CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) – Media executive Oscar Gomez Barbero gave a bleak assessment of his work-life balance.

“I feel compelled to be constantly in touch with my work, including weekends and holidays, but you learn to live with this situation,” said Barbero, the chief technology officer at Spanish and Portuguese-language media group Prisa.

“When you are part of the most important decision-making bodies of a company, there are no limits on dedication. I have little time for family or social activities.”

In recent years, many companies on Wall Street and beyond have embraced the mantra of flexible hours and work-life balance. Read any image-building column written by a top executive, and he or she is likely to stress the importance of getting to a child’s soccer game or concert.

The idea of flexibility and fewer total hours on the job has clear popular appeal. The 2007 book “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich,” for example, became a huge best seller. But tales of short hours and relaxed work environments do not mesh with reality for many senior managers. The problem is that modern communications may allow less time in the office, but compel them to work around the clock, according to 10 executives in six countries interviewed as part of a larger Harvard Business School survey.

Some grimly predict that those seeking to get to or stay in the executive suite will have to be plugged in almost constantly.

Without a company publicist to cast a positive spin on corporate life, the executives spoke bluntly about how technology increasingly captures their off hours and fills their lives with stress. All subsequently gave their consent for Reuters to reprint their remarks, and two, including Barbero, agreed to have their names published.

CAMBRIDGE (Reuters) – Mark Zuckerberg returned to Harvard officially for the first time Monday, winning a warm welcome from the university where he created Facebook and embarked on a well-chronicled meteoric ascent.

It was clear Zuckerberg was no longer the dropout who left the iconic Ivy League institution, even if he still dresses in the classic campus uniform of T-shirt, jeans and sneakers.

If he weren’t so famous, the billionaire and Silicon Valley entrepreneur portrayed as the flawed protagonist of the Oscar-nominated “The Social Network” could have passed for any one of the hundreds of computer science students who came to hear him speak.

“It didn’t seem it was that different than talking to other Harvard students,” said Kyle Solan, 19, a computer science major afterward. “He seemed very down to earth.”

Just a few blocks from where he started the world’s largest social network, Zuckerberg took part in a rare question-and-answer for students, who snapped up tickets to the event with the same frenzy reserved for favorite bands.

“We weren’t originally planning this as a business or anything,” Zuckerberg said sheepishly of the phenomenon that Facebook would become. “If I had a chance to do it again I would have gone to classes.”

Zuckerberg’s rock-star reception marked a sea change from when the entrepreneur famously landed himself in hot water for creating Facemash, a website that allowed users to rank their fellow students’ attractiveness and an incident immortalized in the film.

BELGRADE/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – When Serbia arrested Bosnia Serb wartime General Ratko Mladic in May, Muslim survivors of the 1992-95 war celebrated and his ethnic Serb supporters expressed outrage at the treatment of a man they considered a hero.

The arrest of the Croat Serb wartime leader Goran Hadzic on Wednesday provoked a far less dramatic reaction, but is key for the European Union future of Serbia as it removes the shadow of war crimes that has plagued Belgrade’s membership bid.

“I will be looking our European counterparts in the eye and seeing whether they make good on what they have promised,” Serbian President Boris Tadic told reporters, spelling out Belgrade’s expectations of quick progress from now on.

Serbia hopes bringing Hadzic — the last remaining fugitive sought by the United Nations war crimes tribunal — to justice will be enough to persuade the EU executive that it is ready to launch EU accession talks.

Once started, negotiations will likely take years. But until now, the baggage of its role in the 1990s war that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia kept Serbia behind many of its regional peers, all of whom aspire to membership.

Wartime foe Croatia is expected to become an EU member in 2013, while Serbia still does not have even candidate status, putting it behind Montenegro and Macedonia in line for entry.

Tadic acknowledged that dealing with the wartime past was only one of the conditions set by the EU before it agrees to discuss the details of accession.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – Desperate for cash after years on the run, Goran Hadzic tried to sell a stolen painting believed to be a Modigliani and supplied the vital clue for capturing the last major Yugoslav war crimes fugitive.

Serbia’s president announced the arrest of Hadzic, a Croatian Serb wartime leader indicted for crimes against humanity during the 1991-95 Croatian war, Wednesday.

In a later news conference, Serbia’s chief war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said the 52-year-old was arrested in a forest near the village of Krusedol after investigators followed the trail of a painting attributed to Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian 20th century figurative artist.

“The breakthrough was information that he (Hadzic) wanted to sell a stolen Modigliani painting as he was running out of money,” Vukcevic told a news conference.

Earlier this year Serbian tabloids reported that the painting, allegedly titled “Portrait of a Man,” had been discovered in the home of a friend of Hadzic.

The Art Loss Register in London, which tracks lost or stolen paintings, lists four Modigliani portraits of men as stolen, said executive director Christopher Marinello.

“We have worked with the Serbian authorities before and we are currently working with them on a number of cases,” he said in an interview.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – Serbia’s last major war crimes fugitive, a Croatian Serb wartime leader indicted for crimes against humanity during the 1991-95 Croatian war, has been arrested, a Serbian official told Reuters on Wednesday.

Goran Hadzic, 52, was a key figure in the breakaway Krajina Serb republic in Croatia, and after the arrest of wartime General Ratko Mladic earlier this year, he was Serbia’s last remaining figure sought by the United Nations war crime tribunal in The Hague.

A Serbian official confirmed the arrest but declined to give details. President Boris Tadic, who announced the arrest of Mladic in May, scheduled an urgent news conference for 11 a.m. (0900 GMT).

Hadzic is charged with ordering the killing of hundreds and the deportation of thousands of Croats and other non-Serbs from his region of Croatia.

For years he was overshadowed by the higher profile ethnic Serb fugitives Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, and his military commander Mladic. Hadzic may ultimately be remembered mostly as the man who evaded justice longer than others charged with crimes in the 1990s Yugoslav wars.

“He is much more discrete than the others in terms of personality and what he did,” said Anna Maria Corazza Bildt, a member of European Parliament who served with U.N. forces in the region of Croatia where Hadzic was a regional leader. “He was not a particularly notable personality.”

Hadzic was a physically imposing figure however at 1.85 meters tall with a full dark beard during the war years.

DUBROVNIK, Croatia (Reuters) – Croatia’s economy may grow as much as 1.5 percent in 2011 after two years of downturn, boosted by an especially strong summer tourist season, the prime minister told Reuters said in an interview on Saturday.

However, Jadranka Kosor’s forecast of 1 to 1.5 percent GDP growth for the former Yugoslav republic, which concluded EU membership talks last month, was slightly below the 1.5 to 2 percent estimate she had given in April.

“This year we expect economic growth at long last,” she said at the closing of a two-day regional summit she hosted in the walled Adriatic city of Dubrovnik. “These were terribly difficult years. We expect growth of at least one percent.”

“We expect that major government investment will impact unemployment, which will lead to economic growth,” she said. “I think we can reach 1.5 percent.”

The International Monetary Fund has forecast growth of 1 percent.

Croatia’s economic recovery has lagged other countries in emerging Europe. It experienced two years of recession as it was completing EU talks and now hopes to become the bloc’s 28th member in July 2013.

With tourists flocking to Croatia’s pristine coastline and crystal clear waters this summer, Kosor was optimistic about the season, as tourism brings in about a fifth of total GDP.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general who once barked out orders that could kill thousands, could not stand the pain and decided he no longer wanted to live.

By 2006, the man charged with genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had been on the run for 11 years. Suffering from kidney stones — solid salts or minerals in the ureter which cause sharp pain — he ordered one of his aides to end his misery.

“We could not take him for treatment,” the former aide, who refused to be named because he still faces legal proceedings related to his role, told Reuters. “We found him some painkillers, but he was in such a pain that he begged us to kill him.”

That refusal by Mladic’s supporters to end his life was to prove one of many secret episodes in a long life on the run that ended with his arrest last week.

There are many gaps in the trail of Ratko Mladic. But interviews with the former aide, a Serbian operative working on his arrest, a top government official overseeing the operation and others, as well as information contained in U.S. diplomatic cables, show a man whose power and influence dwindled over the years until he was found alone last week in a farmhouse, surrounded by disorder and medications.

FRAGMENTS OF A LIFE ON THE RUN

At first he had lived quite openly at his home in the Serb capital Belgrade. As a commander overseeing the siege of Sarajevo and other operations, Mladic had gained a reputation for fearlessness, as someone who would not seek cover even when other men scrambled for safety.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – Serbia extradited most-wanted war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic on Tuesday after he lost his final legal appeal, removing a nationalist icon whose years on the run hindered Serbian progress towards EU membership.

Serbia’s war crimes court rejected an appeal from his lawyer that poor health should stop the former general’s extradition to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, where ex-Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic is already on trial.

“Ratko Mladic has been extradited,” Serbian Justice Minister Snezana Malovic told reporters on Tuesday evening. “That means he is in the plane en route to The Hague tribunal.”

Mladic, 69, was indicted by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia 15 years ago for genocide in the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

He was arrested on Thursday in a farmhouse in northern Serbia belonging to a cousin. His capture prompted at times violent protests by Serb nationalists in Serbia and Bosnia.

Mladic’s last day in Serbia, where he spent most of his fugitive years, began with a police-escorted visit to the Belgrade grave of his daughter Ana, who committed suicide in 1994.

Mladic’s wife and son paid a final visit to the prison before he was dispatched to the Belgrade airport with special police wearing balaclava masks, bulletproof vests and automatic rifles guarding the convoy of Land Rover vehicles.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – Serbia’s war crimes court rejected an appeal against the extradition of Ratko Mladic on Tuesday, opening the way for the former Bosnian Serb general’s dispatch to The Hague to stand trial, a spokeswoman said.

Earlier in the day, Serbian officials said Mladic could be sent to the international criminal court within 24 hours, making a late night Tuesday or early Wednesday departure most likely.

The accused war criminal’s last day in Serbia began with a police-escorted visit to the Belgrade grave of his daughter Ana, who committed suicide in 1994.

Mladic is charged with genocide in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian War.

The court received the Mladic appeal on Tuesday morning after his cemetery visit and rejected it within hours. His lawyer said he had new medical evidence.

The justice minister scheduled a news conference for 5 p.m. local time (1500 GMT).

During a prison visit on Monday, Mladic met his five-year old grandson, possibly for the first time, and his 10-year-old granddaughter. His wife and son were expected to visit him again on Tuesday afternoon.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – Accused war criminal Ratko Mladic may be sent to The Hague in the next 24 hours, Serbian officials said on Tuesday, after he was allowed to go to his daughter’s grave and his grandchildren visited prison.

Authorities paved the way for what may be the former Bosnian Serb general’s last day in Serbia by escorting him early on Tuesday to the Belgrade grave of his daughter Ana, who committed suicide in 1994.

Later on Tuesday, a court is expected to hear Mladic’s appeal against extradition to the International Criminal Court in the Dutch city of The Hague on charges of genocide in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian War.

His transfer is expected within the next 24 hours, two Serbian officials said.

“The panel of three will swiftly decide on the appeal, they will almost certainly reject it, the justice minister will sign extradition papers and off he goes,” one official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“It will happen within the next 24 hours, as soon as the appeal arrives to the court and that is expected today.”

A second official in a separate division of the government confirmed that timetable for the fugitive general arrested last Thursday after 16 years on the run.