Vox Sentences: Why the war-crimes conviction of a Bosnian Serb leader is such a big deal

Radovan Karadzic convicted of genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia; North Carolina's terrible bathroom bill; US indicts Iranian hackers.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

The conviction of Radovan Karadzic

Robin van Lonkhuijsen/AFP/Getty Images

• Radovan Karadzic, the political leader of Bosnian Serbs during the 1992 to 1995 civil war, has been convicted of war crimes and genocide by a UN tribunal in the Hague.

  [NYT / Marlise Simons]

• Karadzic is the most senior leader to be convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is arguably the biggest war crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

  [BBC]

• Karadzic was apprehended and extradited in 2008. He'd been living openly (if under an assumed name) in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, for 11 years, sheltered by a bunch of New Age healers. This feature by Jack Hitt is a trip to read — but what it implies about Karadzic's neighbors' willingness to protect him is chilling.

  [The New York Times Magazine / Jack Hitt]

• UN judges found Karadzic helped direct the worst atrocity of the Bosnian war: the murder of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. 20 years later, bodies are still being excavated in the city.

  [The Guardian / Julian Borger]

• Srebrenica was especially appalling because the UN was supposed to be protecting the city as a "safe haven" for Bosnians. At best, the UN failed. At worst, as some documents released after the fact have alleged, the US and other governments abandoned Srebrenica in order to bring a faster end to the war.

  [The Guardian / Florence Hartmann and Ed Vulliamy]

• While the UN (of which the ICTY is a division) has been able to convict and sentence Karadzic, it's not clear that it would be any more able to protect victims in a similar situation today. It might even be less well-equipped than it was in 1995.

  [The Atlantic / David Rhode]

• The UN couldn't even pass a resolution commemorating the 20-year anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre last summer, because Russia (which also objects to the Hague trial of Karadzic) objected to the word "genocide."

  [Foreign Policy / Reid Standish]

Seriously, North Carolina, this was an emergency?

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• In a special session Wednesday, North Carolina passed a bill that prohibits local governments from passing LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws, and requires all people in public bathrooms in the state to use the bathroom of their birth-assigned sex.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The bill was championed by the state's Republicans. But while Senate Democrats walked out of the chamber en masse instead of voting, some House Democrats voted for the bill — though some argued they hadn't had time to read it.

  [BuzzFeed News / Dominic Holden]

• Discrimination against LGBTQ people was already legal under state law in North Carolina (like many states). But last month, Charlotte passed a city ordinance banning it locally — which spurred the legislature into exceptional action.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The proponents of the North Carolina bill used the now-familiar threat of "women and girls" being preyed on in bathrooms by "grown men" posing as trans women. There is no evidence that nondiscrimination laws increase sexual assaults. There is, however, evidence that public bathrooms are a common site of harassment for trans people.

  [Williams Institute / Jody L. Herman]

• Where does the bathroom myth come from, anyway? In Pacific Standard, Melissa Gira Grant lays it at the feet of feminists like Germaine Greer who continue to argue that trans women aren't "real" women.

  [Pacific Standard / Melissa Gira Grant]

Treating hackers as terrorists

ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

• The US government unsealed indictments today against seven Iranians for hacking into a New York dam, and for launching DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on major US banks.

  [Washington Post / Ellen Nakashima and Matt Zapotosky]

• The hackers worked as contractors for the Iranian government. It's the first time the US has accused people "tied to another country" (as Reuters puts it) of trying to disrupt infrastructure in the US.

  [Reuters / Dustin Volz]

• You should expect to see more of this. The US government is now making a point of treating hackers who are "affiliated" with governments as terrorists.

  [Wall Street Journal / Christopher M. Matthews and Kate O'Keeffe]

• Just yesterday, a Chinese national living in Canada pled guilty in another federal hacking case.

  [Council on Foreign Relations / Adam Segal]

• But the difference between "state-affiliated" and "state-sponsored" is crucial. The US isn't saying Iran's government directed the attacks (though it's not saying it didn't, either).

  [FBI ]

• For what it's worth, the hackers all live in Iran, and Iran doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US, so none of these men are likely to stand trial.

  [Bloomberg / Erik Larson, Patricia Hurtado, and Chris Strohm]

MISCELLANEOUS

Intel founder and CEO Andy Grove died Monday. And he wouldn't have had the chance to accomplish what he did if the US hadn't accepted him as a refugee in 1957. [Chris Blattman]

• When Microsoft launched a Twitter bot that learned how to talk through its interactions with other users, it took like zero seconds for it to start saying stuff like, "bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we've got."

  [The Guardian / Elle Hunt]

• Es Devlin isn't a household name. But she's perhaps the single most influential set designer, not just of plays but of concerts (Adele, Kanye West, U2), runway shows, and the Olympics.

  [New Yorker / Andrew O'Hagan]

• The psychology of why Ted Cruz's face launched a thousand memes.

  [Popular Science / William Mansell]

• The White House has finally finished a rule regulating the material silica — 45 years after the OSHA started developing it.

  [Politico / Marianne Levine]

VERBATIM

"It would seem to me to be fair warning if a prisoner who has been in solitary says, 'If you put someone in this cell, I'll kill 'em.'" [Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) to Marshall Project / Christie Thompson]

• "'You are a king,' his father would tell Donald [Trump], according to his biographer Michael D’Antonio. His son took that to mean he could set his own rules. In elementary school, he gave one teacher he didn’t like a black eye; others were pelted with erasers. At birthday parties, he would fling cake."

  [Slate / Franklin Foer]

• "Probably the most famous book of this type is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which was published in 1936 and has never gone out of print. It is reported to have sold more than thirty million copies. I can tell you the lesson of that book in one sentence: If you are nice to people, they will like you. You just saved yourself sixteen dollars."

  [New Yorker / Louis Menand]

• "On their side they place Thomas Jefferson, whom they frame as an agrarian anti-capitalist avant la lettre. They allude (presumably) to his slave-breeding, -raping, and -selling by calling him 'an impulsive and often contradictory figure' with 'flaws.'"

  [New Republic / Malcolm Harris]

• "For example, the other day, at lunch, Josh was telling us about the B. and B. he and his wife were going to for their anniversary, and I interrupted him and was like, 'My wife!' I said it all funny, like that Borat guy does in that Borat movie. Everybody laughed, and then Jenny said, 'You are so random.' I do stuff like that all the time."

  [New Yorker / Nate Dern]

WATCH THIS

How "the robot" became the greatest novelty dance of all time [YouTube / Phil Edwards, Gina Barton]

Vox / Gina Barton

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