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(CNN) -- Bosnia genocide suspect Ratko Mladic is back in court Thursday for a procedural hearing, a day after Goran Hadzic -- the last Yugoslav war crimes suspect at large until his arrest last month -- pleaded not guilty to crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Mladic, the highest profile Yugoslav war crimes suspect until his capture earlier this year, is accused of responsibility for the killing of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, the single largest mass slaughter in Europe since World War II.

He has been a combative figure at the ICTY, the United Nations-backed court set up to try war crimes suspects from the wars that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

The Thursday hearing is a status conference as preparations for his trial continue.
Hadzic, an ex-Croatian Serb rebel leader who had been a fugitive for seven years, was captured in Serbia on July 20.

The former president of a self-proclaimed Serbian republic in Croatia, Hadzic is accused of trying to remove Croats and other non-Serbs from the territory and the "extermination or murder of hundreds of Croat or other non-Serb civilians," among many other crimes, according to the tribunal.

(CNN) -- Imagine if long-term drought were to strike a part of the rural United States, Wyoming say, or Montana.

There would be bank foreclosures as the price of cattle would fall because there was too many of them on the market, families would tragically lose their farms, and grocery lists would be trimmed.

But would people starve, actually waste away until their bodies began to devour themselves?

In Southern Somalia, Djibouti, parts of Ethiopia and in refugee camps in Kenya at the moment, up to 12 million people, basically half a Canada, are facing death.

In Somalia, the people already in crisis number about four million. Mothers, for example, are again making the Sophie's choice of how to share the small resources of remaining food amongst their children.

And the tired old terms to explain it all are again repeated. The cause, we are told, is drought. The "caused by drought" formula is not only lazy journalism. We've heard that song sung so often in the past that it may now make us immune to the famine's claim on us.

Certainly, drought is a trigger of famine. And global warming might be extending the length of droughts. But Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist famously said that no substantial famine has ever occurred in a liberal democracy. I believe Sen is right. Famines occur in places where people are tyrannized over either by governments or, in the case of Southern Somalia, by private armies and militias. They occur in places where even in the lead-up years to famine, farmers are not always able to plant crops with security, without the likelihood that they might be confiscated, or that the village granary will be burned by armies, private and government.

(CNN) -- A meeting on Thursday between the British government and Internet communications firms was friendly, not confrontational, according to people from the organizations that took part in the meeting.

At the meeting, the government "did not seek any additional powers to close down social media networks," the British Home Office, the government's home security department, said in a statement. "The discussions looked at how law enforcement and the networks can build on the existing relationships and cooperation to crack down on the networks being used for criminal behavior."

Spokespeople for the British Home Office declined to provide additional details about whether it broached the issue of imposing limits social media.

The gathering took place about two weeks after British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that the government should impose limits on the "free flow of information" when it's "used for ill." "When people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them," he said then.

(CNN) -- Word on the cobblestone street is Istria is the "new Tuscany." I disagree. The landscape of this northern part of Croatia is less cultivated. It's less wealthy. And, last I checked, the Renaissance didn't happen here. Plus, "Istria" is still a little-known proper noun and "Tuscany" has moved into adjective territory.

Show me an American suburb and I'll show you a "Tuscan" kitchen, if not an entire foreclosed development named "Tuscan Hills." Earlier this year when Olive Garden -- the strip mall home of endless breadsticks -- wanted to make itself more appealing, it announced it was making over its restaurants in the style of Tuscan farmhouses. Now, I don't know if they serve shark in Tuscany, but the region has certainly jumped it.

That's not going to happen to Istria anytime soon. No, it will continue to hide in plain sight. Right in the middle of Europe. A small peninsula the shape of a crudely drawn heart tucked behind the boot of Italy. Capped by the Alps, bottom dangling in the cartoon blue of the Adriatic sea.

Eventually the tour buses and cookbook authors will arrive en masse, but for now the region is so sparsely populated that sometimes with its raw grandeur and new highways it can feel like an imaginary world in a video game where you build your own civilization.

Turns out civilization has existed in Istria since at least the Bronze Age, when people lived in "gradines," fortified castles built on the tops of hills. Houses and walls from that time are still visible as are the many structures left behind by all those who have ruled this region: The Illyrians, the Romans, the Venetians, the Austro-Hungarians. You name them, and they probably killed people and built churches here.

The Italians controlled the area until 1947 when it was ceded to then-Yugoslavia after the World War II. Now it is part of Croatia.

For the modern invader, Istria comes in two flavors: coastal paradise and rustic hilltop hamlet. Because the region is only about 50 miles wide and 60 miles north to south you can have both in the same day.