Occupy G8

Democracy Now!:

World leaders are convening at the heavily guarded Camp David in Maryland today for the G8 Summit. Leading nonprofits such as Save the Children and Oxfam are urging G8 leaders to live up to a 2009 pledge of $22 billion towards food security in developing nations of which only a quarter has been met. Activists are also urging G8 leaders to build on their previous commitments and partner with developing countries to urgently tackle hunger. We’re joined by Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, and Dr. Margaret Flowers, a physician and organizer with the Occupy G8 Peoples’ Summit.

Will Ratko Mladic's trial deliver justice?

Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general has faced his first day in The Hague in front of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, charged with genocide and war crimes. The prosecution argues that Serb atrocities were not spontaneous but part of a plan to remove, to ethnically cleanse Muslims and Croats from the land that the Serbs wanted and that Ratko Mladic was an integral part of this plan. The success or failure of this trial will go a long way to establishing how the UN court is perceived by generations to come. Inside Story, with presenter Kamahl Santamaria, discusses with guests: Muhamed Sacirbey, former Bosnian ambassador to the UN; Toby Cadman, international criminal lawyer and a former special adviser to the chief prosecutor of Bosnia ; and Slobodan Samar-dzija, a journalist at the Politika Daily newspaper in Serbia.

Save economy: public spending, not deficit hysteria

Democracy Now!:

Public spending is under assault from the United States to Europe in the name of fighting deficits. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues in his new book, "End This Depression Now!", that the hysteria over the deficit will constrain an economic recovery in a time of high unemployment and stagnating wages. "The economics is really easy," says Krugman, "If we were to spend more money at the government level and ... rehire the schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers who have been laid off in the last several years because of cutbacks at the state and local level, we would be a long way back towards full employment. ... Right now, there just is not enough spending, and we need the government, which can do it, to step in and provide the demand we need. ... We’ve had austerity in the face of a recession, in a way that we have never had before since the 1930s. ... And the results are clear: it’s disastrous." Krugman writes about the economy as a columnist for the New York Times and is a professor of economics at Princeton University.