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Macy’s customers report delays with credit card transactions
Macy’s had hoped for a rush of shoppers on Black Friday. But it appears the crowds were too much of a good thing.
Macy’s credit card payment system buckled due to a higher than anticipated volume of transactions, the retailer said, leading to delays that slowed the checkout process at department stores around the country Friday.
The Cincinnati retailer said in a statement that the issue caused some transactions to take longer to process. Tweets by the department store to customers specified the issue affected credit and gift card transactions.
Macy’s said Friday afternoon that it had “fully resolved today’s system issues” and that it did not anticipate any additional delays.
Customers at the Macy’s at Westside Pavilion said the credit card payment issues forced them to either pay for their purchases with cash or come back at a later time.
Consuela Amaya, 55, of Los Angeles, was buying shoes and clothes for her daughters at Macy’s around 10 a.m. when the cashier said her Macy’s card had been rejected. After a different credit card also failed, her daughter, Danely Amaya, 18, said they just paid cash and left.
Dhruv Iyer, 19, was in line to purchase shirts around 1 p.m. when it became clear that there were payment issues. A cashier told him that the store could put a hold on his card and charge him for his purchase two weeks from now, but Iyer declined. His credit card was eventually cleared.
Macy’s Chief Executive Jeff Gennette told CNBC earlier Friday morning that online and in-store traffic on Thanksgiving and Black Friday were “strong.”
“Good start to the whole Black Friday shopping season,” he said in the CNBC interview.
Macy’s stock closed at $21.07, up 2.1%.
samantha.masunaga@latimes.com
Twitter: @smasunaga
Mueller might be the one who’s ‘draining the swamp’
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.
Egypt attack: President Sisi pledges forceful response
Egypt’s President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi has vowed to respond with “the utmost force” after 235 people were killed at a North Sinai mosque during Friday prayers.
The al-Rawda mosque in the town of Bir al-Abed was bombed and fleeing worshippers were then gunned down.
The Egyptian military has said it has conducted air strikes on “terrorist” targets in response.
No group has yet claimed the attack, the deadliest in recent memory.
Egyptian security forces have for years been fighting an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, and militants affiliated with so-called Islamic State (IS) have been behind scores of deadly attacks in the desert region.
They usually target security forces and Christian churches, and the bloody attack on a mosque associated with Sufi Muslims has shocked Egypt.
“What is happening is an attempt to stop us from our efforts in the fight against terrorism,” Mr Sisi said in a televised address hours after the attack.
“The armed forces and the police will avenge our martyrs and restore security and stability with the utmost force.”
Image copyright
AFP/getty
The lights of the Eiffel tower were switched off on Friday in tribute to the victims
An army spokesman said “terrorist spots” where weapons and ammunition were reportedly stocked had been bombed by air force jets on Friday in response.
The official also said that several vehicles used in the attack had been located and destroyed.
Mr Sisi, the former head of Egypt’s armed forces, has emphasised national security and stability during his time as president.
Three days of national mourning have been declared.
What happened?
Dozens of gunmen surrounded the mosque in vehicles and opened fire on those trying to escape after bombs were set off.
The assailants are reported to have set parked vehicles on fire in the vicinity to block off access to the mosque, and they fired upon ambulances trying to help victims.
At least 100 people were wounded, reports say, overwhelming hospitals.
It is the deadliest militant attack in modern Egyptian history. Bir al-Abed is about 130 miles (211km) from Cairo.
Can Sisi curb a stubborn insurgency?
By Orla Guerin, Cairo correspondent
This is a major challenge to the Egyptian state.
If this was IS, it is always worth considering the broader regional dimension. In the last few months, IS has had massive territorial losses in Iraq and across the border in Syria.
If IS was behind this, this could be an attempt to remind supporters around the world that they are still here, still relevant and can still inflict terrible damage on their enemies.
What we don’t know right now is if the Egyptian security establishment, if President Sisi, has anything else in the arsenal to try.
He has already tried the hardline military approach – there has been a massive military operation going on in the Sinai peninsula for years. It has not delivered results that time and time again the Egyptian establishment has promised.
But it is unclear if they have something new they can try to attempt to curb this very stubborn Islamic insurgency which today has inflicted such terrible damage.
Who was targeted?
Locals are quoted as saying that followers of Sufism, a mystical branch of Sunni Islam, regularly gathered at the mosque.
Although Sufis are widely accepted across much of the Muslim world, some jihadist groups, including IS, see them as heretics.
- Egypt’s militant groups explained
- Sisi the strongman
- What is Sufism?
The head of IS’s “religious police” in Sinai said last December that Sufis who did not “repent” would be killed, after the group beheaded two elderly men reported to be Sufi clerics.
The victims of the mosque attack also included military conscripts.
The number of victims is unprecedented for an attack of this type, says the BBC’s Sally Nabil in Cairo. She adds that this is the first time that worshippers inside a mosque have been targeted by militants in North Sinai.
Image copyright
EPA
The injured were brought to hospitals near and far, including in Cairo
Who might be behind the attack?
Militant Islamists stepped up attacks in Sinai after Egypt’s military overthrew Islamist President Mohammed Morsi following mass anti-government protests in July 2013.
Hundreds of police, soldiers and civilians have been killed since then, mostly in attacks carried out by the Sinai Province group, which is affiliated to IS.
Sinai Province has also carried out deadly attacks against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority elsewhere in the country, and said it was behind the bombing of a Russian plane carrying tourists in Sinai in 2015, killing 224 people on board.
- Egypt disputes desert shootout reports
- Sinai plane crash: What we know
- The IS affiliate in Sinai
It has been operating mainly in North Sinai, which has been under a state of emergency since October 2014, when 33 security personnel were killed in an attack claimed by the group.
Sinai Province is thought to want to take control of the Sinai peninsula in order to turn it into an Islamist province run by IS.
Image copyright
Reuters
Security forces “will avenge our martyrs”, President Sisi said
Journalists, including from state-sponsored outlets, have not been allowed to report from North Sinai in the last few years.
Correspondents say that the frequency of attacks raises doubts about the effectiveness of military operations against militants.
What has the reaction been internationally?
Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit condemned the attack as a “terrifying crime which again shows that Islam is innocent of those who follow extremist terrorist ideology”.
Governments in the UK, US, France, Russia, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have deplored the massacre.
Skip Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump
Will be calling the President of Egypt in a short while to discuss the tragic terrorist attack, with so much loss of life. We have to get TOUGHER AND SMARTER than ever before, and we will. Need the WALL, need the BAN! God bless the people of Egypt.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2017
End of Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump
Can the world’s mightiest naval fleet survive the perfect storm?
Updated 9:12 AM ET, Thu November 23, 2017
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It was a once-in-a-decade display of American firepower.
The aircraft carriers USS Ronald Reagan and USS Carl Vinson steam with their strike groups and ships from Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force during bilateral training in June.
Jan-31
Tuesday 31 January:
USS Antietam runs aground in Tokyo Bay
The USS Antietam, a guided-missile cruiser, damaged its propellers and spilled hydraulic oil into the water after running aground while the ship was anchoring in Tokyo Bay.
May-9
Tuesday 9 May:
USS Lake Champlain collides with South Korean fishing boat
The guided-missile cruiser was struck by a 60- to 70-foot-long South Korean fishing boat while conducting operations in international waters near the Korean Peninsula, the Navy said.
June-17
Saturday 17 June:
USS Fitzgerald collides with Philippine cargo ship
The collision between the Fitzgerald, a guided-missile destroyer, and the ACX Crystal on June 17 claimed the lives of seven US sailors. It took place 56 nautical miles off the coast of Honshu, Japan, in an area heavily traveled by commercial shipping.
Aug-21
Monday 21 August:
USS John S McCain collides with oil tanker off Singapore
The US guided-missile destroyer collided with a Liberian oil tanker in crowded shipping lanes off Singapore, leaving 10 US sailors dead and five more injured. The accident left a large highly visible hole in the US ship.
Nov-18
Saturday 18 November:
USS Benfold struck by Japanese tugboat
The guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold was struck by a Japanese tugboat while participating in a scheduled towing exercise off Japan. The tug boat lost propulsion and drifted into the US ship, the Navy said. No one was injured.
F/A-18 Hornets fly over US and South Korean warships during an exercise off the Korean Peninsula.
F/A-18 Hornets fly off the carrier USS Carl Vinson off the Korean Peninsula in March. US officials say they’ve had to scavenge parts to keep the F/A-18s flyable.
The US 7th Fleet this year has participated in about 160 exercises with other countries, including this one with Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force.
The littoral combat ship USS Coronado fires a Harpoon missile during Exercise Pacific Griffin, conducted with the Singaporean navy.
Texas authorities catch suspect in fatal shooting of state trooper
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A Split From Trump Indicates That Flynn Is Moving to Cooperate With Mueller
Lawyers for Mr. Flynn and Mr. Trump declined to comment. The four people briefed on the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
A deal with Mr. Flynn would give Mr. Mueller a behind-the-scenes look at the Trump campaign and the early tumultuous weeks of the administration. Mr. Flynn was an early and important adviser to Mr. Trump, an architect of Mr. Trump’s populist “America first” platform and an advocate of closer ties with Russia.
His ties to Russia predated the campaign — he sat with President Vladimir V. Putin at a 2015 event in Moscow — and he was a point person on the transition team for dealing with Russia.
The White House had been bracing for charges against Mr. Flynn in recent weeks, particularly after charges were filed against three other former Trump associates: Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman; Rick Gates, a campaign aide; and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser.
But none of those men match Mr. Flynn in stature, or in his significance to Mr. Trump. A retired three-star general, Mr. Flynn was an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s and a valued surrogate for a candidate who had no foreign policy experience. Mr. Trump named him national security adviser, he said, to help “restore America’s leadership position in the world.”
Among the interactions that Mr. Mueller is investigating is a private meeting that Mr. Flynn had with the Russian ambassador and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, during the presidential transition. In the past year, it has been revealed that people with ties to Russia repeatedly sought to meet with Trump campaign officials, sometimes dangling the promise of compromising information on Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Flynn is regarded as loyal to Mr. Trump, but he has in recent weeks expressed serious concerns to friends that prosecutors will bring charges against his son, Michael Flynn Jr., who served as his father’s chief of staff and was a part of several financial deals involving the elder Mr. Flynn that Mr. Mueller is scrutinizing.
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The White House has said that neither Mr. Flynn nor other former aides have incriminating information to provide about Mr. Trump. “He likes General Flynn personally, but understands that they have their own path with the special counsel,” a White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, said in an interview last month with The New York Times. “I think he would be sad for them, as a friend and a former colleague, if the process results in punishment or indictments. But to the extent that that happens, that’s beyond his control.”
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Mr. Flynn was supposed to have been the cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s national security team. Instead, he was forced out after a month in office over his conversations with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak. Mr. Flynn’s handling of those conversations fueled suspicion that people around Mr. Trump had concealed their dealings with Russians, worsening a controversy that has hung over the president’s first year in office.
Four days after Mr. Trump was sworn in, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Flynn at the White House about his calls with the ambassador. American intelligence and law enforcement agencies became so concerned about Mr. Flynn’s conversations and false statements about them to Vice President Mike Pence that the acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, warned the White House that Mr. Flynn might be compromised.
The conversations with the Russian ambassador that led to Mr. Flynn’s undoing took place during the presidential transition. When questions about them surfaced, Mr. Flynn told Mr. Pence that they had exchanged only holiday greetings — the conversations happened in late December, around the time that the Obama administration was announcing sanctions against Russia.
While Mr. Pence and White House press officers repeated the holiday-greetings claim publicly, Mr. Flynn and the ambassador had in fact discussed the sanctions. That invited the idea that the incoming administration was trying to undermine the departing president and curry favor with Moscow.
Mr. Trump sought Mr. Flynn’s resignation only after news broke that Mr. Flynn had been interviewed by F.B.I. agents and that Ms. Yates had warned the White House that his false statements could make him vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
Since then, Mr. Flynn’s legal problems have grown. It was revealed that he failed to list payments from Russia-linked entities on financial disclosure forms. He did not mention a paid speech he gave in Moscow, as well as other payments from companies linked to Russia.
The former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, has testified before Congress that Mr. Trump asked him to end the government’s investigation into Mr. Flynn in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office the day after Mr. Flynn was fired. Mr. Trump’s request caused great concern for Mr. Comey, who immediately wrote a memo about his meeting with the president.
And investigators working for Mr. Mueller have questioned witnesses about whether Mr. Flynn was secretly paid by the Turkish government during the presidential campaign. Mr. Flynn belatedly disclosed, after leaving the White House, that the Turkish government had paid him more than $500,000.
Mr. Flynn’s firing was, in some ways, the first domino that set off a cascade of problems for Mr. Trump. After the president ousted Mr. Comey, news surfaced that the president had requested an end to the Flynn inquiry, a revelation that led to Mr. Mueller’s appointment. That, in turn, raised the profile of an investigation that the president had tried mightily to contain.
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Genocide conviction of ex-Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic fuels hopes for future accountability
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.
Two More Women Accuse Sen. Al Franken Of Inappropriate Touching
The first woman, a 38-year-old book editor who was living in Minneapolis at the time, told HuffPost that she had just finished performing with a feminist choir at the Women’s Political Caucus event, which Franken and his wife, Franni Bryson, attended. After the ceremony, she and other members of the choir approached him for photos.
Former ethics director: Kellyanne Conway violated Hatch Act with Roy Moore comments
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