Jeremy Harding

Were all Serbs complicit in the crimes of the Milošević era? That’s the view of Ratko Mladić, the man who ran the four-year siege of Sarajevo and orchestrated the killings in Srebrenica. 'You voted for Milošević,' he said at the special war crimes court in Belgrade, after his arrest last week. 'I am not guilty.' Punish us all, in other words, but don't single me out. It's a weight-free argument beside the gravity of the charges, and an insult to the many Serbs who could do nothing to halt the degradation of the 1990s. In The Hague, Mladić will want to do better.

Sunday. My landlady accosts me: have you heard what’s happened in America? ‘Histoire de fesses!’ She is agitated. Whose business is it that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF and hot tip for the Elysée in 2012, has lunged at an employee of Sofitel in midtown Manhattan? What do they think they’re doing arresting him? Who was she, after all? A chambermaid! So, it’s an engraving in an 18th-century romance for gentlemen. Or if you read the New York Post, a ‘perv bust’, following ‘alleged sodomy of hotel maid’. Not such bad news for the right in France, despite the national disgrace.

How far can an American president sink below the line of least resistance? Andrew Sullivan answers this question in a blogpost about Guantánamo. That Obama has failed to address the breaking apart of human beings by Americans on the base makes him the inheritor of the Texan legacy on torture: Barack W. Obama, second president of Gitmo. 'To his eternal shame', as Sullivan remarks.