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Charles Manson, one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history, died late Sunday at the age of 83, after four and a half decades in prison.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Manson died of natural causes at a hospital in Kern County.

Manson and six of his associates were jailed in 1971 for a series of seven grisly murders in the Los Angeles area over two nights in 1969. Three other of his followers were later jailed for crimes linked to Manson.

Manson was born to an unwed mother in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1934. He spent his entire life in and out of detention for various crimes. He started in his teenage years with sentences for burglary and armed robbery. As an adult, the diminutive Manson was believed to be illiterate, but the chronically unemployed, self-styled songwriter won followers with good looks and charisma. In the mid-1960s he became the leader of a small cult known as the Manson Family whom he led to commit the murders of August 1969.

Manson claimed to be influenced by the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter.” He said he believed the song alluded to an impending race war that would be brought about by the murders he and his followers committed.

Manson’s most well-known victim was the American actress Sharon Tate, who was 26 years old and eight and a half months pregnant when she was stabbed to death by the Manson gang at the home she shared with film director husband Roman Polanski in Benedict Canyon, California. Also killed at the same location were Tate’s acquaintances Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, as well as Steven Parent, a friend of the house caretaker. The murder scene was left in a gruesome mess; one of the Manson gang left the word “pig” written in blood on the front door.

The following night, six members of the Manson gang broke into the Los Feliz (L.A.) home of a wealthy supermarket executive, Leno LaBianca, and killed him and his wife Rosemary. The two sets of murders were not connected by authorities until weeks later.

After law enforcement authorities identified the Manson gang members by their fingerprints, Manson and his followers were tried in a spectacular court proceeding the following year. Manson attempted to represent himself, which resulted in a number of flamboyant legal motions. Ultimately he was assigned an attorney and responded by carving an “X” into his own forehead to demonstrate his displeasure. His followers copied him, disfiguring their own faces as well.

Manson later converted his “X” into a swastika, the symbol of the white-supremacist Nazi Party of Germany.

Manson and his followers were each given death sentences in the 1971 verdict, but the state of California outlawed the death penalty the following year — so most of the Manson family members have remained behind bars despite dozens of parole hearings. Manson himself had been denied parole 12 times.

Manson’s death leaves five members of the Manson Family still in prison, serving out their life sentences: Robert Beausoleil, Bruce Davis, Charles “Tex” Watson, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel. All are in their 60s and 70s. A sixth member, Susan Atkins, died in prison, of brain cancer, in 2009.

At least three other Manson associates have been paroled after serving time for crimes linked to Manson.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was paroled in 2009 after serving 33 years for an attempt on the life of U.S. President Gerald Ford.

Sandra Good was paroled in 1985 after serving nine years for sending threatening letters to more than 150 corporate executives. And Steve Grogan, convicted for helping Manson and Davis kill a ranch hand in 1969, also was paroled in 1985, after drawing a map that helped authorities locate the body of the victim, eight years after the murder.
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Opioid drug abuse, which has ravaged parts of the United States in recent years, cost the economy as much as $504 billion in 2015, White House economists said in a report made public on Sunday.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) said the toll from the opioid crisis represented 2.8 percent of gross domestic product that year.

President Donald Trump last month declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency. While Republican lawmakers said that was an important step in fighting opioid abuse, some critics, including Democrats, said the move was meaningless without additional funding.

The report could be used by the Trump White House to urge Republicans in Congress – who historically have opposed increasing government spending – to provide more funding for fighting the opioid crisis by arguing that the economic losses far outweigh the cost of additional government funding.

Using a combination of statistical models, the CEA said the lost economic output stemming from 33,000 opioid-related deaths in 2015 could be between $221 billion and $431 billion, depending on the methodology used.

In addition, the report looked at the cost of non-fatal opioid usage, estimating a total of $72 billion for 2.4 million people with opioid addictions in 2015. Those costs included medical treatment, criminal justice system expenses and the decreased economic productivity of addicts.

The CEA said its estimate was larger than those of some prior studies because it took a broad look at the value of lives lost to overdoses. The CEA also said its methodology incorporated an adjustment to reflect the fact that opioids were underreported on death certificates.

“The crisis has worsened, especially in terms of overdose deaths which have doubled in the past ten years,” the CEA said.

“While previous studies have focused exclusively on prescription opioids, we consider illicit opioids including heroin as well.”

Opioids, primarily prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl, are fueling the drug overdoses. More than 100 Americans die daily from related overdoses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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One-third of the newest crop of Rhodes Scholars from the United States are African-Americans, the most ever elected in a U.S. Rhodes class.

Of the 100 Rhodes Scholars chosen worldwide for advanced study at Oxford in Britain each year, 32 come from the United States, and this time, 10 of those are African Americans. One of them is Simone Askew, the first black female student to head the Corps of Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy.

Other American scholars include a transgender man and students from U.S. colleges that had never had a student win a spot in the Rhodes program.

The Rhodes Scholar program is the most prestigious available to American students, but it had been criticized for excluding women and blacks until the 1970s.

The scholarship program was set up in 1902 by Cecil Rhodes, a wealthy British philanthropist for whom the nation of Rhodesia was named.  After a civil war removed Rhodesia’s white-minority government, that nation was renamed Zimbabwe.  

 
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Police in Okinawa are investigating a fatal traffic accident, involving an elderly man and a U.S. Marine.

Police say a 61-year-old man died when his vehicle and the serviceman’s truck collided.

Kazuhiko Miyagi of the Okinawa police confirmed that the Marine’s breath test had an alcohol level three times the legal limit.

The Marines have expressed their “sincere condolences” to the victim’s family and have promised to cooperate with the investigation.

The names of the two drivers have not been released.

The U.S. has a number of military bases in Japan with tens of thousands of U.S. troops. Many of the troops are stationed on Okinawa, where there has been longstanding opposition to their presence.

The U.S. military is in Japan as part of a joint security treaty.
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Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen challenged the United States on Sunday to cut all aid after it announced it was ending funding for a general election next year in response to the dissolution of the main opposition party, media reported.

Hun Sen, the strongman who has ruled Cambodia for more than three decades, has taken a strident anti-American line in an increasingly tense run-up to a 2018 election that has included a crackdown on critics, rights groups and independent media.

The United States announced on Friday it was ending funding for the election, and promised more “concrete steps,” after the Supreme Court dissolved the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) at the request of the government, on the grounds it was plotting to seize power.

The party denied the accusation.

The pro-government Fresh News website reported that Hun Sen said in a speech to garment workers that he welcomed the U.S. aid cut and urged it to cut it all.

“Samdech Techo Hun Sen confirmed that cutting U.S. aid won’t kill the government but will only kill a group of people who serve American policies,” Fresh News reported, using Hun Sen’s official title.

It did not identify the people suspected of serving U.S. policies but added: “Hun Sen … welcomes and encourages the U.S. to cut all aid.”

The U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh did not respond to a request for comment.

In April, the U.S. embassy announced a $1.8 million grant to assist local elections this year and next year’s general election.

Chinese support

The U.S. State Department said on its website that U.S. assistance to Cambodia for programs in health, education, governance, economic growth and clearing unexploded ordnance was worth more than $77.6 million in 2014.

However, Chinese support for big ticket projects has allowed Hun Sen to brush off Western criticism of his crackdown on dissent.

China vastly outspends the United States in a country once destroyed by Cold War superpower rivalry, and its money goes on highly visible infrastructure projects and with no demands for political reform.

​Opposition leader jailed

In September, authorities arrested the CNRP leader, Kem Sokha, and charged him with treason over what they said was a plot to take power with U.S. help. He denied any such plot. The U.S. State Department called on Friday for Cambodia to release him and reverse the decision to ban his party.

The court also banned 118 party members from politics for five years.

Police have begun to take down CNRP signs from their offices across the country. Mu Sochua, a senior CNRP member who moved abroad shortly before the party was banned, said Hun Sen was jeopardizing foreign investment.

“Foreign investors serious about investing in Cambodia won’t be coming and are, or will be, looking at an exit if they can’t compete with China’s monopoly in Cambodia because Hun Sen needs to pay back favors to China,” she said.

Western countries, which for decades supported Cambodia’s emergence from war and isolation, have shown little appetite for sanctions in response to the crackdown, but the European Union has raised the possibility of Cambodia losing trade preferences.

Tariff-free access to Europe for Cambodian garments, and similar trade preferences in the United States, have helped Cambodia build a garment industry on low-cost labour. EU and U.S. buyers take some 60 percent of Cambodia’s exports.
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LaToya Cantrell, a City Council member who first gained a political following as she worked to help her hard-hit neighborhood recover from Hurricane Katrina, won a historic election Saturday that made her the first woman mayor of New Orleans.

The Democrat will succeed term-limited fellow Democrat Mitch Landrieu as the city celebrates its 300th anniversary next year. 

“Almost 300 years, my friends. And New Orleans, we’re still making history,” Cantrell told a cheering crowd in her victory speech.

Immigrant wins council seat

Voters also made history in a New Orleans City Council race. 

Cyndi Nguyen defeated incumbent James Gray in an eastern New Orleans district. An immigrant who fled Vietnam with her family when she was 5 in 1975, Nguyen is the organizer of a nonprofit and will be the first Vietnamese-American to serve on the council.

Mayor’s race

In the mayor’s race, Cantrell was the leader in most polls before the runoff election, she never trailed as votes were counted.

Her opponent, former municipal Judge Desiree Charbonnet, conceded the race and congratulated Cantrell late Saturday. Later, complete returns showed Cantrell with 60 percent of the vote. 

The two women led a field of 18 candidates in an October general election to win runoff spots. 

Landrieu earned credit for accelerating the recovery from Hurricane Katrina in an administration cited for reduced blight, improvements in the celebrated tourism economy and economic development that included last week’s announcement that a digital services company is bringing 2,000 new jobs to the city. 

But Cantrell will face lingering problems. Crime is one. Another is dysfunction at the agency overseeing the city’s drinking water system and storm drainage — a problem that became evident during serious flash flooding in August. 

About 32 percent of the city’s voters took part in last month’s election. It was unclear whether turnout would surpass that on Saturday.

Cantrell faced questions about her use of a city credit card. Charbonnet had to fight back against critics who cast her as an insider who would steer city work to cronies.

Katrina a theme

Katrina was a theme in the backstory of both candidates. Cantrell moved to the city from California. Her work as a neighborhood activist in the aftermath of Katrina in the hard-hit Broadmoor neighborhood helped her win a seat on council in 2012. 

Charbonnet, from a well-known political family in New Orleans, was the city’s elected recorder of mortgages before she was a judge. In the campaign she made a point of saying hers was the first city office to re-open after Katrina, providing critical property records to the displaced.

Former state civil court Judge Michael Bagneris, who finished third in last month’s race, endorsed Cantrell, as did Troy Henry, a businessman who also ran for the post last month. 

University of New Orleans political science professor Edward Chervenak said the endorsements appeared to help Cantrell overcome revelations that she had used her city-issued credit card for thousands of dollars in purchases without clear indications that they were for public purposes. The money was eventually reimbursed, but questions lingered about whether she had improperly used city money for personal or campaign expenditures. 
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Editor’s note: November is Native American Heritage Month. First proclaimed by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, it is an opportunity to acknowledge the histories and cultures of Native people across the U.S., highlighting the challenges they have faced, their sacrifices and their contributions.

“Native Americans have influenced every stage of America’s development,” noted President Donald Trump in his October 31, 2017 proclamation. “They helped early European settlers survive and thrive in a new land. They contributed democratic ideas to our constitutional framers. And, for more than 200 years, they have bravely answered the call to defend our Nation, serving with distinction in every branch of the United States Armed Forces.”

This month, VOA will highlight prominent Native Americans and their role in U.S. history, culture and society.

Sitting Bull was born around 1831, a member of the Hunkpapa band of Lakota. The location of his birth is disputed. Most historians say he was born in what is today South Dakota. His descendants cite Montana as his birthplace.

Mentored by his uncle, a healer and spiritual leader, the boy killed his first buffalo at age ten and at 14, distinguished himself during a raid on the Lakota’s traditional enemy, the Crow. He earned the warrior name Thathanka Iyotake, translated as “Sitting Bison Bull.”

Sitting Bull was accepted into at least two warrior societies, the Midnight Strong Heart and Kit Fox, brotherhoods whose members were bound by principles of bravery, generosity and morality. He would also become a wichasha wakan, a spiritual leader whose visions would help guide his people.

By the end of the 1840s, the U.S., then just 25 states, extended only as far the continent’s midpoint. The Plains, considered inhospitable, were designated as “Indian Territory.” But everything changed in 1849, when gold was discovered in California, and President Polk decided it was America’s “manifest destiny” to push U.S. boundaries all the way west to the Pacific Ocean.

In 1862, the government passed the Homestead Act, handing out free 65-hectare (160-acre) lots in the West, setting off an unprecedented land rush. It also authorized the first transcontinental railroad.Wave after wave of miners, railroad workers and settlers began crossing the Plains, looking to the U.S. Army to protect them from attacks by the region’s tribes, and the 1860s saw often brutal warfare by both sides. 

Refused to submit

Sitting Bull first encountered the American Army in 1863, when the military mounted a broad campaign against the Lakota in retaliation for a Dakota massacre in Minnesota. He went on to lead the Lakota in many attacks on U.S. military forts, rejecting government efforts to negotiate or contain him.

Sitting Bull refused to join other Lakota bands, the Yanktonai Dakota and Arapaho Nation in signing an 1868 treaty negotiated at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The treaty guaranteed the Lakota “absolute and undisturbed use of the Great Sioux Reservation,” including the Black Hills, sacred to Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other tribes. It held only until the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, in 1874. The government then confiscated the Hills and ordered tribes back to the reservation. Sitting Bull resisted, setting up camp along the Little Big Horn River in Montana.

In early June of 1876, Sitting Bull held a Sun Dance, a prayer ceremony in which he pierced his arms in an act of sacrifice and danced to exhaustion. During the ritual, he is said to have had a vision of a military defeat of many soldiers.

That same month, General George A. Custer, a former Civil War hero, led a surprise attack on Sitting Bull’s camp. The Lakota, said to be inspired by Sitting Bull’s vision, fought fiercely. Within hours, Custer and more than 200 soldiers were dead, news that shocked Americans and caused the Army to redouble efforts to contain the tribes.

In video below, Sitting Bull’s great grandson Ernie LaPointe talks about his ancestor and the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Sitting Bull and his followers fled to Canada, but scarce food resources led him to finally surrender to the U.S. Authorities sent him to the Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota, where he lived as a prisoner, refusing to renounce his traditions and spiritual beliefs. This created tension among those Lakota who had embraced assimilation into Christian culture and likely led to his death.

Ghost Dance

The late 1880s saw the birth of a spiritual movement which promised that if Natives lived a good life and performed a ceremonial Ghost Dance, their former way of life would be returned to them.The prophecy spread across the Plains, where it was adapted by the Lakota, now living in harsh conditions on the reservation, dependent on inadequate government rations. 

The government viewed the dance as an act of sedition and tried in vain to stop it. Sitting Bull, say his descendants, merely tolerated the prophecy, which was to his eyes a preferable alternative to Christianization

​On December 16th, 1890, tribal police, acting on the government’s behalf, entered Sitting Bull’s cabin to arrest him. He was shot and killed in the melee that followed. On the 29th of December, the Army launched an attack on about 300 Lakota men, women and children camped at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation, killing most of them and burying them in a mass grave.

Today, Sitting Bull’s descendants still pray for their ancestor, whom they revere as a visionary acting not only on behalf of his contemporaries but future generations of Lakota. And every December 29, Lakota gather at Wounded Knee to remember their ancestors and celebrate their resilience.

 
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A U.S. guided missile destroyer sustained minimal damage Saturday when a Japanese tug boat lost propulsion and drifted into it during a towing exercise in Sagami Bay off central Japan in the Pacific Ocean.

The Navy said in a statement the USS Benfold sustained had scrapes on its side, though no one was injured on either vessel.

“Benfold remains at sea under her own power. The Japanese commercial tug is being towed by another vessel to a port in Yokosuka. The incident will be investigated,” read the statement from the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

The commercial tug boat was being towed to a port in Yokosuka, the home of the Navy’s Japan-based 7th Fleet, which has had two fatal accidents in Asian waters this year in which Navy warships and commercial ships collided at sea.

Seventeen sailors were killed this year in the two collisions with commercial vessels involving guided-missile destroyers, the USS Fitzgerald in June off Japan, and the USS John S. McCain in August as it approached Singapore.

The incidents prompted dismissals of Navy commanders, and the U.S. Navy announced a series of reforms this month aimed at restoring basic naval skills and alertness at sea after a review of deadly ship collisions in the Asia-Pacific region showed sailors were under-trained and over-worked.

 
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In the weeks since dozens of women have accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of rape or sexual, unleashing an avalanche of similar charges against other prominent men across American life, women and men of color have been largely absent from the national furor.

The stories of abuse have roiled the entertainment industry, politics, tech and more, raising the possibility that this could be a watershed moment to end tolerance of such behavior. But some observers fear minority women may miss the moment, as they often are more reticent to speak up about sexual harassment.

“The stakes are higher in a lot of instances for us than they are for a lot of other women,” said Tarana Burke, a black activist who founded the #MeToo movement on Twitter in 2006 to raise awareness around sexual violence. “That creates a dynamic where you have women of color who have to think a little bit differently about what it means for them to come forward in cases of sexual harassment.”

A few high-profile minority actresses have come forward. New York authorities are investigating claims from actress Paz de la Huerta that Weinstein raped her twice in 2010; he has denied charges of non-consensual sex with any woman.

When Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o wrote in a New York Times op-ed last month that she had an unsettling encounter with the producer in 2011 at his home, Weinstein quickly denied doing anything inappropriate with Nyong’o, after days of silence following similar accusations by famous white accusers.

Author and activist Feminista Jones said that Weinstein’s denial of Nyong’o’s allegations sent the message to black women that they can’t be harassed, they can’t be assaulted.”

For black women, that is a message that dates back to slavery, when black women’s bodies were not their own and racist stereotypes were used to justify abuse, said Rutgers University historian Deborah Gray White.

“Historically, African-American women have been perceived as promiscuous,” said White, author of the book, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South.”

“Black women’s bodies, from Day One, have been available to all men,” she said.

As a result, White said, black women have had a hard time proving sexual exploitation. In response, many chose to remain silent as a form of self-preservation.

“Somehow talking about it is admitting , ’I walk the land unprotected,’” White said. “They were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.”

For Asian-American women, speaking up after sexual assault can be daunting for a variety of cultural reasons, said Anna Bang, education coordinator at KAN-WIN, a Chicago-based domestic violence and sexual assault services group that frequently helps Asian-American and immigrant women. Bang said she has noticed the absence of Asian-American women from the Weinstein conversation and, as a Korean immigrant, doubts that she would tell her family if she were ever assaulted.

“It’s such a shame and guilt,” she said. “You don’t want your parents to be worried about you … When we are growing up, your parents teach you, ‘Don’t share your family problems with people.’ We’re trying to break that silence by educating our community members.”

Many of the women who seek help from KAN-WIN do so a decade or more after the abuse took place, she said.

“In our culture, women … they teach you how to suck it up,” she said. “They teach you to swallow your anger, your fear. It’s tough.”

Women of Latin American descent also weigh economic and cultural issues when deciding whether to speak out about sexual abuse.

Women of Latin American descent have been stereotyped as being submissive and sexually available, according to Monica Russel y Rodriguez, a Northwestern University ethnographer whose research includes sexuality, race and class in Latino communities. She said that undocumented immigrants in the United States would be even less likely to report an assault or harassment, fearing anything from job loss to blackmail or deportation.

“Even for white women, there’s not going to be any guarantee of an equitable resolution, so it’s a lot to expect women in a more highly vulnerable situation to be willing to speak out at the same rate,” Russel y Rodriguez said. “There’s no reason to expect that Latinas aren’t being sexually harassed or raped at the same degree or more.”

While most of the recent spate of sexual abuse allegations have been against white men, men of color have not been immune to such charges. Before the Weinstein scandal upended Hollywood, Bill Cosby’s name became synonymous with sexual abuse, as more than 50 women came forward and said the pioneering black actor once known as “America’s Dad” forced sexual contact with them over decades. Last June, Cosby went to trial on charges that he drugged and molested a woman in 2004. The case ended in a mistrial and Cosby is expected to be retried next year.

Since the Weinstein scandal, a writer for The Root, a website geared toward the black audience, said both Jesse Jackson and John Singleton sexually harassed her. Jackson and Singleton declined comment when contacted by The Associated Press, as did the Root writer.

George Takei, best known for his role in the original “Star Trek,” was recently accused of groping a man decades earlier; he denied the allegations. Actor Terry Crews went public with a claim that a Hollywood agent groped him, and that agent was later fired.

And an actress, Demi Mann, filed a lawsuit Thursday in which she alleged agent Cameron Mitchell sexually assaulted her. Mitchell, who is black, was fired by Creative Arts Agency, LLC.; he called Mann’s claims false.

But compared to the dozens of well-known white men named and white women who have made allegations, people of color have not played a prominent role in this evolving scandal.

Nearly three decades ago, an African-American attorney started the conversation on the topic. Anita Hill detailed allegations of sexual harassment by her former boss, then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, during the 1991 congressional hearings held ahead of his confirmation. Thomas, also African-American, framed the hearings as a “high-tech lynching” and went on to be confirmed to the high court.

Hill was treated as a pariah by some for coming forward, but she was hailed by others and has spent the decades since as an advocate for women’s equality.

Burke, whose online #MeToo campaign was resurrected by actress Alyssa Milano in the wake of the Weinstein charges, doesn’t want minority women to miss the moment. She is launching a series of webinars to help women understand sexual violence and is encouraging women of color around the world to speak out.

“At some point, we have to confront this as a community,” Burke said. “This is a great place for this to happen.”
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