friday, 5.18.12 press d 5a facebook’s ipo one of...

BY MIKE CORDERAssociated Press

THE HAGUE, Netherlands —An apparent clerical errorprompted judges to postpone thelong-awaited war crimes trial offormer Bosnian Serb militaryleader Ratko Mladic on Thursday,possibly for months.

The delay cast a shadow overone of the court’s biggest cases— and over the reputation of thecourt itself, whose most promi-nent trials have proceeded at asnail’s pace, frustrating manyvictims.

It also highlighted problemsfaced by international tribunalsin prosecuting sweeping indict-ments covering allegations ofatrocities spanning years incountries far from the courtswhere defendants face justice.

“It is fraught with delay be-cause of the volume of documen-tation and scope of allegedcrimes,” Richard Dicker, the di-rector of Human Rights Watch’sinternational justice program,

said in a telephone interviewThursday. “Add to that the needto translate and it really takes itto a whole new level of complex-ity that you don’t see in domestictrials.”

Presiding judge Alphons Oriesaid he was delaying the Yu-goslav war crimes tribunal casedue to “significant disclosure er-rors” by prosecutors, who areobliged to share all evidence withMladic’s lawyers.

Orie said judges will analyzethe “scope and full impact” of theerror and aim to establish a newstarting date “as soon as possi-ble.” The presentation of evi-dence was supposed to beginlater this month.

Prosecutors had already ac-knowledged the errors and didnot object to the delay. Mladic’sattorney has asked for a six-month delay to study thematerials.

Mladic is accused of com-manding Bosnian Serb troopswho waged a campaign of killingsand persecution to drive Muslims

and Croats out of territory theyconsidered part of Serbia duringBosnia’s 1992-95 war.

His troops rained shells andsnipers’ bullets down on civiliansin the 44-month siege of theBosnian capital, Sarajevo. Theyalso executed thousands of Mus-lim men and boys in Srebrenica,the site of Europe’s worst mas-sacre since World War II. The waritself left over 100,000 dead.

He has refused to enter pleasto the charges but denies wrong-doing. If convicted, he faces amaximum sentence of lifeimprisonment.

BY DAVID B. CARUSOAND JIM FITZGERALDAssociated Press

BEDFORD, N.Y. — Every fam-ily has its share of pain and tri-umph. And then there are theKennedys.

America’s great political dy-nasty is grieving again after MaryRichardson Kennedy, the es-tranged wife of Robert KennedyJr., hanged herself Wednesday atthe family’s 10-acre estate in aNew York City suburb.

Her death, at age 52, came asa shock to some friends and fam-ily, even though the past twoyears had been undeniably toughones. The couple was goingthrough a divorce, and Mary hadbeen charged twice with drivingwhile intoxicated in 2010.

But Victoria Michaelis, afriend since Mary’s college days,said she hadn’t seemed suicidal,or crippled by the alcohol prob-lems that briefly landed her inthe headlines two springs ago.

“She was definitely suffering,but she was very, very spiritualand a resolute Catholic,”Michaelis said. “I’d say she wasdepressed the last two yearssince the divorce. But she wouldput that aside and ask you howyou were. I saw her a couple ofweeks ago, and she was fine.”

Her death resonated, too, witha public that has watchedtragedy march through the ranksof the Kennedy clan again andagain.

“I think every family has itstragedies. But this is too much,”said Kim O’Connell, who droppedoff a bouquet of Calla lilies at thefamily’s home in Bedford onThursday morning. She had metRobert and Mary only a few

times, while working at theirhealth club, but felt a connectionanyway. “I just thought she wasjust a lady. I woke up this morn-ing, and I wanted to dosomething.”

Mary Kennedy had livedmuch her life at the edge of thespotlight that shines on theKennedy family. An architecturaldesigner with New Jersey roots,she met her estranged husband’ssister, Kerry, in boarding school

when they were still teenagersand had stayed close to the clanthrough the decades before mar-rying Robert in 1994.

Robert is the son of Robert F.Kennedy, the former U.S. attor-ney general who was slain in1968 while running for the Demo-cratic presidential nomination,and the nephew of assassinatedPresident John F. Kennedy andthe late U.S. Sen. EdwardKennedy of Massachusetts.

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BY BARBARA ORTUTAYAP Technology Writer

NEW YORK — Facebook’s initial public of-fering of stock is one of the largest ever. Theworld’s definitive online social network israising at least $16 billion for the companyand its early investors in a transaction thatvalues Facebook at $104 billion.

It’s a big windfall for a company thatbegan eight years ago with no way to makemoney.

Facebook priced its IPO at $38 per shareon Thursday, at the top of expectations. Thecompany is selling just a portion of its sharesas part of the offering. The $38 price meansall of its shares will be worth about $104 bil-lion, giving the company a market valuehigher than Amazon.com and other well-known companies such as Kraft, Disney andMcDonald’s.

Facebook’s stock is expected to begintrading on the Nasdaq Stock Market some-time Friday morning under the ticker symbol“FB.” That’s when so-called retail investorscan try to buy the stock.

Facebook’s offering is the culmination of ayear’s worth of Internet IPOs that began last

May with LinkedIn Corp. Since then, a steadystream of startups focused on the social sideof the Web has gone public, with varying de-grees of success. It all led up to Facebook, thecompany that’s come to define social net-working by getting 900 million people aroundthe world to share everything from photos oftheir pets to their deepest thoughts.

“They could have gone public in 2009 at amuch lower price,” said Nick Einhorn, re-search analyst at IPO investment advisoryfirm Renaissance Capital. “They waited aslong as they could to go public, so it makessense that it’s a very large offering.”

Facebook Inc. is the third-highest valuedcompany to go public, according to data fromDealogic, a financial data provider. Only twoChinese banks, Agricultural Bank of China in2010 and Industrial and Commercial Bank ofChina in 2006, have been worth more. At $16billion, the size of the IPO is the third-largestfor a U.S. company. The largest U.S. IPO wasVisa, which raised $17.9 billion in 2008. No. 2was Enel, a power company and No. 4 wasGeneral Motors, according to RenaissanceCapital.

For the company that was born in a Har-vard dormitory and went on to reimagine on-

line communication, the stock sale meansmore money to build on the features andservices it offers users. It means an infusionof funds to hire the best engineers to work atits sprawling Menlo Park, Calif., headquar-ters, or in New York City, where it opened anengineering office last year.

And it means early investors, who took achance seeding the young social networkwith start-up funds six, seven and eight yearsago, can reap big rewards. Peter Thiel, theventure capitalist who sits on Facebook’sboard of directors, invested $500,000 in thecompany back in 2004. He’s selling nearly 17million of his shares in the IPO, which meanshe’ll get some $640 million.

The offering values Facebook, whose 2011revenue was $3.7 billion, at as much as $104billion. The sky-high valuation has its skep-tics, who worry about signs of a slowdownand Facebook’s ability to grow in the mobilespace when it was created with desktop com-puters in mind. Rival Google Inc., whose rev-enue stood at $38 billion last year, has amarket capitalization of $207 billion.

“There seems to be somewhat of a hypearound the stock offering,” says Gartner ana-lyst Brian Blau.

BY SETH BORENSTEINAP Science Writer

WASHINGTON — And theheat goes on. Forecasters pre-dict toasty temperatures willstretch through the summer inthe U.S. And that’s a bad signfor wildfires in the West.

The forecast for Junethrough August calls forwarmer-than-normal weatherfor about three-quarters of thenation, the National OceanicAtmospheric Administrationsaid Thursday.

The warmth is expectedsouth of a line stretching frommiddle New Jersey to south-ern Idaho. Only tiny portionsof northwestern U.S. andAlaska are predicted to becooler than average and that’sonly for June, not the rest ofthe summer.

Last May until April wasthe hottest 12-month periodon record for the nation withrecords going back to 1895.This year so far has seen thehottest March, the thirdwarmest April and the fourthwarmest January and Febru-ary in U.S. weather history.And it was one of the leastsnowy years on record in theLower 48.

Some people called it theyear without winter.

And the outlook for sum-mer is “more of the same,”said Jon Gottschalck, head offorecast operations at NOAA’sClimate Prediction Center inCamp Springs, Md. “There’sdefinitely a tilt toward beingabove normal through thesummer.”

For some areas of theSouthwest that could meantemperatures 1 or even 2 de-grees warmer than normal onaverage, and maybe close tohalf a degree warmer than nor-mal in the East, he said.

One of the reasons is thatmuch of the country’s soil isalready unusually dry. So thesun doesn’t use as much en-ergy evaporating water in thesoil and instead heats up theair near the ground evenmore, Gottschalck said.

Martin Autopsy Finds Evidence Of MarijuanaORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Trayvon Martin’s autopsy shows evi-

dence of marijuana in his urine and blood.The autopsy was among a large amount of evidence released by

prosecutors on Thursday as part of the second-degree murder caseagainst the neighborhood watch volunteer who shot him in Febru-ary.

Other documents include a photograph that shows suspectGeorge Zimmerman with a bloody nose. Zimmerman has claimedself-defense and said he only fired because the unarmed teenagerattacked him. He has pleaded not guilty.

A police report says Martin had $40.15, Skittles candy, a redlighter, headphones and a photo pin in his pocket. He had beenshot once in the chest and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Romney Denounces Racially Focused Ads JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Mitt Romney swiftly and firmly dis-

tanced himself Thursday from a group exploring plans to targetPresident Barack Obama’s relationship with a controversial formerpastor. But the revival of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a campaignissue momentarily placed race at the center of the presidentialcontest and showcased the independent groups playing a new rolethis year with big-money TV ads.

Republican Romney pushed back against a proposal beingweighed by a conservative super PAC, Ending Spending ActionFund, to run a $10 million ad campaign drawing attention toracially provocative sermons Wright delivered at a church Obamaattended in Chicago. But with super PACS operating under signifi-cantly looser campaign finance restrictions than in past presiden-tial contests, there was no guarantee Romney’s words would beheeded by other groups eager to make Wright — and, by extension,race — a factor in the campaign.

“I want to make it very clear: I repudiate that effort,” Romneytold reporters after a campaign stop in Florida. “I think it’s thewrong course for a PAC or a campaign. I hope that our campaignscan be respectively about the future and about issues and about vi-sion for America.”

Romney indicated he was eager to shift the discussion back tojobs and the economy — bedrock issues on which he contendsObama is vulnerable.

Joe Ricketts, the billionaire benefactor of the super PAC, alsodistanced himself from the plan and announced he, too, would re-ject a racially focused approach.

Syrian Opposition Council Appears To CrumbleBEIRUT (AP) — Syria’s main opposition council is crumbling

under the weight of infighting and divisions over issues that cut tothe heart of the revolution, including accusations that the move-ment is becoming as autocratic as the regime it wants to drive out.

The slow disintegration of the Syrian National Council, whichhas become the international face of the uprising, could complicateWestern efforts to bolster the opposition, just as President BasharAssad’s regime gathers momentum in its crackdown on dissent.

On Thursday, SNC leader Burhan Ghalioun said he was ready tostep down once a replacement is found, amid mounting criticism ofhis leadership.

The decision came just days after he was re-elected for a third,three month term during a council vote held in Rome. The councilhas said it would rotate the presidency every three months, soGhalioun’s repeated appointments rankled some who wanted anew face.

“I will not accept under any circumstances to be a divisive can-didate, and I am not after any post,” said Ghalioun, an exiled Syrianand professor at the Sorbonne in Paris. “I will resign as soon as anew candidate is picked, either by consensus or new elections.”

Commercially Built Rocket Will Fly To StationCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — For the first time, a private com-

pany will launch a rocket to the International Space Station, send-ing it on a grocery run this weekend that could be the shape ofthings to come for America’s space program.

If this unmanned flight and others like it succeed, commercialspacecraft could be ferrying astronauts to the orbiting outpostwithin five years.

It’s a transition that has been in the works since the middle ofthe last decade, when President George W. Bush decided to retirethe space shuttle and devote more of NASA’s energies to venturingdeeper into space.

Saturday’s flight by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is “athoroughly exciting moment in the history of spaceflight, but is justthe beginning of a new way of doing business for NASA,” said Presi-dent Barack Obama’s chief science adviser, John Holdren.

By handing off space station launches to private business,“NASA is freeing itself up to focus on exploring beyond low Earthorbit for the first time in 40 years.”

Damaged Navy Assault Ship Arrives At PortSAN DIEGO (AP) — Sporting crumpled catwalks and smashed

lifeboats, the U.S. Navy vessel USS Essex managed to glide into SanDiego Bay on Thursday, 24 hours after colliding with a tanker in thePacific Ocean when the aging warship’s steering apparently failed.

Families of the crew aboard the “Iron Gator” waved homemadeflags in celebration as the 21-year-old amphibious assault ship —which officials say is overdue to be dry docked — came into viewthrough the morning’s thick marine layer.

Wednesday’s midmorning crash 120 miles off the coast of South-ern California resulted in no injuries or fuel spills. The 844-foot-longEssex was carrying 982 crew members. The tanker, the 677-footUSNS Yukon, was carrying 82.

“To me, it felt like a minor earthquake,” said Navy photographerDuke Richardson from Jersey City, N.J., who was in a photo lab onthe Essex when it struck the Yukon.

He said some of the “newbies” on board were in a “state ofshock” and let out some interesting “four-letter words” when theboat jolted and the collision alarms sounded.

Boy Bites Into Severed Finger Flesh At Arby’sJACKSON, Mich. (AP) — A Michigan teen finishing off an Arby’s

roast beef sandwich chomped down on something tough thattasted like rubber, so he spit it out.

Turns out it tasted like finger. The fleshy, severed pad of an un-fortunate employee’s finger, apparently.

Ryan Hart, 14, told the Jackson Citizen Patriot on Wednesdaythat once he got a good look at it, he knew right away what hadbeen in the junior roast beef sandwich he was eating last Friday.

“I was like, ‘That (has) to be a finger,”’ Hart said. “I was about topuke. ... It was just nasty.”

The employee apparently cut her finger on a meat slicer and lefther station without immediately telling anyone, said Steve Hall, theenvironmental health director for the Jackson County health de-partment. Her co-workers continued filling orders until they foundout what had happened, he said.

Facebook’s IPO One Of World’s Largest

Suicide Adds To Kennedy Misfortunes ForecastersSay HeatWill StickAround

Mladic Trial Delayed By Evidence Errors