on this edition for saturday, april 12th, armed men loyal to russia storm a police station in ukraine. walmart's big new bet on food. what it means to customers and competitors. >> and jailing those who can't pay their fines. >> i didn't sell drugs. i didn't break into anyone's home. i didn't kill anybody. i had an expired tag. next on pbs news hour weekend. >> announcer: pbs news hour weekend is made possible by the

cullm cullman, the wallach family, bernard and eye reason schwartz. rosalind p. walter. and provided by mutual of america. that's why we're your retirement company. additional l support is provided by -- and by the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to your pbs stations from viewers like you. from new york. good evening. thanks for joining us. ukraine's national security council held an emergency session tonight after pro russian activists seized new buildings earlier in the day. the interior minister promised what he called a very tough response. they were armed with pistols and rifles and seize add police head

kaurs in an eastern ukraine can city. there were hundreds of pistols and ammunition stored at the police head quarters. in a nearby city, they also seized the police head quarters. protestors have occupied a government building there for nearly a week. eastern ukraine has a large russian speaking population. >> there has been another poison gas attack in syria. an amateur video posted online shows men and children crowded into a hospital room, some apparently having difficulty breathing. they say the attack occurred last evening during air raids by government forces. the regime blamed remember l forces saying they had used chlorine gas. a chemical attack by the

assad regime last august killed hundreds. the australian prime minister today tamped down expectations that search planes and ships will recover wreckage from flight 370 any time soon. sounds coming from what are beloved to be the -- believed to be the black box recorders are rapidly fading. >> no one should underestimate the difficulty of the task ahead of us. trying to locate anything 4 1/2 kilometers underbeneath the ocean is a massive task and it is likely to continue for a long time to come. >> that's roughly equivalent to 3 miles underwater. the plane went missing five weeks ago today. >> iran today condemned the

obama administration's decision not to grant a visa to it's u.n. ambassador. iran said it would appeal the decision to the you know. they say he was part of the group responsible in 1979. that event led to the taking of 52 american hostages held captive for about 15 months. they have denied involvement. in the west african nation of giny, health officials struggling to contain the deadly ebola virus have set up cameras at airport check points. more than 100 people have died in recent weeks. here in new york last night, president obama blamed republicans for trying to impose new restrictions on voting. he says it is trying to undermine gains during the civil rights era.

>> it is the single greatest tool we have to address an unjust status quo. you would think there would not be an argument about this anymore.z27quq the stark, simp this, the right to vote is threatened today in a way that it has not been since the voting rights act became law nearly five decades ago. >> a spokeswoman said protecting the integrity of the voting process is something that benefits everyone. new details about the crash in california involving a tour bus and a fedex tractor trailer that killed ten people earlier this week. they are saying that the fedex truck was already on fire before it veered across the median and hit the bus. a fedex spokesman had no comment on the report. the u.s. bureau of land management called off a round up

of cattle that it said were being grazed illegally on federal land. there was a confrontation with federal officers earlier in the week. they said they stopped the round up because of what it called the serious concern about its safety and of its employees and the public. >> a series of experimental drugs were shown to cure more than 90% of cases. hepatitis c kills approximately 15,000 americans every year. >> and now to our signature segment. in-depth about significant but underreported stories. tonight, we take you to alabama where civil advocates say hundreds of people are being jailed each month because they can't afford their fines. debtors prisons were outlawed in

the united states. carlos fray has our report. ♪ >> timothy, the minister of music at this church in alabama says that it's his deep faith in god that got him through some tough time. his son cole was born with a rare brain disease. >> pretty much when you looked into a ct scan, it was nothing but fluid. >> life got tougher when he was pulled over by police and ticketed for an expired license plate tag. >> i was coming from the hospital. we'd been sitting with cole. as i come into town, they had a traffic check point. >> his wife had also received two tickets. they told the judge about their

hospitalized son and both were found not guilty as these court documents show. but the judge ruled they still had to pay court costs of about $500. during this period, timothy says he was spending so much time at the hospital that he couldn't hold down a job. with his wife also not working, they couldn't afford the course costs. their case was turned over to a private company that collects fines for the city. the company told him that he and his wife could be jailed if they didn't pay what they owed. >> if you can't pay, then they'll issue a warrant for your arrest. >> did that scare you? >> of course. >> he said he did the best he could, but says when he couldn't continue to pay, they were arrested and jailed. >> i felt like a criminal. i didn't sell drugs. i didn't break into anyone's home. i didn't kill anybody. i had an expired tag.

>> so you and your wife were found not guilty of the traffic violations, but still you were being arrested. >> we were being arrested, yes. i was very upset. >> they were released several hours later when a relative paid a portion of what they owed. that led them to become part of a lawsuit against the city. the suit alleges that incarcerating people that can't pay their fines violates the constituti constitution. though some argue it's legal, in 1971, the supreme court ruled that the constitution prohibits imposing a jail term because the defendant is indigent. >> that's exactly what's happening here. >> david is the deputy legal director of the southern poverty law center, a nonprofit organization not involved in their lawsuit. he estimates that a thousand people every month are going to

jail in alabama because they cannot afford to pay a fine. >> everyone thinks that debtors prison is over. it isn't. as a matter of practice and policy, the courts ask one question. can you pay the fine. if you can't, then you have to do what's called sit it out in jail. that's unconstitutional unless the court conducts an inquiry into whether they're indigent. routinely what's happening here is thatrfym no such inquiry is undertaken. >> did they try to assess whether or not you could afford to pay the fees? >> no, sir. it was pass and go. it was really fast. >> collecting fines is more important than ever because many cities face budget short falls. so increasingly they turn to private probation companies. that's where journal correction services comes in. >> we were approached by the

probation service. they found a niche. >> they declined to speak with us, so we met with the finance director for mountain brook, a neighboring city that also hired jie additional correction services. it's one of over a thousand cities that have hired this type of company. judicial correction services collects fines at no cost to the cities it works for. >> they're helping us to become more efficient and they're helping us to enshire we don't get a -- ensure we don't get a backlog. i think it's a win-win. i think private probation has a role. >> republican state senator cam ward is the chairman of the judiciary committee and has been following the growing trend. he believes the industry will continue to grow. >> i think the privatization in the area of collections, i thaik that will continue all across

the country until you see a concentrated effort to put more money into the collection services that the estate runs. >> by they are by definition in business to make money. even though they don't charge the city anything, they charge offenders like timothy. $45 a month and a stampup fee -- startup fee until the debt is paid off. >> can you tell me if you were making an effort to pay these off? >> we were. yes, sir. even though i was, we weren't getting very far with it. i wasn't gaining much ground with all the fees adding up. >> still, four months after the initial court date, documents show they paid off almost $300 of the $5600 they -- $500 they owed in course costs. but then things went from bad to worse. in june of 2011, their son cole died. a month later, their house was

foreclosed upon. they were consumed with grief and missing their appointments with jsf. he says he explained the difficult circumstances his family was hurnd, but they wouldn't work with him at all. >> it just hit us all at once. but it was either payor go to jay. >> did that help you to come up with the money. >> it helped me to try harder. the old thing goes, you can't squeeze blood from a turnip. >> the couple missed at least one court date each and were fined additional fees. then warrants for their arrests were issued. by the time of their arrests in february of 2011, they had racked up $2,500 in additional court fines. all this began with three

traffic violations for which they were found not guilty. if you had come up with the money you owed and shown up for all of your appointments with them to the courts, none of this would have ever happened. >> you're tñ but the situation i was in, i was doing what i could do. had a dying child, no steady job at that point because we were back and forth to the hospital. i was doing what i could do. >> david of the southern poverty law center says that people like them end up paying jcf off for years. >> all they are doing a paying jcf for the privilege of staying out of jail. >> we asked a columbia law professor to take a look at the lawsuit and to evaluate the constitutionality of private companies like jsc collecting fines. she has no involvement in the

case. >> part of what due process requires is that you have an impartial decision maker. if the company that is imposing the fees and continuing your supervision has a financial interest in your staying under supervision, that calls their impash yalt into question. >> she also says the court is obligated to provide alternative options for an individual to payoff a debt to associate society. >> if you're not paying because you're too poor to pay, they have to do an investigation and offer alternative arrangements in order to work off the fine in some other way. >> we reached out to jsc multiple times for an interview. on its website, jsc says the lawsuit is baseless. we also tried to ask the mayor of the town if he was satisfy satisfied with the services, but

city hall never responded to our request. so we went to a city city counsel meeting. after speaking to some of the residents here, they feel like they are being threatened with a jail sentence if they don't pay their fines. >> i mean, is it not unconstitutional to jail somebody who cannot pay their fee? >> i don't know. there again, if the court -- [ inaudible ] jurisdiction and i know that when it comes back, we're one of the many, many cities in alabama that uses a contract service and the reason being because not having the amount of personnel we have. >> even the state senator who supports the private probation industry has concerns. >> what's currently in existence is almost like the wild west. if you're going to create a system that quote, unquote is a debtors prison, all you're doing is inviting yourself to a federal lawsuit.

>> as for this family, after being charged an initial court cost of $500 for traffic violations of which they were found not guilty, court documents provided by their lawyers show that they've paid almost $1300 to the court. it's a number that doesn't even include all the additional monthly fees they paid to journal correction services. they failed to provide us the documents. timothy says his family still owes more money to journal correction services. how much? he's not sure. he says jcs stopped contacting him after the lawsuit was filed. >> learn about why the area's surveillance recording the movements of an entire city. see my interview at news

hour.pbs.org. organic food sales totalled some $30 billion in the u.s. last year and suppliers can barely keep up with demand. walmart announced that it would slash prices of some of its organic products by 25%. the company says it acted after research shows their customers would purchase organic products if it was more affordable. so first of all, what's the significance of the largest retail in the country, but beyond that, why is this news so important? >> people think that this is going to be the inflection point that will make organic foods more mainstream. walmart already sells more than 1,600 different items. now they're adding 100 items from under the wild oats brand. those will not have the typical premium you see with organic

food. there's the 25% preem yim typically. that will be gone. a lot of people think this is a way to bring organic food to lower income shoppers. >> does that mean that other retailers adjust their prices? >> the impact will actually be more on food makers. there won't be that much pressure on whole foods because there isn't that much overlap between whole food shoppers and walmart shoppers. people think there's going to be more of the -- will be used for conventional farming -- i mean for organic farming rather than conventional. so that in turn will lower costs. it will create a cycle for organic foods. that will pressure companies like kehl log among others to offer more organic foods. >> so this is really more

pressure on manufacturers to create more organic food for retailers then? >> absolutely. >> even as we see the trend lines going up, this is still a very small fraction of the overall food market, right? >> it's roughly 4% of food spending in the united states. but it's growing by about 10% per year. if you look at companies like walmart and target, they get a huge amount of their sales from grocery. walmart gets 55% of its revenue from wys;grocery. it has been a struggling business for them. so this is a way for them to give a boost to the raw grocery sales. >> what does this do for the producers of food? right now, it seems these prices are up because supply is shorter than demand. >> well, the -- several groups such as the environmental working group and the center for science in the public interests believe that this is going to be an incentive for more farmers to

use more labs for organic farming. overall organic food prices, beyond these 100 wild oats items that walmart will be selling, will fall. that will in turn pressure the packaged food makers. >> and this isn't necessarily likely to happen any time soon, even if a farmer turns over his land into organic crops, this takes a couple years for the fda to give you that sale, right? >> you can't just use your farm differently from one day to the next. the reason this has been seen as a pretty big deal is that it's a turning point now in food consumption. organic food has typically been associated with more affluent shoppers. a lot of people think this is the first step towards it becoming mainstream and viable for lower income shoppers. >> what kind of products under this wild oats brand will

walmart be selling? >> the thing that's important to remember is that this is not going to be dairy and produce. they include things like tomato paste, olive oil. the other 1,600 items considered organic which are mostly produce and dairy, they will keep that organic price premium. >> is this also trying to catch up with the trend of younger people who are more conscious about what goes in their food? >> lower income shopters are like everyone else. they want to eat foods that are good for them and sustainable for the economy. so it's -- as you mentioned before, walmart's own research found that 90% of its shoppers would be willing to buy organic foods if it were affordable. >> thanks so much. >> thank you.

>> announcer: this is pbs news hour weekend saturday. at an international conference at the vatican today, pope francis met with police officials in an effort to stop human trafficking. julie has our report. >> as ever, pope francis didn't mince his words describing human trafficking as an open wound on the body of contemporary society. >> what message do you have for those who carry out the crime of human trafficking and what message do you have for the victims?

[ inaudible ] [ speaking foreign language ] >> to those who suffer of the body of christ, the flesh of christ. [ inaudible ] >> how to cry, how to lament. we need many tears in order to understand the die mention of this drama. >> the pulling power of pope francis as 20 police chiefs from around the world have come to see him here at the vatican. they know how passionately recares about human trafficking and how closely he will be watching their work. a wave and a smile, but a

serious challenge to make a change. join us on air and online tomorrow from vancouver, controlling the spread of hiv by helping drug users take illegal drugs safely. >> if this facility wasn't there, these people would be injecting in alley ways, running from the police and continue to be disconnected from the health care system. that's it for this edition of pbs news hour weekend. thanks for watching.

>> announcer: pbs news hour weekend is made possible by lewis b. and louise her sh feld cullman. joyce v. hail, the wallach family. the cheryl is philip milstein family. bernard and eye reason schwartz. corporate funding provided by mutual of america, designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your requirement company. additional support provided by -- and by the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

>> hi, i'm ed slott. it's 2014, and they're at it again. the u.s. government is trillions and trillions of dollars in debt, and congress is just licking their lips trying to get their greedy hands on your hard-earned retirement savings. don't let them. i'm here to show you how to rescue your retirement. stay tuned for an updated package of gifts for 2014 that will help you and your family and help support this great public television station. thanks. >> announcer: your retirement is in danger. 20, 30, 40 years of your hard work is at risk. wall street banks and congress are waiting to grab whatever is left of your retirement savings'