Former Bosnian-Serb Army Commander, General Ratko Mladic, is facing 11 charges, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in the trial that starts Wednesday at a United Nations tribunal in The Hague.

The 70-year-old former commander, referred to by his critics as the “butcher of Bosnia,” is accused of ordering the massacre of about 8,000 men and boys outside the Bosnian city of Srebrenica and the bloody siege of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the early 1990s.

A career military man, Mladic trained at the military academy of the Yugoslav People's Army in Belgrade. As Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in the early 1990s, he was promoted to general colonel and took command of all Bosnian Serb military forces when they began fighting for a separate Serb state.

The Srebrenica massacre took place in 1995, when thousands of civilians had gathered in an area designated by the United Nations as a safe haven. Disregarding the U.N. designation, Bosnian Serb troops rounded up as many as 8,000 men and boys and slaughtered them over several days. Mass graves were later found in the surrounding area.

After the war, Mladic returned to Belgrade, where some experts believe he was supported and protected by then-Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. But after Milosevic was arrested in 2001 and transferred to the Hague tribunal, Mladic went into hiding.

He was arrested in Serbia in May of last year after being a fugitive for 16 years. Experts say Mladic must have had support among the Serb military and secret services to avoid arrest for so many years.

The U.N. tribunal indicted him in 1995 along with his former ally, Bosnia's wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic.

A nuclear arms control advocacy group is calling on the United States to drastically reduce its stockpile of nuclear weapons.

A special panel convened by the group Global Zero has issued a report urging the U.S. to cut its current nuclear arsenal to 900 total warheads, well below the 5,000 nuclear warheads currently in service. The report calls for the elimination of all land-based intercontinental nuclear warheads, in favor of an arsenal deployed either by submarine or long-range bombers.

The panel, chaired by retired U.S. General James Cartwright, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says America's current nuclear posture is part of an outdated Cold War-era mindset that does not address the current threats of the 21st century.

The panel says the reductions could save the U.S. as much as $100 billion over the next decade, at a time when the Pentagon is facing huge budget cuts.

The U.S. and Russia have agreed cut their nuclear arsenal to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads by 2018, as required by the New START agreement reached in 2009. President Barack Obama is considering a number of options, including keeping the levels at those agreed to in the New START treaty, or reducing them to 300 to 400 warheads. The Global Zero report suggests 450 deployed warheads, with an equal number kept in reserve.

The report from the Global Zero panel emphasizes the importance of missile defense to protect the U.S. from the threat of nuclear attack from such nations as Iran and North Korea.

The panel includes such prominent national security experts as former U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel, Thomas Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, retired General Jack Sheehan, who served in a number of posts in NATO, and Richard Burt, a former chief U.S. nuclear arms negotiator.

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor has taken the stand in his own defense at a U.N.-backed tribunal, as judges heard oral arguments Wednesday in the sentencing phase of his war crimes trial.

Taylor said the Hague-based court “did not have the full contextual picture” of his case when it found him guilty last month on 11 counts of crimes against humanity, including acts of terrorism, murder and rape.

He also accused the prosecution of paying witnesses to testify against him and accused the court of being part of a Western conspiracy against him and other black Africans.

Taylor's attorneys have rejected the prosecution's call for an 80-year jail sentence in a British prison, saying the sentence is overly harsh and places too much blame for Sierra Leone's wartime atrocities on Taylor.

Prosecutors said Taylor masterminded Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s, arming and assisting rebels in exchange for “blood diamonds” mined in eastern Sierra Leone.

He is due to be sentenced on May 30.

The court found Taylor did not have command and control of the rebels, but was aware of their activities and provided them with weapons and other supplies.

He is the first African head of state to be brought before an international tribunal to face charges for mass atrocities and violations of international humanitarian law.

China pushed back Wednesday against accusations made by blind dissident Chen Guangcheng, after he pleaded his case to a U.S. congressional hearing for the second time in less than two weeks.

Chen told U.S. lawmakers via telephone from his Beijing hospital on Tuesday that he is concerned about the safety of his family, saying both his nephew and older brother have been beaten by Chinese authorities.

But Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei said the U.S. – not China – should be blamed for the incident, again repeating Beijing's position that Washington interfered in China's internal affairs.

“On the Chen Guangcheng case, China has made its position known many times. This case again shows the U.S. interference in China's internal affairs and we demand the U.S. handle competent personnel responsible for the issue and prevent similar incidents from happening again with similar measures. China is a country of the rule of law. The constitution and Chinese laws ensure citizens' legitimate rights and interests and at the same time they should also abide by laws and regulations.”

In an interview with VOA on Tuesday, Chen said U.S. diplomats are holding discussions with Chinese officials on plans for him to travel to New York for a teaching fellowship, but have been asked to maintain a low profile on the case.

Chen says he thinks the trip will take place eventually, despite the lack of substantial progress. U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said Tuesday that the U.S. has finished processing his visa paperwork and that it has been ready for more than a week.

Although he did not voice concern over his own conditions, Chen said his older brother is blocked from going outside because of murder charges brought against his son. Chen says the charges against his nephew are unfounded and that he has contacted a lawyer who has agreed to take up the case, despite pressure from authorities.

Chen was given a four-year prison sentence in 2006 for exposing abuses under China's forced abortion policy aimed at population control. He had been under house arrest since 2010, before fleeing on April 22 to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, where he remained for six days.

The self-taught legal activist agreed to depart the embassy under a deal reached by U.S. and Chinese authorities that would have allowed him to stay in a safe place in China and study law. But he changed his mind hours after leaving the embassy, saying his family had been threatened, and he wanted to go to the United States.

The activist, who has been blind since childhood, is at a Beijing hospital recovering from injuries sustained in his escape in late April.

Syrian activists have reported fresh gunfire on Wednesday in the same region of Hama where at least 20 mourners were shot and killed on Tuesday shortly before a roadside bomb exploded near U.N. observers.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights tells VOA the gunfire erupted in the central Khan Sheikhoun region, but it is unclear who is firing the shots.

The London-based group also says at least three people were killed after security forces opened fire on a Daraa province refugee camp.

Meanwhile, some U.N. monitors spent the night under rebel protection in Khan Sheikhoun after at least one of their vehicles was damaged in Tuesday's blast.

The monitors are part of a larger group of U.N. observers who have fanned out across the country to assess the government and the opposition's compliance to a fragile cease-fire brokered by international mediator Kofi Annan.

The head of the observer mission, Major General Robert Mood, says the monitors in Khan Sheikhoun are safe and should be evacuated on Wednesday.

The United Nations says more than 9,000 people have been killed in violence related to the anti-government uprising that erupted more than a year ago. The Syrian government has blamed armed terrorist groups for much of the country's unrest.

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U.S.-based General Motors says it will stop all of its paid advertising on Facebook, raising doubts about the viability of the popular social network ahead of its eagerly awaited debut as a publicly traded company.

A spokesman for the world's largest automaker says it decided to pull its ads off Facebook because they have not been effective. GM, the third-largest advertiser in the United States, spent about $10 million a year to advertise on Facebook.

The loss of paid advertising from GM will have little affect on the Internet giant, which earned $3.7 billion in revenues last year. But financial analysts say this could lead other businesses to reconsider using Facebook as part of their overall advertising strategy. The company's advertising revenue growth has slowed in recent months, and it has yet to devise a strategy to attract advertising on mobile devices like smartphones or tablet computers.

Facebook's value is expected to increase to more than $100 billion when it begins trading on the U.S. stock market's Nasdaq exchange on Friday. The company on Tuesday raised the price of its initial public offering from $28 a share to at least $34 a share.

A U.N. report says the global mortality rate for women giving birth has been cut in nearly half over the past two decades.

The report released Wednesday by the Geneva-based World Health Organization said maternal deaths declined from 540,000 in 1990 to 287,000 in 2010.

However, the report showed that one woman still dies from pregnancy-related complications every two minutes.

It said sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia account for most of the deaths.

One third of all the women's deaths during childbirth in 2010 were in just two countries: India and Nigeria. India had 20 percent of pregnancy-related deaths and Nigeria had 14 percent.

Chinese state media on Wednesday warned of diplomatic retaliation against Britain after Prime Minister David Cameron held a private meeting with the Dalai Lama in London.

An editorial in the official Xinhua news agency called the Monday meeting a “dark moment in China-Britain relations” and said it amounted to “blatant interference in China's domestic affairs.”

Beijing routinely criticizes nations who host the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. China has long accused the Dalai Lama of trying to separate Tibet from China, a charge he denies.

The Communist Party-affiliated Global Times on Wednesday also called for “punitive actions” against Britain. It suggested that Beijing respond by suspending high-level communications with Britain, as well as unspecified economic cooperative projects.

On Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei said Mr. Cameron “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” in going ahead with the meeting despite Chinese objections.

“The UK ignored China's strong opposition, insisting on arranging for its Prime Minister David Cameron to meet with the Dalai Lama. It severely interfered in China's internal affairs, hurt the feelings of the Chinese people, damaged China-UK relations, and we are strongly discontented and firmly opposed to it.”

Hong said that China lodged a protest with the British Embassy in Beijing over the matter, while the Chinese Embassy in London delivered the same message to the British government.

The Dalai Lama stepped down as the leader of the Tibetan government in exile last year. He has repeatedly said he is not pushing for Tibetan independence, but instead wants dialogue with Chinese officials aimed at establishing Tibetan autonomy.

The Nobel laureate is greeted warmly by well-wishers across the world during his travels, which serve in part to draw attention to China's often-harsh 60-year rule in Tibet.

The trial of former Bosnian-Serb Army Commander General Ratko Mladic has started at a United Nations tribunal in the Hague, 20 years after the Bosnian war began.

Prosecutor Dermot Groome said Wednesday the army chief's goal was to ethnically cleanse parts of Bosnia of non-Serbs.

Mladic is facing 11 charges, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The 70-year-old former commander is accused of ordering the massacre of about 8,000 men and boys outside the Bosnian city of Srebrenica and the bloody siege of Bosnia's capital Sarajevo in the early 1990s.

Mladic, a career military man, trained at the academy of the Yugoslav People's Army in Belgrade. As Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in the early 1990s, he was promoted and took command of all Bosnian Serb military forces when they began fighting for a separate Serb state.

The Srebrenica massacre took place in 1995, after thousands of civilians had gathered in an area designated by the United Nations as a safe haven. Disregarding the U.N. designation, Bosnian Serb troops rounded up as many as 8,000 men and boys and slaughtered them over several days. Mass graves were later found in the surrounding area.

After the war, Mladic returned to Belgrade, where some experts believe he was supported and protected by then-Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. But after Milosevic was arrested in 2001 and transferred to the Hague tribunal, Mladic went into hiding.

He was arrested in May of last year, almost three years later than Bosnia's wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic. Experts say Mladic must have had support among the Serb military and secret services to avoid arrest for so many years.

The U.N. tribunal indicted him in 1995 along with his former ally Karadzic.