Even before a game kicked off Saturday, it was huge news day in college football.

After UCLA announced it hired Chip Kelly to coach the Bruins and Nebraska fired Mike Riley, the rivalry games began. As the day drew to an end, Auburn had once again given the College Football Playoff race a seismic shake.

Thoughts, takedowns and takeaways from the 13th week of the season; there are only two undefeated teams left and neither is Alabama.

___

1. A College Football Playoff without No. 1 Alabama? Very possible, even likely. At 11-1 and with no chance to win a conference championship after losing to No. 6 Auburn , Alabama is going to need help.

2. The Tide always does well with the eye test, but the resume is light compared to what Ohio State did to reach the playoff without playing in its conference title game last season. Those Buckeyes reached selection Sunday with three wins against top-10 teams, two on the road. Alabama’s best victories will be against LSU and Mississippi State.

3. The SEC champion is in. The ACC champion is likely in, even with Miami’s loss at Pitt. Oklahoma is in if it wins the Big 12. Unbeaten Wisconsin seems like a lock with a Big Ten title. There would be no room for the Tide.

4. What does Alabama need to happen? No. 8 Ohio State (10-2) beating unbeaten and No. 5 Wisconsin in the Big Ten championship game probably is a good place to start. No. 10 TCU (10-2) beating Oklahoma could work, too.

5. It could be an interesting test for the selection committee, seeing how comfortable it is having two teams from one conference in the final four. The selections could provide insight on how much the committee simply differs to the digit in the loss column and what is the value of a conference championship.

6. So who’s No. 1 now? The Tide has been on top of the AP rankings since the preseason. Miami was No. 2. Hello, No. 3 Oklahoma!

7. The last time the Sooners were No. 1 in November was 2003.

8. The winner of the Iron Bowl might have been No. 7 Georgia. The Tide and Tigers pounded each other and Auburn running back Kerryon Johnson left the game early with what coach Gus Malzahn said was “a shoulder issue.”

9. The Bulldogs easily took care of business against Georgia Tech and will show up at Mercedes-Benz Stadium the fresher team, looking to avenge its only loss of the season.

10. Most impressive thing about Auburn’s second victory in three weeks against the team holding the CFP No. 1 ranking: Nothing fluky about it. The Tigers clearly outplayed the Tide, a rarity in the Nick Saban era.

11. So far the Jim Harbaugh era at Michigan has been far more interesting in the offseason than it has from September to January.

12. Harbaugh is now 0-3 against Ohio State , and surely there are some Wolverines fans losing patience. Though probably just some. The program is in far better shape than it has been since the 1990s.

13. Michigan’s 8-4 record this season is not shocking, but still pretty empty, with no victories against winning teams. Next season Harbaugh returns a mountain of talent and it will be on him to develop Brandon Peters or Dylan McCaffrey into a top-tier quarterback. No more excuses.

14. Ohio State coach Urban Meyer is now 27-3 in rivalry games, dating back to when he went 1-1 coaching Bowling Green against Toledo. It’s an impressive number in a Hall of Fame career and speaks to how well Meyer taps into the emotions of his players.

15. While it is understandable that Meyer would be upset about his quarterback being injured on a crowded sideline during pregame warm up, the coach’s reaction to J.T. Barrett’s injury seemed a bit melodramatic.

16. Barrett said he will be good to go next week, though backup Dwayne Haskins played well against Michigan. The last time Barrett was hurt against Michigan and Ohio State’s backup quarterback had to play Wisconsin in the Big Ten title game, the world was introduced to Cardale Jones. That worked out OK for the Buckeyes.

17. Baker Mayfield’s punishment for being knucklehead last week against Kansas tuned out to be two plays. That’s how long it took the Sooners to score on their first possession against West Virginia. Mayfield then took over and went 14 of 17 for 281 yards and three touchdowns. The Heisman Trophy is still all his, barring some sort of five-interception meltdown in the Big 12 title game next week.

18. Good thing the Big 12 brought back its championship game to have a better chance of getting into the playoff, huh?

19. It was a little weird to hear Nebraska athletic director Bill Moos say that he would consider UCF coach and former Cornhuskers quarterback Scott Frost , whose teams is unbeaten, among the candidates to be the Huskers next coach. Athletic directors almost never name names, but it is so obvious that Nebraska would be interested in Frost there is no reason to hide it.

20. Texas Tech’s Kliff Kingsbury seemed to save his job on Friday night by beating Texas. Time will tell whether Arizona State’s Todd Graham did the same by winning the Territorial Cup against Arizona .

21. Big difference between those two situations: Tech has always wanted Kingsbury to succeed at his alma mater and seemed willing to cut him extra slack. Arizona State seems to be looking for a reason to move on from Graham.

22. Kansas is sticking with David Beaty, who is 3-33 in three seasons. It’s complicated, but basically Kansas doesn’t want to fire its athletic director but doesn’t seem to have confidence in Sheaon Zenger to hire another coach.

23. On Saturday, Florida fans watched their Gators (4-7) lose to Florida State for the fifth straight year and found out Chip Kelly was not going to be their next coach. That’s a bad day.

24. There will be no 5-7 bowl teams this season. In fact, there could be as many as 82 teams with six wins and only 78 spots. Clearly, we need more bowls.

25. Florida State will play Louisiana-Monroe next week to get bowl eligible for a 36th straight season. The Seminoles will definitely play in the postseason with six victories. A team like Buffalo, which qualified for the postseason, might get shut out. That seems wrong.

___

Follow Ralph D. Russo at www.Twitter.com/ralphDrussoAP

___

More AP college football: www.collegefootball.ap.org and www.twitter.com/AP_Top25

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Donald Trump, then the president-elect, is on Time’s cover as Person of the Year in December 2016. (Nadav Kander/AFP/Time Inc.)

Almost every year for the past several years, President Trump talks about Time magazine.

Toward the end of the year, like clockwork, he seems to get preoccupied with one topic that involves the magazine: its annual Person of the Year recognition.

On Friday the president said that he will “PROBABLY” be named Person of the Year, but he opted out because he didn’t want to participate in an interview and photography session — and that “probably is no good.” Time has disputed Trump’s claim, saying he was “incorrect” about how the magazine chooses who will be Person of the Year, and that it does not comment on its choice until publication.

Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2017

The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year. TIME does not comment on our choice until publication, which is December 6.

— TIME (@TIME) November 25, 2017

Trump’s recent comments are the latest in his love-hate relationship with Time, which he has described both as “a very important magazine” that he grew up reading and as a “paper-thin” publication that will “soon be dead.” It also shows that Trump — as a private citizen living in Manhattan, as a presidential candidate and as president — has long had a fixation with how he’s portrayed in the media and how many times his face makes it on the cover of magazines, especially Time.

In a March interview with former Time Washington bureau chief Michael Scherer, Trump asked if he has set the record for most covers.

[Trump claims he took himself out of the running for Time’s ‘Person of the Year’]

“I guess, right? Covers, nobody’s had more covers,” Trump asked.

Scherer, who joined The Washington Post in September, told Trump that Richard Nixon “still has you beat.” But he shouldn’t worry because Nixon was president for longer, Scherer told the then-newly inaugurated president, adding that he should give himself more time.

“Okay, good. I’m sure I’ll win,” Trump replied.

Some days, he relishes the recognition:

“On the cover of @TIME Magazine — a great honor!” he tweeted on Aug. 20, 2015.

“Time Magazine has me on the cover this week. Don Von Drehle has written one of the best stories I have ever had,” he said on Jan. 9, 2016.

“Remember, get TIME magazine! I am on the cover. Take it out in 4 years and read it again. Just watch…,” he tweeted the following day.

Last December, when Time named him Person of the Year, he told NBC News it “means a lot” and that he considers it “a very, very great honor.”

On other days, however, he was more critical, including when the cover features someone else: “I told you @TIME Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite They picked person who is ruining Germany,” he tweeted on Dec. 9, 2015, when the magazine named German Chancellor Angela Merkel Person of the Year.

That was followed by a tweet later that day thanking then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly for a “wonderful editorial” on why Trump should’ve been picked. 

[A Time magazine with Trump on the cover hangs in his golf clubs. It’s fake.]

In December 2011, Trump criticized the magazine when it chose “The Protester” as its “Person of the Year” to highlight protests that had brought political and social change.

He was also highly critical of Time in May 2012, when it featured a mother breast-feeding her toddler, and again in July 2012, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made the cover.

That same year, Trump said Time had lost all its credibility when it didn’t include him in its Top 100 most influential people.

Indeed, the president places high value on seeing his face on magazine covers — and he likes to show proof of it.

Case in point: Many of his clubs are decorated with these covers — including, until recently, a fake March 2009 Time cover that featured the real estate developer and proclaimed: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . . EVEN TV!”

During a September 2015 interview with CBS’s Scott Pelley in Trump’s Manhattan penthouse, Pelley took note of magazines stacked on Trump’s desk and pictures hanging on the walls of his office. All have his face on them.

“What are we supposed to take from that?” Pelley asked.

Trump replied with a grandiose proclamation.

“You know, look, I’m on a lot of covers. I think maybe more than almost any supermodel. I think more than any supermodel. But in a way that is a sign of respect, people are respecting what you are doing,” he said.

But if history were any indication, a picture on a magazine’s coveted spot isn’t always tied to a positive story or “a sign of respect.” Time, for example, has frequently featured unflattering photo illustrations of Trump, both when he was a candidate and president.

[At one Trump golf resort, fake Time magazine covers are taken off the wall]

One of the magazine’s covers in February is an illustration of the president sitting stoically behind his desk as a hurricane engulfs the Oval Office. Below the magazine’s name: “Nothing to see here.”

A cover from March features Trump typing on his phone while leaning on a crumbling Washington Monument. “Trump’s war on Washington,” the cover says.

More recently, earlier this month, a Time cover featured illustrations of the likeness of Trump’s face shaped as wrecking balls.

“The wrecking crew: How Trump’s Cabinet is dismantling government as we know it.”

TIME’s new cover: How Trump’s cabinet is dismantling government as we know it https://t.co/VuOLJcma2a pic.twitter.com/IsKKLVPFKA

— TIME (@TIME) October 26, 2017

Last year, in August and October, Time twice featured a likeness of Trump’s face melting like candle wax to portray the then-candidate’s tumultuous campaign. Each cover had the word “meltdown.”

TIME’s new cover: Inside Donald Trump’s total meltdown https://t.co/3YstGtYpDK pic.twitter.com/VQ2km55Cwy

— TIME (@TIME) October 13, 2016

In March 2016, one of the magazine’s covers was a black-and-white, zoomed-in face of Trump, with five check boxes across. The boxes for “bully,” “showman,” “party crasher” and “demagogue” were checked, while the box for “the 45th President of the United States” was left blank.

The title Person of the Year also is not defined solely by glowing coverage or positive recognition. The title is given to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse,” former managing editor Walter Isaacson wrote in the 1998 issue.

The same nod has been given to Adolf Hitler in 1938, Joseph Stalin in 1939 and 1943 and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

Trump was given the title last year for his unexpected victory against Hillary Clinton.

Jenna Johnson contributed to this story.

Read more:

Trump replies ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’ to tweet about his attacks on African Americans

Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton come to Malia Obama’s defense

‘Keep coming at me guys!!!’: Donald Trump Jr. meets Russia scrutiny with defiance

Between 25 and 30 gunmen, traveling in five vehicles and carrying an Islamic State flag, surrounded a Sufi mosque on all sides in Bir al-Abed, a dusty town on a road that arcs across the sandy plain of North Sinai.

After an explosion, they positioned themselves outside the main entrance of the mosque and its 12 windows, spraying the worshipers with gunfire. Seven parked cars were set ablaze to prevent victims from escaping. Among the dead were 27 children.

For Sinai residents, the attack deepened an abiding sense of dread about life in a part of Egypt where many feel trapped between barbarous militants and a heartless military. At a hospital in nearby Ismailia, survivors recounted how they leapt through windows as militants raked them with gunfire, or of watching their friends and relatives die.

Photo

“If even mosques are being targeted, then where are we safe?” said Mohamed Abdel Salam, 22.

For Sinai experts, the assault sharpened scrutiny of Egypt’s counterinsurgency tactics against a dogged Islamist insurgency that has surged in strength since 2013, after Mr. Sisi came to power in a military takeover.

They paint a picture of a stubbornly outmoded approach that is unsuited to the fight, and that perpetuates the mistakes of successive Egyptian leaders.

For decades Egypt has seen Sinai through a military prism, taking an aggressive approach to an alienated local population. The military has engaged in summary executions and the destruction of whole villages, while offering little to solve the region’s deep social and economic problems, including chronic unemployment, illiteracy and poor access to health care.

Egyptian soldiers and conscripts are hunkered down inside heavily protected bases, venturing out in armored convoys that barrel down long, exposed roads.

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Those roads are filled with check posts manned by nervous soldiers, many of them conscripts. The insurgents, some with roots in Sinai’s long tradition of smuggling, skirt through the desert.

“The Egyptians have failed to acknowledge that ISIS is not just a terrorism threat,” said Andrew Miller, a former Egypt specialist at the National Security Council, now at the Project on Middle East Democracy in Washington. “Killing terrorists is not sufficient. They need to deprive ISIS of local support, which is rooted in Cairo’s historical neglect of the Sinai.”

But that support has been eroded by multiple accounts of torture and extrajudicial executions by the military, as well as indiscriminate military tactics that often inflict civilian casualties and sow widespread resentment.

“The military has never cared for civilian losses,” said Mohannad Sabry, author of a book on Sinai. “The excessive and reckless use of force has killed entire families. We’ve seen airstrikes blow people up in their homes. We’ve seen villages razed off the face of the earth. That tells you something about how they see Sinai society.”

Over the past year, Mr. Sisi has welcomed a line of foreign leaders to Cairo, where he signed deals for billions of dollars in advanced military equipment: German submarines, Russian combat helicopters, a French aircraft carrier and a military satellite. American military officials have tried quietly to persuade him to allocate his resources, including $1.3 billion in annual American aid, to tools and techniques better suited to fighting the insurgency in Sinai, like equipment and training for intelligence gathering.

But Mr. Sisi, they say, is not listening, and his generals prefer to buy tanks, jets and other heavy weapons for their bases around the Nile.

“They understand they have got a problem in Sinai, but they have been unprepared to invest in the capabilities to deal with it,” said Steven Simon, a professor at Amherst College and a former senior director for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council.

One person who did have some sway over Mr. Sisi was Egypt’s chief of defense staff, Mahmoud Hegazy. American officials saw him as the only person in Mr. Sisi’s inner circle with the authority to publicly contradict him, a former United States official said. They also had a personal bond: General Hegazy’s daughter is married to Mr. Sisi’s son.

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But last month Mr. Sisi fired General Hegazy, after an outcry over a devastating militant ambush on a security convoy south of Cairo that killed 16 police officers, and possibly many more.

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The move dismayed senior State and Defense Department officials who saw General Hegazy as a check on Mr. Sisi in a circle of advisers that has become ever smaller and, some fear, ever more sycophantic, said the former official, who spoke anonymously to protect internal deliberations on an important ally that rarely receives public criticism well.

Sinai presents a formidable arena for counterinsurgency that would challenge the most capable army: It is a vast terrain of desert and mountains, with long shorelines and a semiporous back door across the border into Gaza, which has been controlled by Hamas.

The collapse of Libya in 2011 has ensured a steady flow of weapons ever since, some from the depots of the deposed Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi. In the past year, as the Islamic State’s vision of a caliphate in Syria and Iraq has crumbled, experts have fretted about an influx of returning Egyptian jihadis, bent on bringing their fight back home.

So far, American officials say, a relatively small number of fighters have returned. But the collapse of Raqqa and Mosul has precipitated a sharp shift in the Islamic State’s tactics in Sinai, with a greater emphasis on attacks against soft targets, like Coptic Christians and Sufis, in a bid to undermine Mr. Sisi by sowing sectarian hatred in Egyptian society.

Little of Egypt’s fight against the Islamic State in Sinai is visible to the outside world, or even most Egyptians. Foreign reporters and most Egyptian ones are not allowed into Sinai. Concrete information about the conflict is hard to come by: On its Facebook page, the Egyptian military claims to have killed at least 3,000 Islamist militants, far more than the hundreds it once estimated were there.

Photo

A leaked videotape last April depicted those claims in a very different light. It showed a military unit, made up of Sinai locals and accompanied by senior army officers, executing detainees — local men in jeans — on a desolate patch of ground in Sinai. Earlier, on its Facebook page, the army had claimed the men died in a shootout.

Amnesty International, which confirmed the video’s authenticity, said it was consistent with a pattern of military-led abuses it has documented in Sinai.

In private, Mr. Sisi’s officials argue that they don’t need to take lessons from the Americans. They point to what they say is a failure of American counterinsurgency ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they add that their methods worked in the 1990s and 2000s, at least temporarily and in other parts of Egypt, when President Hosni Mubarak authorized harsh measures to disarm militants who attacked Western tourists at historical sites.

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“They look back and say: This is how we did it, and it worked,” said Zack Gold, a Sinai expert at the Hariri Center at the Atlantic Council. But, Mr. Gold added, the conditions are radically different in North Sinai, where residents have suffered years of neglect and mistreatment from the Egyptian mainland.

Sinai residents complain of feeling isolated, even culturally distant, from the Nile Valley where the vast majority of Egyptians live. Many in the North Sinai refer to other Egyptians as “people of the valley,” as though they were citizens of another country. Some speak nostalgically of more effective governance when the peninsula was under Israeli control, between the Israeli seizure of the area in the Six Day war in 1967 and its return to Egypt in 1982.

The Bedouin tribes who live there, often portrayed as outlaws in Egyptian popular culture, say they feel greater kinship with the tribes in Gaza — a connection that has bred longstanding suspicion among officials in Cairo, especially since the Israeli occupation.

South Sinai, around Sharm el Sheikh, and Mount Sinai developed into a tourist destination. But the North remained loosely governed and some of the tribes who lived there considered smuggling a birthright, and resented Cairo’s attempts to restrict it.

“Many Egyptians west of the Suez don’t consider the Bedouin to be fully Egyptian,” Mr. Miller, the analyst, said. “They have poorer educational and employment opportunities, and they are largely shut out of government jobs and the security services.”

Cynicism about the central government was evident outside the Ismailia hospital on Friday, where an elderly Bedouin woman in black sat on the muddy lawn, huddled under a blanket for warmth. She refused to give her name, citing fear of reprisals from either the military and Islamic State. “If either side sees our names, they will kill us. They are as bad as each other,” she said.

“The military will keep jailing and killing local young people. The terrorists who hate us and the Christians will keep using it as an excuse to kill us,” she added. “There is no point in talking about anything.”

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CHESTER, Va. – Police have arrested a youth pastor for allegedly murdering his family at a home in Chester on Thanksgiving night.

Officers discovered two women and a man shot to death at a home on Dogwood Ridge Court in the Ashley Forrest subdivision around 11:30 p.m.

RELATED: Vintage crime photos from the Daily News

(Original Caption) When John Kerr, of 147 W. 84th Street, and Peter Macon, 490 Columbus Avenue, were being booked on a mugging charge at the West 68th St. Precinct today, photographer Phil Grietzer, New York Daily News photographer, drew a bead on the proceedings with his camera. He didn’t know the boys had a camera allergy. But he found out when the two, although handcuffed together, came charging at him. Another photographer who doesn’t suffer from buck fever, got this picture.

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Officials said the women’s bodies were found inside the home and that the man’s body was found in the front yard.

The victims were identified as 58-year-old Jeanett L. Gattis, 30-year-old Candice L. Kunze and 36-year-old Andrew E. Buthorn.

“The victims and suspect all lived at the residence in the 14000 block of Dogwood Ridge Court and this incident appears to be domestic related,” Sgt. P.H. Zoffuto with Chesterfield Police said in a news release. “Jeanett Gattis is the wife of Christopher Gattis. Buthorn is the boyfriend of Kunze, who is the daughter of Jeanett Gattis.”

Police said 58-year-old Christopher Gattis was arrested at the scene without incident.

Gattis, who is being held without bond at the Chesterfield County Jail, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.

Neighbor heard shot 

Neighbors said everyone on the block is close-knit and that many of them knew the victims and the suspect.

One neighbor said that when heard a gunshot last night, police were already on the scene by the time he came outside. He said he then saw a man’s body and the suspect in handcuffs.

Neighbor Mike Brown was stunned by the tragedy and said the suspect was a friend and a gentle man.

“We were all friends. We hang out sometimes [and] cook out in the back,” neighbor Mike Brown said. “I mean every time I see them, they’re always the same way. [I] had no clue that they were having problems that I knew of, but behind closed doors is behind closed doors.”

Clergy: Suspect is ‘excellent man’

Additionally, sources and neighbors said the suspect was a youth pastor a local church.

A deacon at Grace Lutheran Church on Harrowgate Road in Chester confirmed Gattis was a full-time youth pastor there. He said he was in disbelief about the allegations and called the suspect an “excellent man.”

Another church member said Gattis was frequently at church, including on Thursday for the congregation’s Thanksgiving feast.

The church released a statement Friday afternoon:

Members of Grace Lutheran Church are deeply saddened by the loss of life last night as a result of three individuals being shot in Chester and this tragedy included members of Grace Lutheran Church. Grace Lutheran Church has experienced many hardships over the years, but this heartbreak has unique challenges. Grace Lutheran Church asks for the prayers from the community as our congregation begins the process of addressing the grief being experienced by everyone involved.

Police said their investigation into the incident is ongoing.

Anyone with information that could help investigators is asked to call Chesterfield County Police Department at 804-748-1251 or Crime Solvers at 804-748-0660.

This is a developing story, so anyone with more information can submit a news tip here.

 

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President Trump famously promised that, if elected president, he would “drain the swamp” — upending the culture in Washington that favors the well-connected.

It is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III whose work seems to be sending shock waves through the capital, by exposing the lucrative work lobbyists from both parties engage in on behalf of foreign interests.

The Mueller probe has already claimed its first K Street casualty: Tony Podesta. His lobbying firm, the Podesta Group, a Washington icon of power and political influence, notified its employees recently that the enterprise is shutting its doors.

Since Mueller was appointed, more people and firms have either filed or amended registrations that make public their work on behalf of foreign interests than had done so over the same time period in each of at least the past 20 years. Lobbyists, lawyers and public relations professionals who work for foreign companies and governments say Mueller’s probe has spooked K Street, and firms are likely to be more careful in their compliance with public disclosure standards.

“My colleagues are being contacted by waves of clients concerned about this,” said Joe Sandler, an ethics and lobbying lawyer in Washington who specializes in Foreign Agents Registration Act issues.

The Podesta Group was famous for providing access to Washington power, hosting events for a roster of high-profile domestic and international clients who helped make it one of the city’s most successful lobbying firms. Revenue declined after the 2016 election, but the firm remained a powerhouse.

Tony Podesta, 74, the brother of longtime Democratic adviser and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, resigned on the day Mueller announced charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates.

[The rise and fall of the Podestas, Washington’s powerful brother act]

The 12-count indictment included charges of failing to accurately report lobbying work for a Ukrainian political party as required under FARA. That section made reference to “Company A and Company B,” later confirmed to be the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC, another lobbying dynamo that includes Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who worked on the Ukraine account.

Mueller was appointed in May to investigate possible coordination between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 election, but his work and similar congressional inquiries have stretched into other areas. The charges against Manafort and Gates were unrelated to their Trump campaign work.

According to the indictment, the men used a Brussels-based nonprofit organization, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, to hide that they were running a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign for a Ukrainian political party friendly to Russia. Mueller’s team alleged that the men hired the Podesta Group and Mercury to lobby for the Ukrainians in the United States.

According to the indictment, Gates told Mercury it would be “representing the Government of Ukraine,” and provided talking points to the Podesta Group falsely describing how Manafort and Gates merely provided an introduction to connect them with the European Centre.

An official from the Podesta Group wrote back that there was “a lot of email traffic that has you much more involved than this suggests,” adding, “we will not disclose.” The indictment alleges that Gates and Manafort had weekly phone calls and exchanged frequent emails with the two firms to provide direction on specific lobbying steps they should take. The men paid the firms, which have not been publicly accused of any crimes, more than $2 million from offshore accounts they controlled. Podesta officials have said they initially thought the work they were doing was solely for the European Centre and learned only later of Gates’s connection to the Ukrainian political party.

Even before Manafort and Gates were charged, the Justice Department had put pressure on them to register as foreign agents for their Ukraine work, and they — along with the Podesta Group and Mercury — did so retroactively before indictments were issued.

Mueller’s team, though, still charged Manafort and Gates with including misleading statements on their FARA form, such as the assertion that their efforts did not include outreach within the United States.

[Read Foreign Agents Registration filing of Paul Manafort’s firm]

Officials from Mercury and Podesta have said for months that they have been cooperating with investigators and have a long-standing commitment to disclosure via FARA and the traditional domestic lobbying disclosure system. They said they did not initially file under FARA in this case based on the advice of counsel.

“We are continuing to fully cooperate as we have from the start,” said Michael McKeon, a Mercury partner.

On the day of the indictment, Podesta announced his resignation from the firm he had founded, telling employees, “It is impossible to run a public affairs firm while you are under attack by Fox News and the right-wing media.”

A week later, the chief executive of the firm, Kimberley Fritts, told the staff that the firm would be closing and employees might not be paid after Nov. 16. She announced that she was off to start her own firm, Cogent Strategies, which includes many former Podesta Group employees. That firm is soon expected to launch publicly.

Earlier this month, Podesta employees, stunned by the sudden implosion of the firm, were told to immediately turn in their company laptops and security fobs. In a statement, a Podesta spokesman acknowledged Fritts’s departure — and the end of an era.

“Tony and Kimberley worked together for 22 years. He has tremendous affection, respect and admiration for her and hopes that she and her team of former Podesta Group colleagues will build a firm that is even more successful than the Podesta Group,” Podesta spokeswoman Molly Levinson said.

Criminal charges for noncompliance with FARA — such as those faced by Manafort and Gates — are rare. The act, implemented in 1938 to expose Nazi propagandists, has been haphazardly enforced in recent years by a Justice Department office that mainly acts on news reports and asks people to register voluntarily.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) noted at a hearing earlier this year that only nine people in the Justice Department work full time on bringing about compliance with the law, and a Justice Department Office of the Inspector General report last year found that those in federal law enforcement often don’t agree on how to do that.

Between 1966 and 2015, the OIG found, the Justice Department had brought only seven criminal FARA cases. Kevin Downing, Manafort’s attorney, noted the rarity of such prosecutions when his client first appeared in court.

“Today, you see an indictment brought by an office of special counsel that is using a very novel theory to prosecute Mr. Manafort regarding a FARA filing,” he said, adding that Manafort was “seeking to further democracy and to help the Ukraine come closer to the United States.”

Willfully failing to register, though, is technically a felony that can come with a five-year sentence. Even before Mueller charged Manafort and Gates, his work had long seemed to indicate that he was taking a more aggressive approach in pursuing foreign agents. His probe also has been looking at former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who retroactively registered as a paid foreign agent for Turkish interests.

The special counsel’s office wrote in a court filing in the Manafort case that, “while criminal charges under FARA are not often brought, the facts set forth in the indictment indicate the gravity of the violation at issue based on the dollar volume of earning from the violation, its longevity, its maintenance through creation of a sham entity designed to evade FARA’s requirements, and its continuation through lies to the FARA unit.”

Not everyone who filed or amended their filings after Mueller was appointed did so because of fear of the probe. Some filings are innocuous, such as firms signing new clients. Others are more notable.

In late August, for example, the law firm Sidley Austin amended its filing to disclose that partner Michael Borden had the previous year met with staffers from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as a State Department official and two congressmen, on behalf of the Russian partially state-owned VTB Bank to “discuss U.S. sanctions on Russian institutions.” Borden declined to comment for this report.

Thomas J. Spulak, a partner at King Spalding specializing in government advocacy, said more clients have been calling since Mueller began his work to ask, “Do I have to register under FARA?” He said an uptick in registrations might be partially attributable to new people wanting to influence a new administration, but the special counsel was undoubtedly having an effect.

“I think it all goes back to Mueller — this is of acute concern after Manafort and Podesta — and my sense is that it’s going to continue that way for some time,” Spulak said. “If there’s a new normal for foreign agents, it’s going to be to pay a lot more attention to it.”

The Justice Department, too, might be changing its posture. Justice recently pressured the company operating the website and television channel RT — previously known as Russia Today — to register under FARA.

When Attorney General Jeff Sessions appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), asked whether — were it not for Mueller’s probe — the allegations against Manafort, Gates and the firms with which they did business would have stayed secret.

“The point is that a lot of these things have stayed below the radar because there’s not been appropriate focus and attention on it, and the special investigation has brought that, and in the view of many of us, it’s long overdue,” Johnson said, asking the attorney general, “would you agree to work with us — me and this committee — to correct these very serious problems, so we can update our disclosure laws, so that the American people can see what’s going on behind the veil?”

“I would,” Sessions replied.

Not since the Nazi era had such atrocities taken place in the heart of Europe.

In the streets of Sarajevo, a once-cosmopolitan capital, terrified civilians spent their days dodging snipers’ bullets and shellfire, a years-long urban siege that ultimately left 10,000 people dead.

In the supposed U.N. haven of Srebrenica, some 8,000 Muslim men and boys as young as 12 were herded to the slaughter, their bodies tossed into mass graves.

On Wednesday, a U.N. tribunal found former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic — known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” — guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity amid the blood-soaked breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Mladic, 74, was sentenced to life in prison as a key figure in a push to create a home for Bosnian Serbs by clearing away non-Serbs during Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war.

Bashar Assad, might also one day face justice.

But Mladic’s conviction, more than two decades in the making, also illustrated the many obstacles to bringing war criminals to account. Here is some background about this prosecution and what it might portend for future cases:

Who is Ratko Mladic?

Mladic served as chief of staff of Bosnian Serb forces from 1992 to 1996. Together with the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, he was the best-known of scores of defendants brought before the tribunal, which ultimately handed down more than 80 convictions.

International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Dutch seat of government, the old general was paler and thinner, clad in a suit and tie on the day of his sentencing. But he was in many ways still clearly recognizable as the onetime burly military man in sloppy fatigues who presided over years of systematic slaughter in the name of “greater Serbia.”

As Wednesday’s final session began, his demeanor was almost jaunty, giving photographers a thumbs-up and making the sign of the cross. But soon after, Mladic bellowed out his fury in an obscenity-laced tirade as the court prepared to sentence him.

“Lies!” he shouted as he was bundled out of the room “You are all liars!” He watched his sentencing from a nearby room, via closed-circuit TV.

Why did it take so long to bring him to justice?

The U.N. Security Council set up the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia more than two decades ago. But after being indicted in 1995, Mladic spent years in hiding, aided for much of that time by the Serbian military, before being captured in 2011. Once underway, the proceedings against him spanned five years, with more than 600 witnesses, thousands of pages of documentation and a mountain of forensic evidence.

After the war, Mladic found luxurious haven in Serbian army-run spa-and-hunting resorts. But as democratic leaders gained clout and his military backing evaporated, he was reduced to primitive lodgings in a rural house north of Belgrade, belonging to a cousin, where he was arrested.

What were considered the worst of the atrocities Mladic oversaw?

During the siege of Sarajevo, which Mladic personally oversaw from mountains ringing the city, pitiless gunfire and artillery shells rained down for 43 months. Forced from the meager shelter of their homes by the need for supplies, civilians daily died gruesome deaths, children bleeding out in the arms of their mothers, the elderly cut down as they shopped for vegetables, the infirm unable to move quickly enough across exposed intersections.

Srebrenica, near Bosnia’s eastern border with Serbia, was designated as a U.N. haven. But forces under Mladic’s command overran lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers. Muslim men and boys were separated from women and hustled onto buses or marched off to the killing fields. Thousands lay in unmarked graves; Bosnian Serb forces later dug up some of them in an effort to cover up the massacre, the worst mass killing of its kind in Europe since World War II.

Mladic was an architect of a sinister campaign that saw the term “ethnic cleansing” enter the global lexicon — in this case, a bid to purge Bosnia of hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs. He also seized U.N. peacekeepers as a human shield against NATO bombardment.

In The Hague, presiding Judge Alphons Orie, reading out the judgment, called the former commander’s crimes “among the most heinous known to humankind.” In an echo of the Nuremberg tribunals, Mladic repeatedly insisted in the course of the trial that he was merely following orders.

Why was it difficult to prove Mladic’s guilt in some crimes?

Unrepentant to the end, Mladic pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him, and his lawyers said he would appeal his conviction. The former commander was found guilty of 10 of the 11 counts against him.

But prosecutors acknowledged that for jurisdictional and evidentiary reasons, he could not be held to account for all of his alleged crimes — those in neighboring Croatia, for example, were not included in the docket of charges against him.

Procedural delays and an aging demographic among the accused can make cases like this one a race against time. Milosevic died before his trial ended, and as Mladic’s health deteriorated, prosecutors reportedly feared the same outcome.

What does the case say about the prospects for prosecuting someone like Syria’s Assad?

While not referring to the Syrian leader by name, U.N. human rights chief Zeid Raad Hussein said the Mladic verdict put perpetrators of atrocity on notice that they could be called to account years or even decades later.

A similar message came from many rights groups worldwide. John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Europe director, said the verdict sent a “powerful message” against impunity in crimes of this nature and magnitude.

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President Trump’s company has agreed to remove the Trump name from its hotel in Lower Manhattan and give up management of the property, the most visible sign yet of the toll his presidency has taken on his brand.

The decision, announced by the company Wednesday afternoon, follows signs that business has flagged for months at Trump SoHo, beginning during his polarizing campaign last year.

The hotel’s sushi restaurant closed. Professional sports teams, once reliable customers, began to shun the property. The hotel struggled to attract business for its meeting rooms and banquet halls, according to reporting by radio station WNYC.

Trump SoHo has emerged as one of the clearest examples of how Trump’s divisive politics have redefined his luxury hotel and real estate company, which spent years courting upscale customers in liberal urban centers where he is now deeply unpopular.

The Trump name appears poised to come off the SoHo hotel before the president celebrates his first year in office. “The transition is anticipated to take place by year-end,” the Trump Organization and the property’s owners said in a statement.

The change was first reported Wednesday afternoon by the New York Times.

The deal to remove the Trump name was made with the Trump SoHo condominium board and the property’s majority owner, CIM Group, a California-based real estate investment firm. The hotel is divided into condominiums whose owners allowed them to be rented out as hotel rooms.

“We recognize and sincerely appreciate [the Trump Organization’s] contributions to this exceptional asset,” Bill Doak, CIM Group’s first vice president of hotels, said in a statement.

The release did not specify what the building would be renamed or who would run it. Trump Organization and CIM Group officials declined to answer questions about the reasons for the move.

[Pro sports teams were once reliable patrons of Trump’s hotels. Not anymore.]

Officials described the transaction as a “buyout” but did not specify whether any money changed hands between the Trump Organization and the building’s owners. The president’s business now receives 5.75 percent of the hotel’s operating revenue as a management fee, according to company documents posted online by Reuters.

This will be the third time since Trump’s election that his name has been removed from a building. In July, the Trump name was taken off the Trump International Hotel in Toronto after the property’s owner reached a similar buyout deal. The hotel will be reopened as a St. Regis, according to the Toronto Star.

And last year, the owners of three Trump Place apartment buildings in New York announced that those properties would be renamed after tenant complaints. Trump’s company no longer had a business relationship with the buildings.

In the United States, the Trump name still adorns hotels in Hono­lulu, Las Vegas, Chicago, New York and Washington. The Washington hotel, opened last year, has been a bright spot in the company’s portfolio. Flush with business from Christian groups, trade associations and foreign clients, its profits have greatly exceeded expectations.

[How the Trump hotel changed Washington’s culture of influence]

Elsewhere, the Trump Organization has seen greens-fee revenue fall at its golf courses in Los Angeles and the Bronx, and it has lost dozens of customers who rented out banquet rooms for parties or golf courses for charity tournaments.

One of the biggest changes has happened at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s for-profit social club, which doubles as the “winter White House” in Palm Beach, Fla. Last summer, 19 charities canceled galas or other fundraisers they had planned for this winter at Mar-a-Lago, costing the Trump Organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

The SoHo hotel was once a jewel of the Trump empire. Opened in 2010, it offered Hudson River views, a spa named after Ivanka Trump and a location in one of New York’s most fashionable neighborhoods. Trump promoted the property on his reality show “The Apprentice.”

In 2012, prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office scrutinized the property’s development as part of an investigation into whether Trump’s children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. committed fraud by misleading condo buyers about the project, according to a report last month from ProPublica, WNYC and the New Yorker. District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. decided not to pursue charges.

In its early days, the hotel attracted Hollywood celebrities and many National Basketball Association teams. “When I stay here in New York, I’m at the Trump SoHo,” Oklahoma City Thunder star Russell Westbrook told GQ in 2014, saying the hotel’s luxe lobby had inspired his fashion designs.

But by this year, at least 11 of the 12 NBA teams that previously stayed at Trump SoHo had quit. Some cited logistical reasons. Others said they could not stay at a hotel with Trump’s name on it.

“The president has seemingly made a point of dividing us as best he can,” Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr told The Washington Post in an interview earlier this year. His team quit using Trump SoHo in 2016. “He continually offends people, and so people don’t want to stay at his hotel,” Kerr said. “It’s pretty simple.”

Trump SoHo hotel rates have fallen dramatically. Rooms are routinely offered online for below $300 a night. Luxury Manhattan hotels took in an average daily rate of $451 in the second quarter of this year, according to the accounting and consulting firm PWC.

The Trump Organization does have plans to expand its hotel business, targeting areas where Trump’s political brand is more popular.

Those plans include two new, less-expensive brands of hotels called Scion and American Idea. But since those brands were announced in June, progress has been slow. The three discount hotels that were supposed to start the American Idea brand are still operating under their old names.

And at the site chosen for the first Scion hotel, in Cleveland, Miss., construction stopped weeks ago while Trump Organization and its partners reworked plans.

When Donald Trump appointed John Kelly as chief of staff in July, the four-star Marine general arrived with a mandate to bring order to a freewheeling West Wing. Gone are the days of staffers waltzing into the Oval Office to lobby the president on policy or supply him with gossip. Trump still tweets, of course, but for the most part Kelly’s cleanup has been successful, according to interviews with a half dozen Trump advisers, current and former West Wing officials, and Republicans close to the administration. The aide who has ceded the most influence in the Kelly era, these people said, is Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. “Kelly has clipped his wings,” one high-level Republican in frequent contact with the White House told me.

It’s perhaps hard to remember now, but it wasn’t long ago when Trump handed Kushner a comically broad portfolio that included plans to reinvent government, reform the V.A., end the opioid epidemic, run point on China, and solve Middle East peace. But since his appointment, according to sources, Kelly has tried to shrink Kushner’s responsibilities to focus primarily on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And even that brief appears to be creating tensions between Kushner and Kelly. According to two people close to the White House, Kelly was said to be displeased with the result of Kushner’s trip to Saudi Arabia last month because it took place just days before 32-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman arrested 11 Saudi royals, including billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The Washington Post reported that Kushner and M.B.S., as the prince is known, stayed up till nearly 4 a.m. “planning strategy,” which left Kelly to deal with the impression that the administration had advance knowledge of the purge and even helped orchestrate it, sources told me. (Asked about this, Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded, in part: “Chief Kelly and Jared had a good laugh about this inquiry as nothing in it is true.”)

Where this all leaves Kushner in Trump’s ever-changing orbit is a topic that’s being discussed by Republicans close to the White House. During Kelly’s review of West Wing operations over the summer, the chief of staff sought to downsize Kushner’s portfolio, two sources said. In the early days of the administration, sometimes with the help of a small cadre of Ivy League whiz kids who staff his Office of American Innovation, Kushner dreamed up scores of business “councils” that would advise the White House. “The councils are gone,” one West Wing official told me. With some of their purview being whittled away, “they seem lost,” the official added.

As Kushner’s Russia troubles mount—last Friday the Senate disclosed that he had not turned over e-mails about WikiLeaks, a claim his attorney, Abbe Lowell, denied—insiders are again speculating, as my colleague Emily Jane Fox reported last month, about how long Kushner and Ivanka Trump will remain in Washington. Despite Kushner’s efforts to project confidence about Robert Mueller’s probe, he expressed worry after the indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates about how far the investigation could go. “Do you think they’ll get the president?” Kushner asked a friend, according to a person briefed on the conversation.

According to two Republicans who have spoken with Trump, the president has also been frustrated with Kushner’s political advice, including his encouragement to back losing Alabama G.O.P. candidate Luther Strange and to fire F.B.I. Director James Comey, which Kushner denies. (For what it’s worth, Kushner’s choice of Strange prevented Trump from the embarrassment of inadvertently supporting Roy Moore.) Trump, according to three people who’ve spoken to him, has advocated for Jared and Ivanka to return to New York in part because they are being damaged by negative press. “He keeps pressuring them to go,” one source close to Kushner told me. But as bad as the Russia investigation may be, it’s not clear a New York homecoming would be much better for Kushner, given that his family’s debt-ridden office tower at 666 Fifth Avenue could be headed for bankruptcy.

This article has been updated to include a comment from the White House.