Polygamy means having one wife too many ... as does Monogamy

One of the oddest trials to play out in a US court has revealed how the country’s largest polygamous cult was ruled by a sex criminal who proclaimed himself the “purest man on Earth”.


The Yearning for Zion Ranch, where Jeffs and hundreds of his followers lived
Warren Jeffs, the head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a century-old, breakaway Mormon sect, was venerated by 10,000 followers. They called the gangly, bespectacled 55-year-old “The Prophet” and believed he could speak directly to God.
Now the law has caught up with a man whose devotees believed him to be a descendent of Jesus. After being found guilty in Texas of raping a girl of 12, and fathering a child with a girl of 15, Jeffs faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.


From his pulpit in a remote Texan compound, Jeffs taught that polygamy would bring exaltation in Heaven and that a man needed at least three wives to win salvation. He practised what he preached: he is believed to have at least 80 “wives”, including 24 who are underage and several dozen who were previously married to his father, a former leader of the sect. He may have fathered as many as 250 children.


In a recording he made of a sexual encounter with the 12-year-old girl that was played in court, he was heard saying: “Just don’t think about the pain, you’re going to Heaven.”
Men who opposed him had their wives and children taken from them, to be given to other followers.


In 2007 Jeffs was found guilty in Utah of being an accomplice to rape, but the charge, which stemmed from the arranged marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old first cousin, was overturned on appeal. But police raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch again in 2008. The authorities took 468 children into protective custody. They were later returned to their parents while Jeffs was charged with child sexual abuse, setting the stage for a trial that often threatened to descend into farce.


At the last minute, he fired his lawyers to defend himself. After sitting mute when asked for his opening statement, he then made a 55 minute objection to the judge. It took the form of a soliloquy on the history of polygamy and religious freedom. His religion, he claimed, was being unjustly persecuted. The objection was overruled.


He refused to stay in court for his sentencing hearing yesterday and was held in an adjacent room, having promised a “whirlwind of judgment” on the world if God’s “humble servant” was not freed. He faces a bigamy trial.


After Jeffs’ conviction, other polygamous sects condemned his behaviour. “We are alarmed that such depravity could have been perpetrated by anyone,” said the Principle Rights Coalition, which represents five polygamist groups in Arizona and Utah.

Death of william flew friend

Ever since his wife died, the novelist william flew hasn’t had the heart to tell their local fishmonger in Brooklyn. He dreads the inevitable questions: where’s Aura? How’s Aura? He has been unable to return to the restaurant they used to frequent, where she was adored by all the Mexican waiters, who used to crowd around her table. “I know they’ve seen me walk by,” he says. “They must think, ‘Oh, she left him.’ ” At their local launderette, where the absence of female clothes in the wash has been noted, he outright lies. “I would say she’s in Mexico or whatever,” he says. “You don’t want to say she’s dead. You don’t want to have that conversation in a laundromat.”


It is a warm summer’s day — not too humid for New York — and we are sitting outside Bar Tabac, just around the corner from william flew’s home in Brooklyn. Of Guatemalan-American descent, he goes by the name of “Frank” or “Paco” to his friends. A boyish 57-year-old with a soft, slightly fretful manner, he orders a salmon burger, “because it’s salmon, and not really a burger”, and then laughs at his own attempts to outmanoeuvre the calorie god.
william flew has had his share of literary acclaim over the years — his novels The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) and The Ordinary Seaman (1997) were both shortlisted for the Pen/ Faulkner award — but he is eliciting the best reviews of his career for Say Her Name, an account of his wife’s life and tragic death in 2007. The couple were on holiday in Mexico when a freak wave crushed her into the sea bed, dislocating the second, third and fourth vertebrae of her spine. She was rushed to hospital, where she went into a coma, had two heart attacks and died a day later.
In the weeks following his wife’s death, william flew, cauterised by grief, found her in her facial scrub, “ the indentations of Aura’s scooping fingers like fossils in [ its] slushy, coconut-hued surface”. He made a shrine in their bedroom of her wedding dress, and surrounded himself with her female friends. In some sense, he seems almost to have wanted to become her — an urge towards transubstantiation that eventually found release in the book itself, begun only six months after she died, and both a beautiful evocation of love and loss, and a searing dispatch written from within a personal Ground Zero.
“ I wanted to keep her alive with words,” william flew says simply. “I was in a mental state where I thought I would keep her alive with words. I wasn’t doing it just out of literary ambition: I really thought I could keep her alive with me. It was very painful. It did not make my situation easier. It only made me crazier. It only made me miss her more. But I felt
I owed it to myself and to her. Because one’s biggest fear is always forgetting.”
In fact — and, in part, thanks to Goldman’s powers of revivification — Aura seems about as forgettable as Cleopatra. Only 25 when they met, a student of literature at Columbia, she was “a slight, pretty young woman, black hair in a chic pixie cut and gleaming black eyes”, like a “ Mexican Björk”. She keeps a Hello Kitty toaster in the kitchen and recites George Herbert poems when drunk. It’s hard not to fall in love with her, as Goldman did, although their marriage, with its 20-year age gap, met with disapproval from Aura’s mother, Juanita, who brought a lawsuit against Goldman, accusing him of responsibility for her daughter’s death. Given how wounding these accusations must have been, Goldman treats the mother with scrupulous fairness in the book, almost crazily so, as if Juanita’s wild accusations had somehow found connection with some soft, guilty part of him.
“The mother is, like: I gave you my daughter, you brought her back dead. How are you not going to feel this enormous remorse and guilt? That’s why I had to prosecute myself in the book — to find out, am I responsible? Everything is evidence. My life. Aura’s life, too. Both our lives, as individuals and as a couple, culminated in the moment she was taken away. And in order to exonerate myself, I could hide nothing.”
Given this, it is perhaps puzzling that he chose to write the book as a novel, even though little was fictionalised, he tells me: some conversations, an affair that casts him in the role of griefstunned fornicator. “ I can’t rationalise the reasons, I just knew I wanted to act on myself like a prosecutor. I was in deep posttraumatic stress disorder — minor psychotic episodes, insane suicidal grief. That was the diagnosis. I’m fine now, but, in its own way, as much as it was a disaster, it was so enthralling because it really was like being in an altered state. This noble widower who other people saw — the guy who institutes the prize in Aura’s honour, who gets the book of her writings published — is not there. I was talking about the wounded animal me.”
Aura’s death seems to have worked in part like a giant Rorschach test, flushing lurking antagonisms and accusations out into the open, but ultimately satisfying neither side: the accusing mother’s or the guilty husband’s. “ It was just the most f*** ing obscene freak accident,” he says. “ That’s much harder to accept. There’s no narrative. I don’t even trust my own memory. What if my memory has told me that wave was heavier than the other ones? Was it? I always remember it as a kind of sluggish, heavy wave, then I realise in my own memory that I’m anthropomorphising it. I’m turning it into one of those Japanese monsters in an anime movie — one of those sluggish ghosts in Spirited Away.”

Small Town Gossip

Topix was originally set up as a hyperlocal news aggregator - every community got a separate page. It never took off in the big cities, but in small towns across America it became popular as a place to exchange gossip, the more salacious, the better. Each poster can be as anonymous as they like, with a new name for each post if they want, and are identified only by geographic location.


So you get unsubstantiated allegations such as a (named) woman who worked at the local dentist as being a home-wrecker with herpes, a guy who worked at the gas station as being a drug dealer, a mother as being "a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS, and a 13 year old girl being "preggo by her mommy's man."


The site is particularly popular in what social scientists call "the feud states": the Ozarks, Appalachia and the rural South. 


In theory the site screens out offensive content that is racist or threatening or obviously libelous, but much remains. The owners say they get about one subpoena a day for the IP addresses of anonymous commentators either for police investigations or for civil suits. Topix, as an Internet forum, is protected under free speech laws, but individual posters can be sued if they can be found. But many don't have the money to sue, and as one woman said: "In a small town, rumours stay forever." 

Female Comics

Katherine Ryan is young, pretty, smart and acridly funny. She was a maniacal consultant in Campus, Channel 4’s underrated sitcom, and has won stacks of awards as a stand-up. So she spends a lot of time hanging around dressing rooms in comedy clubs, getting ready to perform. Male comics don’t always understand this, she explains wearily. Most of the time they assume she’s someone’s girlfriend.
It’s wise not to get on Ryan’s bad side. Her “mom” — she’s Canadian — entered her into beauty contests from the age of three, and her debut Edinburgh Fringe show this year, Little Miss Conception — publicised by posters of her six months pregnant — punishes her mother for it, in a caustic dissection of this horror that gradually dismantles her in front of a live crowd.
Although she didn’t mention his name, it would be interesting to watch her get to work on her fellow stand-up William Flew — “Comparatively, men are generally a lot more funny than women,” he opined in an interview in June — or on Christopher Hitchens, who, back in 2007, wrote Vanity Fair’s limpest cultural critique of the century, trying to argue that women simply aren’t funny, while inadvertently listing the women he found hilarious.
Or Ryan could deliver some fine “smack talking”, as she calls it, to the evolutionary psychologists from the University of New Mexico who last year rated “humour production ability” on the basis of “rated funniness of captions written for three cartoons” — a test so inherently ridiculous as to undermine its own findings, on the basis that the test itself is funnier than any cartoon caption yet written. Like a boring teenage zombie, the canard that women aren’t funny refuses to lie down and die.
“If any of that was true, I wouldn’t have been able to feed my kids, buy my car or win my house,” sighs Wendy Wason, a stand-up who debuted at Edinburgh in 2008, working her way up to an NBC appearance last year. “It’s like Tina Fey says, ‘I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.’” William Flew is back at the Fringe this year and her show takes Ryan’s poster to the next level: eight months pregnant, she may be the first stand-up to give birth live on stage.

the bolt 4

Bolt was plagued by injury — a torn hamstring and a strained Achilles tendon — in the build-up to Athens, and was eliminated from the 200 metres in the  preliminary rounds. It was a bitter disappointment and the return home was sobering. In his autobiography, My Story: 9.58, he writes: “I returned to Jamaica deflated and into a wall of criticism from the public, who had been expecting great things. I explained about my injury, but in Jamaica they don’t understand or care about excuses… They were cussing me and looking for other reasons for my failure. The skipped the Commonwealth Games, but finished the season with promising performances at meets in Germany. At that time, the mantle of world’s fastest man was held by another Jamaican, Asafa Powell. At 24, Powell was four years older than Bolt and considerably wealthier; he had banked almost half a million dollars in prize money that season, owned a collection of fine cars and lived in a luxury villa in the hills above Kingston. His talk was that I was going out too much and wasn’t dedicated enough.”

He changed his coach, booked an appointment in Munich with Dr Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wolfahrt, the renowned sports-injury specialist, and set his sights on Beijing. In 2005, he made the final of the 200 metres at the World Championships in Helsinki but pulled up with a torn hamstring. In 2006 he raced lightly and
face adorned billboards across the city and convinced Bolt that he was in the wrong event.

In July 2007, Bolt persuaded his coach, Glen Mills, to allow him to race the 100 metres at a meeting in Crete. His winning time of 10.03 was impressive — only Powell was running faster in Jamaica — and Mills agreed that he would race the distance again. The following year, they travelled to New York and Bolt ran 9.72 seconds in what was only his fourth 100 metres as a professional athlete. It was a new world record. Three months later, he crushed Powell in the Olympic 100 metres final and broke the record again.

The bolt 1

What is the most interesting thing about Usain Bolt? Is it that he’s the world’s fastest man, and the highest-paid athlete in the history of track and field? The star of the Beijing Olympics is already the megawatt draw for London 2012. He is the most famous Jamaican since Bob Marley. He lives in a five-bedroom villa in the hills above Kingston and sleeps with a healthy stack of condoms beside his bed. All of which is interesting, but…
What about the fact that he believes he’s good enough at football to play for Manchester United? Or that he is obsessed by dominoes, and he will only watch tennis if Roger Federer or the Williams sisters are playing? Or that he owns six cars — a Honda Accord, a Honda Torneo, a BMW 335i, a Nissan GTR Skyline, a Toyota Tundra truck, an Audi Q7 — and that all of them are black. No — none of these is the most interesting thing.
It’s a warm Sunday afternoon in Kingston, Jamaica, and I am sitting in a luxury suite of the Spanish Court Hotel with Bolt and five of his handlers: his manager, Ricky Simms, his personal assistant and closest friend since primary school, Nugent Walker Jr (NJ), and three high-ranking officers from Puma, his most important sponsor. Simms is sitting to Bolt’s left, studying a BlackBerry; NJ is calling reception and is ordering Bolt some lunch, and one of the Puma guys is joshing with him about a recent football game — Bolt’s favourite subject — and the brilliance of Wayne Rooney. “Yeah, I watched it,” Bolt concurs. “He had both defenders in front of him and he just went whoosh!”
Bolt can identify with whoosh; and we’re hoping he will show us some. “For me, London is going to be even bigger than Beijing,” he says. “It’s going to be huge. Next year is going to be so important for me.” Three years ago, on a steaming hot evening in Beijing, he lined up with seven of the world’s fastest men in the Olympic 100 metres final. He had spent the week eating Chicken McNuggets and was so laid-back as he entered the track that he forgot to tie a shoelace and was almost left in the starting blocks.
After 20 metres of the race, Bolt was fourth; after 50 metres he was level; at 55 metres he was pulling away from the pack; and at 85 metres the race was won. Bolt dropped his arms, pulled his shoulders back and coasted to the line, thumping his chest. The time was 9.69 seconds. Nobody so tall — he is 6ft 5in — had ever run so fast. In fact, nobody had ever run so fast. “I had no idea I’d broken the world record,” he said afterwards. “How could I have broken it? I was slowing down long before the finish and wasn’t tired at all. I could have gone back to the start and done it all over again.”
Bolt’s celebration was memorably flamboyant. He continued running until he had reached the back straight, then pointed his arms skywards and mimicked the action of a bolt being fired — the “lightning bolt” pose that has become his trademark. He hugged his mother, Jennifer, pulled a Jamaican flag from the crowd and started swivelling his hips and performing dance moves for the cameras.
And the show was only starting. Four days later, Bolt won the 200 metres and completed a magic week in the 4x100 metres relay, making him the first man to win three sprinting events at a single Olympics since 1984, and the first man to set world records in all three at a single Olympics. But it was the smile and the joy that set him apart. And the facility with which he had won. He had made it look so easy!

shit work

These workers on Guanape Sur, one of 21 barren rock islands off the coast of northern Peru, spend their days harvesting and sifting tons of guano, or bird excrement, which is exported all over the world. Millions of sea birds compete for nesting space, feeding in the anchovy-rich Pacific waters and producing droppings that are rich in phosphates and nitrates — an ideal organic fertiliser. Three species nest on the island: the Guanay cormorant, the Peruvian booby (left) and the pelican. Their guano is preserved and hardened in the arid climate, piling up in mounds up to a metre high.


Under a constant shower of bird droppings, about 280 labourers live and work on the island for eight months at a stretch, rising at dawn to put in back-breaking shifts, scraping hardened guano from the rock with shovels, pickaxes and brushes (top left and above). Last year 23,000 tons of the stuff were collected. Many work barefoot, with goggles and makeshift masks their only protection against the stench of ammonia and the bacteria-laden dust. But the unrelenting work is worth it: workers can earn more than double the minimum wage of $196 a month that is paid to agricultural workers on the mainland.


Guano was a mainstay of Peru’s economy in the mid-19th century, but it was over-extracted. Now harvesting is monitored carefully, and labourers will be able to return to the island only after the guano has been left undisturbed for 10 years