Los Angeles

Manson follower up for parole today

Of all the members of Charles Manson’s murderous “family,” Leslie Van Houten was always seen as the different one the youngest, the one most vulnerable to Manson’s diabolical control.

Now she hopes to be the first member of the cult involved in the 1969 Tate-La Bianca killings to get out on parole.

Today nearly 33 years since the slaughter of actress Sharon Tate and six others shocked the nation Van Houten, 52, goes before the state parole board for the 14th time. This time, she might have a chance.

The reason: Earlier this month, Superior Court Judge Bob N. Krug strongly admonished the board for flatly turning Van Houten down every time based solely on the crime. Such decisions, he said, ignore Van Houten’s accomplishments in prison and turn her life sentence into life without parole, in violation of the law.

Geneva

French fries, chips on risky food list

Experts at a U.N.-sponsored meeting said Thursday there was a “major concern” that high levels of a substance called acrylamide in high carbohydrate food such as french fries and potato chips may cause cancer in consumers.

Experts at the three-day meeting sponsored by the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization said further study was needed to determine the extent of the risk and how to reduce it.

In the meantime, they stopped short of issuing guidelines on whether to avoid certain types of food and reiterated standard nutritional guidelines that people should eat a balanced and varied diet with lots of fruits and vegetables and limit the intake of fried and fatty foods.

Austria

Cow falls on car; driver injured

Drivers in farming regions know to be on the lookout for animals that stray onto the road, but even the most cautious seldom scan the heavens for livestock.

A 36-year-old woman should have been doing that Thursday when a cow strayed from a hillside pasture to the top of a tunnel entrance and then fell onto her car.

The woman was hospitalized in Vienna with minor chest and foot injuries. Her husband, in the passenger seat, was unharmed. The cow died after being hit when it fell 15 feet just as the car was leaving the tunnel.

France

Pilot killed in crash

A U.S. Air Force A10 on a training mission crashed Thursday in a forest in eastern France, killing the pilot, the Air Force said.

The plane, a single-seat anti-tank “Warthog,” crashed just before 3 p.m. near the villages of Domptail and Saint-Pierremont, south of the city of Nancy, French authorities said. The area is about 190 miles east of Paris.

The pilot was killed, but his name and nationality were being withheld until relatives are notified, said Staff Sgt. Cindy York of the U.S. Air Force in Spangdahlem, Germany. The pilot was based at Spangdahlem, with the 52nd Fighter Wing’s 81st Fighter Squadron, she said.

The plane was not carrying live or depleted-uranium munitions, the Air Force said.

New York

College Board approves changes to SAT exam

Heeding calls that the SAT should measure what students learn in class, College Board trustees voted Thursday to add an essay to the nation’s most widely used college entrance exam, toughen its math section and eliminate analogy questions.

The head of the 170,000-student University of California system had at one point suggested dropping the SAT as an admissions requirement, arguing it failed to test student knowledge. But Richard Atkinson, president of the UC system, said he was delighted with the makeover and called it “a major event in the history of standardized testing.”

College Board President Gaston Caperton said the new test, to be introduced in March 2005, “will be more aligned with curriculum and more aligned with state standards.”

San Francisco

Beat poet, Zen priest Philip Whalen, 78, dies

Philip Whalen, the burly Zen priest and Beat Generation poet who played a major role in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s that radically changed American poetry, died Wednesday at age 78.

Suffering from heart and brain maladies, his eyesight lost to glaucoma, Whalen spent his final years at a public nursing home in San Francisco, supported financially and emotionally by his many admirers and acolytes in the often inseparable worlds of Buddhism and modern poetry.

“He was a poet’s poet,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, a friend of Whalen’s since their days at Reed College in the 1940s.

Before his health failed, Whalen was abbot at the Hartford Street Zen Center in the Castro district of San Francisco and worked to comfort dying AIDS patients.