Word: sects
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...that is a 50-50 split between old Mormon residents and newcomers with more liberal politics and lifestyles - a split echoed in the makeup of the eight-person jury - it was a gamble for both sides. Would Mormons harbor secret sympathy for polygamists, or come down harder on the sect? Would newcomers be horrified by the child marriages, or see the prosecution as religious persecution? After two and a half days of deliberation and the replacement of one juror, they found that Jeffs did "intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly solicit, request, command or encourage" a 19-year-old follower to rape...
...Shurtleff, a Republican and a practicing Mormon, come to offer moral support to his team. He has called Jeffs "a religious tyrant, a demagogue" with an "absolute disregard for the laws of the nation, of the state." But charges involving polygamy are notoriously hard to prove, especially in a sect so secluded, so protective and so intent on making its own rules about what constitutes a marriage...
...because he tended to arrange marriages of young girls--inspiring more mainstream-minded pluralists of the Big Love school to charge that he was giving the practice a bad name. At the same time, prosecutors were looking for a way to address growing rumors of abuses within the sect, and they turned to newly strengthened child-abuse and sexual-predator laws. In 2005, Jeffs was indicted for sex crimes in Arizona and Utah and became a fugitive. A year later, he was on the FBI's 10-most-wanted list until his arrest in August 2006 in Las Vegas. Police...
...military said al-Qaeda was the prime suspect; some Iraqi government officials fingered Ansar al-Sunnah, which has links to al-Qaeda and has long been active in northern Iraq. Early reports suggest the majority of the victims were Yazidis, a pre-Islamic sect in Syria and northern Iraq...
...does the failure of the country's sectarian system to resolve internal disputes. The system, which reserves the presidency for the Maronite Christians, the Prime Minister's job for a Sunni, the speaker of parliament for a Shi'ite and generally distributes power on the basis of ethnicity and sect, was originally created to achieve stability through a careful balance of power. Instead, it has produced political deadlock and a system dominated by leaders whose domestic power is based on alliances with foreign powers...