supported Germany, which wanted to water down planned rules on takeovers, in exchange for help from Berlin to soften new European Union legislation on workers’ rights.
The fewer areas in which a country participates, the less influence it has to barter.
Something similar affects another area of unofficial influence: control of crucial positions in Brussels. When the last round of top European Union jobs was decided, Tony Blair, a former British prime minister, was a contender to become the president of the European Council, the body in which national governments meet. But Britain’s absence from the euro currency and the Schengen zone made this a nonstarter.
The prime minister at the time, Gordon Brown, wanted a top economic post for Britain in the European Commission, the executive of the bloc. Instead, he got a foreign policy position for Catherine Ashton, reflecting the fact that Britain remained an engaged player in that area.
The euro has dominated the agenda in Brussels for the last three years, but Britons have reduced prospects of making big careers in this policy area because London has no power to lobby for them.
“If you are in the Treasury in London, why the hell would you go to Brussels?” said one European Union official not authorized to speak publicly.
That trend now looks likely to extend to justice and security policy. Britain recently held the most senior position in the justice and home affairs directorate of the European Commission, partly because the British used to be enthusiastic about cooperation in that forum. A Briton, Rob Wainwright, is currently the director of Europol, the bloc’s law enforcement agency.
But given the government’s decision to distance itself, it will be harder for Britons to get such top jobs in the future.
Declining career prospects for British officials are reflected in staff recruitment figures, released in April 2011. They showed that the European Commission now employed more Poles than Britons, though Britain has a larger population and joined the European Union’s forerunner more than 30 years before Polish accession in 2004.
Britain has fewer than half France’s number of European Commission officials, and the situation seems destined to deteriorate because relatively few Britons are applying for entry-level jobs.
All this risks creating a downward spiral in British influence, which the country would need to counter by being more effective in the areas in which it remains.
“I think Britain still could have clout in more limited areas if it keeps friends and allies,” Mr. Grant said. “But the fact that we are not, for example, so engaged in justice and home affairs weakens our bargaining power across policy areas and weakens the career prospects of British officials.”
Mr. Grant added, “There has been a steady diminution in the last few years, which you could plot on a graph: the more you distance yourself the less influence you have.”
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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It’s easy to guess what The Hovercraft was built for just by looking at it: The short swallowtail and the big blunted nose all scream “powder hound.”
I did my first series of tests in early December up in Lake Tahoe, and there was a lot more crust, ice and grooms than powder, so I took it out without expecting much. I got waaay more than I figured I would: The board held its edge just fine in the groomers, but there was no surprise there. The shock came when I crossed over to the shaded side of the mountain, when the soft groomers turned into icy crud. I was fully expecting the Jones to sketch out and leave me butt-checking all over the place, but The Hovercraft’s edge sliced right into the ice and held it as well as it did the soft stuff. No transition, no adjustments — the board just went from soft snow to ice without skipping a beat.
It was so odd that it took me most of the morning before I really trusted it. But by lunchtime, I was flying down the mountain at speeds I wouldn’t dare with any of the other boards we tested. The board’s great bite is thanks to the Jones’ underfoot camber and so-called Magne-Traction edges, which essentially act like a serrated blade to bite into hard snow. These features combine to give the board a huge amount of precision and control in hard snow.
A few weeks later, I was finally able to take it out on Mt. Shasta’s backcountry to hit some deep stuff. It excelled there as well (entirely as expected) thanks to the rockered and blunted nose, which let the board float on top of the soft stuff, while the short, stiff tail made it easy to kick back and keep the nose up.
Bottom line: I’ve never seen a board perform so well in such a wide range of snow conditions. During my multi-mountain testing session of The Hovercraft snowboard, I let one of my friends ride it. He echoed my own thoughts with one simple statement: “This thing just does whatever you ask it to do.”
WIRED Simply some of the best all-mountain performance I’ve seen. Great float on powder, plus a locked-in grip on ice and crud. Seamlessly transitions from soft to hard snow. Shockingly lightweight construction.
TIRED Blunt nose and swallowtail design means you’re not gonna be riding a lot of switch.
LONDON (Reuters) – Flamboyant British film director Michael Winner, best known for the “Death Wish” series of the 1970s and 80s, died at his London home on Monday. He was 77.
In a statement released to the media, his wife Geraldine said: “A light has gone out in my life.”
Winner, who reinvented himself in recent years as an outspoken restaurant critic in the Sunday Times, had been ill for some time, and revealed last summer that specialists had given him 18 months to live due to heart and liver problems.
He said in a later interview that he had considered going to the Dignitas assisted-dying clinic in Switzerland.
Winner’s movie career spanned some 40 years and more than 30 feature films, including the successful Death Wish series starring Charles Bronson as a vigilante out to avenge family murders.
He worked with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum and Faye Dunaway, but his success was overshadowed by a divisive image in Britain as a pompous bon viveur who did nothing to hide his wealth.
According to Winner’s official online biography, actor Michael Caine once said of him: “You are a complete and utter fraud. You come on like a bombastic, ill-tempered monster. It’s not the side I see of you. I see a man who has a tremendous artistic eye.”
In its obituary, the Daily Telegrah wrote: “Flamboyant, often boorish, he was, in many ways, his own worst enemy.”
EARLY INTEREST IN SHOWBUSINESS
Born in London in 1935, Winner took an early interest in showbusiness, writing an entertainment column aged just 14 which was published in 30 local newspapers.
According to his website, he studied law and economics at Cambridge University and worked as a film critic as a teenager before entering the world of movies full time in 1956 when he started marking documentaries and shorts.
In the 1960s Winner focused on comedies like “The Jokers” and “I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Isname”, both of which starred Oliver Reed.
The following decade he moved on to crime capers like “The Mechanic” and “The Stone Killer” before the commercially successful Death Wish, which was released in 1974 and spawned several sequels.
The original movie proved controversial for its portrayal of urban violence, but Winner defended a film he always knew he would be best remembered for.
“Death Wish was an epoch-making film,” he told the Big Issue charity publication last year. “The first film in the history of cinema where the hero kills other civilians.
“It had never been done before. Since then it has been the most copied film ever. Tarantino put it in his top 10 films ever made.”
He later turned his hand to food criticism in a typically outspoken column for the Sunday Times called Winner’s Dinners. His last column appeared on December 2 and was titled: “Geraldine says it’s time to get down from the table. Goodbye.”
Winner, whose appearance in adverts for insurance coined the catchphrase “Calm down dear, it’s only a commercial”, founded and funded the Police Memorial Trust following the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984.
More than 50 officers have been honored by the trust at sites across the country.
He was reportedly offered an OBE in the Queen’s honors’ list in 2006 for the campaign, but turned it down, saying: “An OBE is what you get if you clean the toilets well at King’s Cross station.”
(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)
Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News
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