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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President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
President Barack Obama celebrated his second inauguration Monday night with a private party following his very public day.
The Obama family – including wife Michelle and daughters Malia and Sasha – headed to the White House later on in the evening for a black tie affair, which included celebrities and political stars, as well as a late night buffet of desserts.
The Obamas were surrounded by 300 family and friends, including Bill Clinton (without his wife Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), John Kerry and Colin Powell. Lucky celebs who landed an invite were Swizz Beatz and wife Alicia Keys – who shared her inauguration photos with PEOPLE – Usher, John Legend and fiancée Chrissy Teigen, Jennifer Hudson, Katy Perry and John Mayer (who were "quite cute," says a source), Kelly Clarkson and her fiancé Brandon Blackstock, Eva Longoria, Kerry Washington and country star Brad Paisley.
Not in attendance: Jay-Z and Beyoncé, who according to a source, flew straight to New Orleans, presumably for Super Bowl rehearsals after their inaugural duties.
At the star-studded celebration, there were three performances during the lively evening by Eric Benet, Ledisi and Janelle Monae. Plus, DJ Cassidy spun tunes. (This is the second time Cassidy has deejayed at the White House: He did Obama's 50th birthday as well.)
"The whole family stayed until the end, about 2 a.m.," says a guest.
NEW YORK (AP) — Sniffling, groggy and afraid she had caught the flu, Diana Zavala dragged herself in to work anyway for a day she felt she couldn't afford to miss.
A school speech therapist who works as an independent contractor, she doesn't have paid sick days. So the mother of two reported to work and hoped for the best — and was aching, shivering and coughing by the end of the day. She stayed home the next day, then loaded up on medicine and returned to work.
"It's a balancing act" between physical health and financial well-being, she said.
An unusually early and vigorous flu season is drawing attention to a cause that has scored victories but also hit roadblocks in recent years: mandatory paid sick leave for a third of civilian workers — more than 40 million people — who don't have it.
Supporters and opponents are particularly watching New York City, where lawmakers are weighing a sick leave proposal amid a competitive mayoral race.
Pointing to a flu outbreak that the governor has called a public health emergency, dozens of doctors, nurses, lawmakers and activists — some in surgical masks — rallied Friday on the City Hall steps to call for passage of the measure, which has awaited a City Council vote for nearly three years. Two likely mayoral contenders have also pressed the point.
The flu spike is making people more aware of the argument for sick pay, said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values at Work, which promotes paid sick time initiatives around the country. "There's people who say, 'OK, I get it — you don't want your server coughing on your food,'" she said.
Advocates have cast paid sick time as both a workforce issue akin to parental leave and "living wage" laws, and a public health priority.
But to some business owners, paid sick leave is an impractical and unfair burden for small operations. Critics also say the timing is bad, given the choppy economy and the hardships inflicted by Superstorm Sandy.
Michael Sinensky, an owner of seven bars and restaurants around the city, was against the sick time proposal before Sandy. And after the storm shut down four of his restaurants for days or weeks, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that his insurers have yet to pay, "we're in survival mode."
"We're at the point, right now, where we cannot afford additional social initiatives," said Sinensky, whose roughly 500 employees switch shifts if they can't work, an arrangement that some restaurateurs say benefits workers because paid sick time wouldn't include tips.
Employees without sick days are more likely to go to work with a contagious illness, send an ill child to school or day care and use hospital emergency rooms for care, according to a 2010 survey by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that a lack of sick time helped spread 5 million cases of flu-like illness during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.
To be sure, many employees entitled to sick time go to work ill anyway, out of dedication or at least a desire to project it. But the work-through-it ethic is shifting somewhat amid growing awareness about spreading sickness.
"Right now, where companies' incentives lie is butting right up against this concern over people coming into the workplace, infecting others and bringing productivity of a whole company down," said John A. Challenger, CEO of employer consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Paid sick day requirements are often popular in polls, but only four places have them: San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and the state of Connecticut. The specific provisions vary.
Milwaukee voters approved a sick time requirement in 2008, but the state Legislature passed a law blocking it. Philadelphia's mayor vetoed a sick leave measure in 2011; lawmakers have since instituted a sick time requirement for businesses with city contracts. Voters rejected a paid sick day measure in Denver in 2011.
In New York, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer's proposal would require up to five paid sick days a year at businesses with at least five employees. It wouldn't include independent contractors, such as Zavala, who supports the idea nonetheless.
The idea boasts such supporters as feminist Gloria Steinem and "Sex and the City" actress Cynthia Nixon, as well as a majority of City Council members and a coalition of unions, women's groups and public health advocates. But it also faces influential opponents, including business groups, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has virtually complete control over what matters come to a vote.
Quinn, who is expected to run for mayor, said she considers paid sick leave a worthy goal but doesn't think it would be wise to implement it in a sluggish economy. Two of her likely opponents, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Comptroller John Liu, have reiterated calls for paid sick leave in light of the flu season.
While the debate plays out, Emilio Palaguachi is recovering from the flu and looking for a job. The father of four was abruptly fired without explanation earlier this month from his job at a deli after taking a day off to go to a doctor, he said. His former employer couldn't be reached by telephone.
"I needed work," Palaguachi said after Friday's City Hall rally, but "I needed to see the doctor because I'm sick."
___
Associated Press writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.
___
Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz
The summer before Kenna Castillo started sixth grade at Sierra Madre Middle School, education officials ordered demolition of the aging campus to make way for a brand-new school.
More than 2 1/2 years later, construction has yet to start, and Kenna is wrapping up eighth grade in a hodgepodge of trailers on a dirt lot.
On Tuesday, Pasadena Unified school board members ordered yet another delay for the rebirth of Sierra Madre Middle School after bids for the $22.5-million project came in nearly $9 million over budget.
That has Kenna's mom doubting that even her fifth-grade son will be able to enjoy the school her daughter was promised.
"I'm not holding my breath. For most of us working to get this school built, our kids aren't going to see it," said Melissa Castillo, an organizer and past president of Sierra Madre's PTA.
But school officials say construction will break ground later this year, after a new call for bids on a plan that incorporates cost-cutting design adjustments goes out to a wider pool of contractors in April. The initial request for proposals attracted just six bids from eight general contractors who were pre-qualified for major construction projects.
"We are totally committed to building this school," school board President Renatta Cooper said. "I'm sorry as can be that the middle school has taken so long to build, but we can't afford to spend more on it than it should cost. We have to be wise fiscal stewards."
Plans for the Sierra Madre campus include the construction of 22 classrooms, two science labs and a computer lab, as well as a new gym, library, cafeteria and parking area.
The renovation effort is one of 28 projects funded by the $350-million Measure TT school bond approved by voters in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre in 2008.
Troubles at Sierra Madre Middle School began in July 2010 with demolition of the old campus before California's Division of the State Architect had issued approvals for new buildings.
Cooper said former Pasadena Unified supervisors had sold school board members on an early demolition under the pretense that they could save money by using workers already engaged in other district construction projects.
A year later, Pasadena officials were accusing the Division of the State Architect, which must sign off on all public school construction plans, of dragging out the approval process.
The agency countered that state workers were waiting on Pasadena to submit design changes needed to meet regulations. Local officials denied that any design changes were needed at that time.
Plans for the campus weren't approved until fall 2012, school district Chief Finance Officer John Pappalardo said.
Pappalardo took charge of Measure TT projects last month after board members placed the district's chief facilities officer on leave and suspended a pact with a contractor overseeing some work pending an investigation into the use of bond funds.
Officials have declined to specify the nature of the investigation, which is ongoing.
Staff upheaval and budget reductions for most bond-funded projects, meanwhile, have some Sierra Madre parents accusing officials of delaying construction until they can cancel the project by claiming lack of funds.
That's what happened to Blair Middle School, which the school district demolished in 2005 and failed to rebuild before exhausting a $240-million bond approved in 1997. The new Blair campus was built later using Measure TT proceeds.
Pappalardo said about $111 million has been spent on or committed to school renovations under the current bond program, with some $274 million in Measure TT proceeds and other construction funding still left in the pipeline.
A South African court on Monday said a Nigerian man was guilty of masterminding twin car bombings in Nigeria in 2010. The double bombing in Nigeria’s capital killed at least 12 people and wounded three dozen. The defendant, Henry Okah, faces a minimum sentence of life in prison, said the prosecutor, Shaun Abrahams. “This is clearly indicative that South Africa cannot be seen as a safe haven for international terrorists,” Mr. Abrahams said. Mr. Okah was arrested in Johannesburg one day after the bombings. He is a leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.
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.
[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 OS walkthrough, BlackBerry Z10 pricing]
Although she was a singles figure skater throughout her successful career, Michelle Kwan did have one steadfast partner on the ice – fashion designer Vera Wang.
"I wore so many skating dresses designed by her, whole skating shows and everything," Kwan, 32, tells PEOPLE. "I have a long relationship with her."
And that made picking a wedding dress designer a fairly easy decision.
For Kwan's Rhode Island nuptials on Jan. 19 to Clay Pell, 31, Wang put plenty of consideration into her creation.
"She is marrying someone whose family has a political history, and Michelle is living and working in Washington, D.C.," the designer says. "[The dress] had to have a certain dignity and a certain classicism, and I think it was a lot about a new way of looking at tradition."
So Wang created an ivory, strapless mermaid gown for Kwan, made with layers of silk organza and featuring lace appliqué.
"The fact that it's got an inordinate amount of handwork in terms of lace is really a tribute to the art of hand-piecing lace," Wang says. "There is a princess-slash-queenly level of sophistication and quiet without sacrificing a lot of detail."
To complement the formal wedding gown, Kwan asked Wang what she thought of designing a second dress for the reception. "She said, 'Yeah, I got it,' " Kwan says. "She said, 'First dance, yes, and then you've got to change into something else.' "
Her history with the skater was not lost on Wang. "I'm really very honored and very thrilled that a, Michelle has found the love of her life and b, that I am the one to dress her for that special day just as I did for world championships, national championships, and Olympics," she said. "It's just the ongoing saga of our friendship."
For more on Kwan's wedding, including photos and details from the ceremony, pick up a copy of next week's PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday
NEW YORK (AP) — Sniffling, groggy and afraid she had caught the flu, Diana Zavala dragged herself in to work anyway for a day she felt she couldn't afford to miss.
A school speech therapist who works as an independent contractor, she doesn't have paid sick days. So the mother of two reported to work and hoped for the best — and was aching, shivering and coughing by the end of the day. She stayed home the next day, then loaded up on medicine and returned to work.
"It's a balancing act" between physical health and financial well-being, she said.
An unusually early and vigorous flu season is drawing attention to a cause that has scored victories but also hit roadblocks in recent years: mandatory paid sick leave for a third of civilian workers — more than 40 million people — who don't have it.
Supporters and opponents are particularly watching New York City, where lawmakers are weighing a sick leave proposal amid a competitive mayoral race.
Pointing to a flu outbreak that the governor has called a public health emergency, dozens of doctors, nurses, lawmakers and activists — some in surgical masks — rallied Friday on the City Hall steps to call for passage of the measure, which has awaited a City Council vote for nearly three years. Two likely mayoral contenders have also pressed the point.
The flu spike is making people more aware of the argument for sick pay, said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values at Work, which promotes paid sick time initiatives around the country. "There's people who say, 'OK, I get it — you don't want your server coughing on your food,'" she said.
Advocates have cast paid sick time as both a workforce issue akin to parental leave and "living wage" laws, and a public health priority.
But to some business owners, paid sick leave is an impractical and unfair burden for small operations. Critics also say the timing is bad, given the choppy economy and the hardships inflicted by Superstorm Sandy.
Michael Sinensky, an owner of seven bars and restaurants around the city, was against the sick time proposal before Sandy. And after the storm shut down four of his restaurants for days or weeks, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that his insurers have yet to pay, "we're in survival mode."
"We're at the point, right now, where we cannot afford additional social initiatives," said Sinensky, whose roughly 500 employees switch shifts if they can't work, an arrangement that some restaurateurs say benefits workers because paid sick time wouldn't include tips.
Employees without sick days are more likely to go to work with a contagious illness, send an ill child to school or day care and use hospital emergency rooms for care, according to a 2010 survey by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that a lack of sick time helped spread 5 million cases of flu-like illness during the 2009 swine flu outbreak.
To be sure, many employees entitled to sick time go to work ill anyway, out of dedication or at least a desire to project it. But the work-through-it ethic is shifting somewhat amid growing awareness about spreading sickness.
"Right now, where companies' incentives lie is butting right up against this concern over people coming into the workplace, infecting others and bringing productivity of a whole company down," said John A. Challenger, CEO of employer consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Paid sick day requirements are often popular in polls, but only four places have them: San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and the state of Connecticut. The specific provisions vary.
Milwaukee voters approved a sick time requirement in 2008, but the state Legislature passed a law blocking it. Philadelphia's mayor vetoed a sick leave measure in 2011; lawmakers have since instituted a sick time requirement for businesses with city contracts. Voters rejected a paid sick day measure in Denver in 2011.
In New York, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer's proposal would require up to five paid sick days a year at businesses with at least five employees. It wouldn't include independent contractors, such as Zavala, who supports the idea nonetheless.
The idea boasts such supporters as feminist Gloria Steinem and "Sex and the City" actress Cynthia Nixon, as well as a majority of City Council members and a coalition of unions, women's groups and public health advocates. But it also faces influential opponents, including business groups, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has virtually complete control over what matters come to a vote.
Quinn, who is expected to run for mayor, said she considers paid sick leave a worthy goal but doesn't think it would be wise to implement it in a sluggish economy. Two of her likely opponents, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Comptroller John Liu, have reiterated calls for paid sick leave in light of the flu season.
While the debate plays out, Emilio Palaguachi is recovering from the flu and looking for a job. The father of four was abruptly fired without explanation earlier this month from his job at a deli after taking a day off to go to a doctor, he said. His former employer couldn't be reached by telephone.
"I needed work," Palaguachi said after Friday's City Hall rally, but "I needed to see the doctor because I'm sick."
___
Associated Press writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.
___
Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz
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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Free Syrian Army fighters fired on government forces on Sunday at a checkpoint in Damascus. The foreign minister called on rebels to reject foreign intervention.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — As Syrian opposition leaders met in Turkey over the weekend to try to iron out their differences, Syria’s foreign minister invited rebels to join a national dialogue, promising that all those who lay down their arms and forswear foreign intervention will be part of a transitional government.
“I tell the young men who carried arms to change and reform — take part in the dialogue for a new Syria and you will be a partner in building it,” the foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, said in an interview broadcast on Syrian state television on Saturday. “Why carry arms?”
The minister’s offer went a significant step beyond what President Bashar al-Assad proposed in a speech on Jan. 6, when he called for a national dialogue but intimated that those who had taken up arms would be excluded.
To many of those fighting Mr. Assad, any suggestion of talks with a government they hold responsible for the civil war that has killed more than 60,000 people is absurd, even offensive. Even those in the opposition who reject the use of weapons refused to engage with Mr. Assad in the talks he proposed.
Yet at least some in the Syrian government appear to be aiming to wrest the political initiative from Mr. Assad’s opponents, who remain divided — between exile leaders abroad and fighters on the ground, between secularists and Islamists, and between the armed and unarmed opposition. Meanwhile, those Syrians who are still on the fence increasingly worry about violence with no end in sight, and the world faces the specter of a failed state in a strategic area of the Middle East.
Still, in a government that was never transparent and has become even murkier during the conflict of nearly two years, it was unclear whether Mr. Moallem spoke with full authority. Broadcasting the speech on state television appeared to give it more weight than other calls for dialogue offered by government figures like Vice President Farouk al-Shara, who proposed an inclusive dialogue in an interview with a Lebanese newspaper in December.
Most rebels would probably be reluctant to trust any assurances that they could safely lay down arms from a government whose harsh crackdown on peaceful protesters set off the conflict in March 2011.
The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the opposition exile group formed in November at the behest of Western and some Persian Gulf nations, has said that Mr. Assad’s ouster or resignation is a precondition for talks.
The coalition met for a second day in Istanbul, but by Sunday evening there was no word of a consensus on the selection of a prime minister in waiting, with some members backing former Prime Minister Riad Hijab, the highest-ranking defector, and others arguing that he was too close to the government.
The group was also expected to discuss what it considers to be the broken promises of the United States, the gulf countries and others, which had urged it to reorganize and expand its membership in return for the prospect of increased aid.
A senior official from Iran, Mr. Assad’s only Middle Eastern ally, on Sunday offered one of the strongest recent defenses of the Syrian president, saying that there should be changes but that Mr. Assad should not be forced out.
“We believe that there should be reforms emanating from the will of the Syrian people, but without resorting to violence” and American aid, Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior aide to Iran’s supreme leader, said in an interview with the Lebanese satellite television channel Al Mayadeen.
In response to a question about whether the ouster of Mr. Assad was a “red line,” Mr. Velayati said: “Yes, it is so. But this does not mean that we ignore the Syrian people’s right” to choose their own rulers.
France’s foreign minister announced that the Syrian opposition and its foreign allies would meet in Paris on Jan. 28 and reiterated calls for Mr. Assad to step down.
“The situation is horrific, and Bashar must go as fast as possible,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in a radio interview, Reuters reported.
Agence France-Presse reported that Mr. Assad’s mother, Anisa Makhlouf, was living in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, quoting Syrians living in the Emirates in a report that confirmed earlier rumors that she had left Syria with her daughter Bushra, whose husband, Assef Shawkat, was one of four senior security officials killed in a bombing in Damascus in July.
Ayman Abdel Nour, a longtime critic of the Syrian government and the leader of a new group called Syrian Christians for Democracy, called Ms. Makhlouf’s departure an indication of “Assad losing support even from within his family,” the French news agency reported.
