Last week's arrest of Warren Jeffs, the fundamentalist Mormon polygamist leader, is welcome news to a former sect member, DeLoy Bateman, who blames Jeffs for ripping his family apart.
Bateman, 52, was a faithful member of Jeffs' Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and raised his children to obey without question the commands of church leaders. But when the church tried to remove four of his children borne by his second of two wives from his home six years ago, he rebelled.
Bateman said he had refused to turn over the children to the church for reassignment to another family, a common practice under Jeffs' authoritarian leadership that dictates that women and children are the property of the church.
Bateman's defiance created a schism in his large family. The three oldest of his 17 children sided with Jeffs, whom church members consider to be God's only living prophet, and severed all communication with their father.
"They can never see me again," Bateman said on Friday outside the sprawling two-story home he built to house his large family.
"What's the difference between that and death?" he asked.
Even though his three estranged children still live nearby in this small, dusty community on the Arizona-Utah border, Bateman said he "doesn't even have a clue" how many of his grandchildren might have been born in the last few years.
"I lost a good share of my family to that man," Bateman said. "I'd like to see them sometime."
Jeffs' arrest on Monday last week in a routine traffic stop near Las Vegas provides Bateman a glimmer of hope that a more moderate leader will emerge to oversee the 10,000-member church and that someday he will see his grandchildren.
Meanwhile, Bateman says he wants revenge for what Jeffs has done to his family.
Asked if he wanted Jeffs, 50, to spend the rest of his life in prison, Bateman said, "I hope he does."
The church centers on unwavering devotion to Jeffs because members believe he determines whether they will reach the highest level in the afterlife. Jeffs is the only person in the church who can conduct polygamous marriages.
While the church practices many of the same tenets of the mainstream Mormon Church, there is no direct affiliation between the two. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Salt Lake City, banned polygamy in 1890.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.