President Trump began the day before Thanksgiving on Twitter, calling out those who he claims have not, in fact, given him their proper thanks.

His target, again: LaVar Ball, who Trump had previously called “very ungrateful” for the president’s help in resolving a shoplifting charge in China for his son, LiAngelo, and two other University of California at Los Angeles basketball players.

It had been nearly two full days since Trump last mentioned the elder Ball by name — and in the intervening hours, Ball had been on CNN, saying that he had nothing to be thankful for when it came to his son and his president.

“How’d he help? If he helped, I would say thank you,” Ball told CNN.

Trump wasn’t having it, calling Ball an “ungrateful fool” and “a poor man’s version of Don King,” the boxing promoter known for his spotlight-grabbing style.

As for who had helped free LiAngelo Ball from China, the president said Wednesday: “IT WAS ME.”

It wasn’t the White House, it wasn’t the State Department, it wasn’t father LaVar’s so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long term prison sentence – IT WAS ME. Too bad! LaVar is just a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair. Just think..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017

…LaVar, you could have spent the next 5 to 10 years during Thanksgiving with your son in China, but no NBA contract to support you. But remember LaVar, shoplifting is NOT a little thing. It’s a really big deal, especially in China. Ungrateful fool!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017

LiAngelo Ball and two other UCLA men’s basketball players were arrested for shoplifting while in Hangzhou for a tournament. They returned to the United States last week and were summarily suspended by their team.

“You’re welcome,” Trump tweeted at the trio upon their return to the United States, urging Ball, Cody Riley and Jalen Hill to “HAVE A GREAT LIFE!” He also suggested that they “give a big Thank You to President Xi Jinping of China.”

Trump said last week that he had personally intervened in the case with his Chinese counterpart, asking Xi to help resolve the case.

When the president returned from a 12-day trip through Asia, he wrote on Twitter: “Do you think the three UCLA Basketball Players will say thank you to President Trump? They were headed for 10 years in jail!”

Enter LaVar Ball, who was asked by ESPN about Trump’s role in securing his son’s release.

“Who?” Ball said. “What was he over there for? Don’t tell me nothing. Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out.”

[Why LaVar Ball is a perfect foil for President Trump]

Trump fumed, tweeting Sunday: “I should have left them in jail!” (The White House later said Trump wasn’t serious, calling it “a rhetorical response to a criticism by the father.”)

But the following night, the outspoken Ball went on CNN and took aim at the president.

“You heard what he tweeted,” he told anchor Chris Cuomo. “He tweeted that cause he’s mad at me, ‘I should have left their asses in jail.’”

Ball said insisted that Trump has overstated his role in freeing the three Americans and added that if he would thank anyone, it would be Xi.

But, he added: “I don’t have to go around saying thank you to everybody.”

The State Department typically takes the lead on cases involving U.S. citizens who are arrested abroad, and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing was aware of the case, officials said.

Trump raised the arrests during a two-day state visit to Beijing, arriving after the three freshman players were accused of stealing sunglasses from a Louis Vuitton store next to the team’s hotel.

“The basketball players, by the way — I know a lot of people are asking — I will tell you, when I heard about it two days ago, I had a great conversation with President Xi,” Trump said after boarding Air Force One in Manila at the conclusion his Asia trip. “What they did was unfortunate. You know, you’re talking about very long prison sentences. [The Chinese] do not play games.”

When asked specifically whether Xi was helping to resolve the matter, Trump said last week: “Yes, he is. And he’s been terrific. President Xi has been terrific on that subject.

“But that was not a good subject. That was not something that should have happened.”

The sunglasses in the Louis Vuitton store in Hangzhou are priced at or around 4,900 yuan ($750).

According to Chinese law, anyone stealing goods worth between 4,000 and 7,000 yuan faces between one and two years in jail, although the sentence can be mitigated if they confess, show remorse and pay compensation.

Tim Bontemps in Los Angeles, Simon Denyer in Beijing and Kyle Swenson and Cindy Boren in Washington contributed to this report, which has been updated.

More reading:

For Trump, fighting with athletes is political sport

The president attacked her son. So Marshawn Lynch’s mother fired back.

‘How’d he help?’ LaVar Ball tells CNN he still won’t thank President Trump.

Prosecutors asked for a life sentence for Mr. Mladic. The presiding judge, Alphons Orie, agreed, saying that Mr. Mladic’s crimes “rank among the most heinous known to humankind.”

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Surprising many observers, Mr. Mladic appeared in court on Wednesday, wearing a dark suit and a red tie, as the three-judge panel handed down its ruling.

He sat impassively for the first 45 minutes of the judge’s address. But after his lawyers requested a five-minute break to allow him to go to the bathroom, Mr. Mladic did not reappear for almost an hour. Reporters were told he was having his blood pressure checked.

When he returned, he began shouting at the court in a dispute over his blood pressure. “You are lying, you are lying, you are lying,” Mr. Mladic said to the judge. “I don’t feel good.”

The judge ordered his removal, and guards grabbed him by both arms to take him out. Mr. Mladic was able to watch the rest of the proceedings on a screen elsewhere in the courthouse.

The verdict reverberated throughout the court building in The Hague — where dozens of survivors of the bloodshed, many of them widows or refugees, filled the public gallery, while others watched from monitors set up by the tribunal or followed it online — and across Europe.

In Bosnia, survivors wept and exulted as the verdict was broadcast live, while the reaction was muted in Serbia, where nationalism is rising once again.

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The United Nations human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, welcomed Mr. Mladic’s conviction as “a momentous victory for justice” that served notice to perpetrators of crimes, however powerful, that they would not escape justice.

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“Mladic is the epitome of evil,” Mr. al-Hussein said in a statement issued by his office in Geneva minutes after the judge pronounced the sentence.

The verdict was hardly in doubt, given the volume of evidence produced during the trial, which began in 2012. The sessions were at times halted or cut short because of Mr. Mladic’s health problems, and the trial itself was extended after the discovery of more mass graves.

Citing his fragile health, Mr. Mladic’s lawyers had urged that the verdict be postponed. Judges rejected those arguments — mindful, perhaps, of the case of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president who died in a prison cell in 2006 as his four-year trial was drawing to a close.

Mr. Mladic’s case was the last major trial handled by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which the United Nations established in 1993 in response to the atrocities. After one final appellate ruling, expected this month, the tribunal will close its doors; a small successor court will deal with pending appeals and the retrial of two former intelligence chiefs from Serbia.

To varying degrees, Croats, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims (also known as Bosniaks) all committed atrocities during the 1991-95 violence that ensued after Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia voted for independence from Yugoslavia.

A number of Croats and Bosniaks were convicted by the tribunal. But the majority of trials involved Bosnian Serbs, because crimes in the name of Serbian interests and extreme nationalism were committed on a far greater scale. Of the 130,000 people killed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, 100,000 died in Bosnia.

Along with Mr. Mladic, the other two men seen as among the main instigators of the bloodshed were Mr. Milosevic, who provided the Bosnian Serb separatists with funding, weapons and military personnel, and Mr. Karadzic, who was convicted last year and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

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If Mr. Karadzic was the brains behind the ethnic cleansing operations, Mr. Mladic was the muscle, leading a proxy army largely financed, armed and staffed at the top by Serbia.

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The two men faced similar charges, although crucial differences stand out.

One was the compelling trail Mr. Mladic himself left by recording his meetings and telephone conversations with military officials, politicians or foreign envoys. They were discovered behind a false wall in Mr. Mladic’s home; included in that cache were 18 notebooks representing his wartime diaries, an extraordinary windfall, prosecutors said.

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Mr. Mladic, whose handwriting was authenticated, listed meetings, including numerous times with the Serbian president, topics of discussion, strategy laid out, orders for ammunition and troop movements. In one telling entry on May 7, 1992, Mr. Mladic wrote that the Bosnian Serb leadership had discussed six strategic goals, of which the first and most important was “to separate from the Croats and Muslims forever.”

None of the 3,500 pages directly showed his own hand in crimes and few entries exist, or survive, from the days of the Srebrenica massacre. But many entries were used in various prosecutions, including Mr. Mladic’s, providing the kind of firsthand, dot-connecting accounts needed to prove a criminal case.

It was also the first trial in which prosecutors presented evidence from recently explored mass graves around an open-pit mine at Tomasica near Prijedor in Northern Bosnia.

They proved to be a dumping ground for Bosniaks killed or starved to death during the ethnic cleansing campaign around Prijedor, where the police operated concentration camps that became notorious for torture and rape.

The International Commission on Missing Persons, which uses DNA testing, said this month that so far 656 bodies from the mine have been identified, most of them men, all of them in civilian clothes. Those identified were among the nearly 6,000 people reported missing around Prijedor in the summer of 1992.

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But more bodies are emerging, including remains that were moved to other graves to hide the magnitude of the crime.

Mr. Mladic’s diary notes a request in 1992 from Simo Drljaca, the Prijedor police chief, asking for the army’s help to remove about 5,000 bodies buried in Tomasica by “burning them or grinding them or in any other way.” Mr. Mladic wrote that he replied, “You killed them, you bury them.”

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At the height of the ethnic cleansing campaign, in 1992, close to 45,000 were killed or missing, almost half of the 100,000 who died in the Bosnian war. That year, the number of Bosnian refugees and internally displaced persons reached 2.6 million.

In court Mr. Mladic was unpredictable, veering between indifference and angry outbursts, charming or mocking his judges, shouting orders at his lawyers because he can barely write notes after suffering strokes.

He called the charges against him “monstrous” and said he was “defending Serbia and the Serbian people, not Ratko Mladic.”

But his failing health has been a continuing problem. Pressed by the judges, the prosecution cut back about 40 percent of the crimes cited in an earlier indictment.

Doctors said he had suffered two strokes before arriving in The Hague, and since then he has suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney stones and other ailments. Several crises, including what is presumed to have been a heart attack, forced a pause in the proceedings and a reduction of weekly sessions to four days instead of five.

Defense lawyers repeatedly warned that his health had deteriorated, and just this month prosecutors privately expressed worry that he might not live until the verdict or would be unable to attend.

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The clear winners from the move would be the giant companies that provide internet access to phones and computers, which have fought for years against broadband regulations. A repeal of the rules would allow the companies to exert more control over the online experiences of American consumers.

Big online companies like Amazon say that the telecom companies would be able to show favoritism to certain web services, by charging for accessing some sites but not others, or by slowing the connection speed to some sites. Small online companies say the proposal would hurt innovation. Only the largest companies, they say, would be able to afford the expense of making sure their sites received preferred treatment.

And consumers, the online companies say, may see their costs go up to get quality access to popular websites like Netflix.

The action “represents the end of net neutrality as we know it and defies the will of millions of Americans,” said Michael Beckerman, chief executive of the Internet Association, a lobbying group that represent Google, Facebook, Amazon and other tech firms.

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But Mr. Pai said the internet rules were adopted to stop only theoretical harms. He said the old rules limited consumer choice and stifled investment in network expansion and upgrades.

He has also argued that the existing internet rules stop internet service companies from experimenting with new business models that could help them compete with online businesses like Netflix, Google and Facebook.

The plan to repeal the existing rules, passed in 2015, also reverses a hallmark decision by the agency to declare broadband as a service as essential as phones and electricity. That move created the legal foundation for the current rules and underscored the importance of high-speed internet service to the nation. It was put in place by Tom Wheeler, an F.C.C. chairman under President Obama.

Mr. Pai signaled his intention to dismantle the existing rules in April. The action on Tuesday by Mr. Pai, who was appointed chairman by President Trump, is the centerpiece of a deregulatory agenda that has also stripped television broadcasters, newspapers and telecom companies of a broad range of regulations meant to protect the public interest.

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The telecom companies on Tuesday cheered Mr. Pai’s proposal.

“The removal of antiquated, restrictive regulations will pave the way for broadband network investment, expansion and upgrades,” said Jonathan Spalter, the chief executive of USTelecom, an industry lobbying group.

But consumer advocacy groups and Democratic lawmakers said the move would harm consumers and internet businesses that have relied on the rules to ensure all content is equally available, and to make sure that speech is not stifled by broadband companies putting up barriers to certain internet sites.

Consumer groups say broadband companies have been incredibly profitable under the net neutrality rules and have expanded their networks into new communities and with faster speeds, despite complaints the rules hamper their businesses.

“Your internet service provider will be free to make online fast lanes and favor the content of its choice,” said Gigi Sohn, a former senior adviser to Mr. Wheeler at the F.C.C. “That it will take away your control of your internet experience and give it to Comcast, ATT and Verizon.”

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CLOSE

President Donald Trump pardons the national Thanksgiving turkey at the White House.
Time

President Trump exercised his pardon power on Tuesday, sparing two turkeys named Wishbone and Drumstick from becoming Thanksgiving dinner. 

« I’m pleased to report that unlike millions of other turkeys at this time of the year, Drumstick has a very, very bright future ahead of him, » Trump said at the pardoning, with first lady Melania and son Barron standing by his side and many extended family members in the audience.

When he approached Drumstick for the pardon, he exclaimed, « Big bird! » 

More: Meet Wishbone and Drumstick, the turkeys President Trump plans to pardon

More: Honest and Abe, turkeys Obama pardoned in 2015, are living their best lives in Virginia

Drumstick and Wishbone will live in « Gobbler’s Rest » at Virginia Tech, which the president described as « a beautiful place. » There, they’ll join Tater and Tot, the turkeys former president Barack Obama pardoned in 2016.

Trump joked that, while he has taken many steps to try to reverse Obama’s executive actions, the White House counsel’s office advised him not to try to overturn the Democratic president’s previous pardon of Wishbone and Drumstick’s predecessors.

« Tater and Tot’s pardons cannot under any circumstances be revoked, » he said. « So Tater and Tot, you can rest easy. » 

Trump’s first turkey pardoning is in keeping with a White House tradition of nearly three decades. Keeping up with the Thanksgiving-themed jokes, he noted that the first president to participate in the turkey event, Harry Truman, did not in fact pardon his feathered guest of honor.

« He was a tough cookie, » Trump said of Truman. « Today, I am going to be a much nicer president. »

The first official turkey pardoning was done by former president George H. W. Bush in 1989, and the tradition has been carried on by every president ever since. 

CLOSE

Abe and his understudy, Honest, were pardoned by President Obama in 2015 and now live on a beautiful farm in Virginia with their buddy, George.
USA TODAY

As Trump thanked members of the armed forces, police and first responders, he ignored shouted questions about whether he was going to pardon any people, according to pool reports.

Since taking office, the president has commented several times about his constitutional authority to grant reprieves and pardons. He’s exercised it once before, pardoning the controversial former sheriff Joe Arpaio back in August, without going through the usual process. 

As Trump pardoned the turkeys, some of his political critics wondered if he planned to use his pardoning power as the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election continue. Several individuals – including Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his campaign and business associate Rick Gates – have been charged by special counsel Robert Mueller.

« Today, the president is publicly pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey, but there’s nothing to stop him from secretly pardoning a political turkey – and there is a lot of foul behavior at the White House, » Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat who sits on the House’s oversight panel, said in a statement.

Like many distinguished White House guests, Wishbone and Drumstick got special tours earlier on Tuesday. 

While Drumstick checked out the Rose Garden, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders brought Wishbone into the briefing room.

As the lucky turkey gobbled and wobbled near the podium, Sanders told reporters: « If you guys haven’t voted yet, you should do that … Two more minutes. »‘

Sanders was referring to a poll the White House posted on Twitter, asking people to vote on which turkey Trump would pardon in the ceremony. (Regardless of social media popularity, both turkeys will live.)

After a few minutes, Sanders escorted Wishbone to the back offices so that he and Drumstick could prepare to meet the president.

« They have a big appearance coming up, » Sanders said.

Shouted one reporter: « Thanks for the gaggle. »

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President Clinton, accompanied by Jim Cooper, chairman, National Turkey Federation, laughs while looking at Carl, a 35-pound turkey, wearing a White House visitors pass, which was presented to him at the White House Nov. 27, 1996. After the ceremony, the president continued a tradition begun by President Harry Truman 49 years ago by pardoning the turkey and sending it off to life in a Virginia petting farm.  
Doug Mills, AP

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Charlie Rose’s CBS News career came to an unceremonious end Tuesday when the network fired him over allegations of sexual harassment.

“A short time ago we terminated Charlie Rose’s employment with CBS News, effective immediately,” CBS News President David Rhodes wrote in a note to staff. “This followed the revelation yesterday of extremely disturbing and intolerable behavior said to have revolved around his PBS program. Despite Charlie’s important journalistic contribution to our news division, there is absolutely nothing more important, in this or any organization, than ensuring a safe, professional workplace — a supportive environment where people feel they can do their best work. We need to be such a place.”

PBS followed with an announcement that it no longer will distribute “Charlie Rose,” the nightly talk show hosted by Rose since 1991.

“In light of yesterday’s revelations, PBS has terminated its relationship with Charlie Rose and canceled distribution of his programs,” a PBS spokesperson said in a statement. “PBS expects all the producers we work with to provide a workplace where people feel safe and are treated with dignity and respect.”

Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell, in 2012.

Rose’s serious demeanor and ability to engage a wide range of personalities in politics, the arts and business earned him respect and global recognition. He frequently jetted off to land interviews with world leaders.

“There is not a single person of note on the planet who does not know who he is,” said one CBS News executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. “His talent was so in the stratosphere.”

CBS had moved quickly Monday to suspend Rose, 75, after the Washington Post reported that day that eight women said they were subjected to inappropriate behavior while working with him. The story said Rose made unwanted sexual advances, appeared nude in their presence or groped them. His PBS talk show also was halted and there was no immediate update on the long-term status of the program.