In response to a suicide bombing in Kashmir that killed 40 Indian paramilitaries last month, the Indian Air Force struck targets in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province.

I imagine that many readers around the world today would read that sentence the way that 105 years ago they would have read the sentence: "A Bosnian separatist shot the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo today." Many would have been saddened by the news or shocked at the outburst of violence and the senseless death . . . and then went about their day. After all, that was way over there in the Balkans. "What does that have to do with us?"

Similarly, many might be tempted to write off the latest news from Kashmir-the disputed territory between India and Pakistan-as just another regrettable flare up of violence. But it is not. As two nuclear-armed nations with deep-seated hostilities sitting at the crossroads of a new geopolitical order, India and Pakistan represent the Balkans of our day. We ignore the events there at our own peril.

So let's take a closer look at what just happened (or didn't happen) between India and Pakistan, and what it means in the bigger scheme of things.

The House on Thursday passed a sweeping Democrat bill on voting regulations, campaign finance, and ethics rules that conservatives have derided as a "voter fraud and election theft" wish list.

The House passed H.R. 1, known as the For the People Act, which was approved on staunch party lines by 234-193 vote.

"H.R. 1 restores the people's faith that government works for the public interest, the people's interests, not the special interests," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said during a press conference before the vote on Friday.

H.R. would expand early voting, enact redistricting changes, make Election Day a federal holiday, automatically register voters, and force stricter disclosure laws for many political activities. One provision would force presidential candidates and vice-presidential candidates to release their tax returns over the last ten years, which Democrats have tried to force President Donald Trump to do since he first decided to run for president.

India carried out three cross-border strikes in Pakistan in the last five years, the country's Home Affairs Minister Rajnath Singh has said. One of these three strikes, however, remains shrouded in secrecy.

Singh admitted that Indian forces struck alleged terrorist "launch pads" in Pakistani Kashmir in 2016, after four militants killed 19 Indian soldiers near the town of Uri. India struck again last month, bombing suspected terrorist training camps in Pakistani territory, in retaliation for a suicide bombing attack that had claimed the lives of 40 Indian police officers.

"I want to tell you brothers and sisters that, in the last five years, we have gone beyond our borders thrice and our men have successfully conducted airstrikes," Singh told a public rally in Mangalore on Saturday. "About two I will tell you, but won't tell you about the third one."

The attack comes amid reported US plans to withdraw its forces from Syria by the summer following the waning of the threat posed by Daesh in the region.

A suicide bomber in a vehicle packed with explosives carried out an attack against a joint US-Kurdish patrol around the city of Manbij, northern Syria on Saturday, Kurdish television reported, citing Manbij Military Council spokesman Sharfan Darwish.

According to the spokesman, the car bomb injured seven civilians in the area and left one Kurdish militia member hurt after the bomber detonated his car as a military vehicle and several civilian cars passed. One of the civilians is thought to be in a serious condition, with five others taken to hospital.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Friday he was working to try to end international sanctions against Russia, which the ruling parties in Rome say are ineffective and hurt the Italian economy.

Speaking at a foreign policy conference in Genova, Conte said the sanctions, imposed after Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, must never become an end in themselves.

When asked if Italy wanted them lifted, he replied: "We are working for this objective."

The government of the self-proclaimed president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, can be called elusive: everyone talks about it, but no one can prove that it really exists, that's what political scientist and Latin American relations expert Arantxa Tirado told Sputnik.

Tirado lived in Venezuela in 2011 and since returning to her native Spain, she has been back to Venezuela four times and has had strong ties to the country for the last 15 years.

During her last trip in February of this year, Tirado admitted that she felt how the economic blockade and crisis had hit the people of Venezuela, so the atmosphere was different from what she was used to.

There was hyperinflation and she faced difficulties when buying certain products outside the CLAP (Local Committees for Supply and Production) programme, through which the government guarantees priority foods and products for the people.

After it claimed no such document existed, the Justice Department just unearthed a letter Matt Whitaker delivered to the Utah U.S. attorney directing a review of how the department handled the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One issues.

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote the letter on Nov. 22, 2017 for Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber. Matt Whitaker, who was Sessions' chief of staff at the time, emailed the letter to Huber that day, writing, "As we discussed." He also sent Huber a copy of a letter the Justice Department's Congressional affairs chief sent to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 13 of that year.

The existence of a letter documenting Sessions' directive that the DOJ revisit probes of Trump's top political foe is a surprise because a department lawyer said in court last year that senior officials insisted it didn't exist. The liberal nonprofit American Oversight obtained the letter through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request they filed on Nov. 22, 2017--the same day Whitaker emailed Sessions' letter to Huber.

The request asked for documentation of the directions Sessions gave Huber about the review of the Clinton investigations. After DOJ failed to produce any written directions, American Oversight sued.

And on Nov. 16, 2018, Senior Counsel in the Office of Information Policy Vanessa Brinkmann, who handles FOIA Requests, said a lawyer in Sessions' office told her no such letter existed. That lawyer spoke with Huber and Whitaker, she said in a declaration filed in federal court, and then told her that "when the Attorney General directed Mr. Huber to evaluate these matters, no written guidance or directives were issued to Mr. Huber in connection with this directive, either by the Attorney General, or by other senior leadership office staff."

That wasn't correct. On Wednesday of last week, a DOJ lawyer told American Oversight that they had found the document that kicked off Huber's work.

The letter, which American Oversight provided to The Daily Beast, is consistent with what the DOJ's chief of legislative affairs has told Congress: that Huber is scrutinizing the sale of a Canadian uranium mining company with interests in the United States to Rosatom, a Russian state-owned company. Republicans have long alleged that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declined to oppose the deal because of contributions to the Clinton Foundation.

The DOJ hasn't brought any charges related to the foundation or the transaction. Some Hill Republicans and conservative media commentators have long argued this is because the Department hasn't sufficiently investigated it. They have called for the appointment of a special counsel to scrutinize the transaction.

Sessions didn't bite. Instead, he directed Huber to review what the Department had done regarding the matter. Huber's work has drawn significant interest but-unlike Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian influence during the 2016 election-there is scant public information about what fruits, if any, it has borne.

Some Republicans say Huber's work is too little, too late. Democrats, meanwhile, argue it's evidence of the Trump administration weaponizing law enforcement to target its political rivals.

"'Lock her up' was wrong at campaign rallies, and it's even worse coming from the Department of Justice," said Austin Evers, who heads American Oversight. "Even after this long, it's still deeply shocking to see the black and white proof that Jeff Sessions caved to President Trump's worst authoritarian impulses and ordered a wide-ranging investigation of his political opponents based on demands from Congress instead of the facts and the law."

"It strains credulity to believe that the Justice Department didn't know about this letter when they swore under penalty of perjury that it didn't exist-you don't exactly forget about a formal directive to investigate Hillary Clinton signed by Jeff Sessions," he added.

"The fact that they only 'found' it the same week Matthew Whitaker was heading for the exit makes it hard to see DOJ's previous denial as anything but a deliberate attempt to conceal the extent to which President Trump's authoritarian demands were being put into action. The authoritarian instinct in the Trump administration needs to be investigated. Sessions and Whitaker shouldn't escape accountability by skipping town."

Reached for comment, a DOJ spokesperson said Huber's review is still underway.
Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote the letter on Nov. 22, 2017 for Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber. Read it here at Documentcloud.org. [LINK]

Electrical systems in Venezuela have been targeted by another cyberattack, President Nicholas Maduro has said. Caracas has accused the US of "sabotage", while US officials blame local corruption and mismanagement for the blackout.

After a failure at the Guri hydroelectric power plant left much of the country without power on Thursday night, Venezuelan authorities managed to restore power to "many parts" of the country. However, the country's grid took another hammering on Saturday, with many of the restored systems knocked out once again, the country's embattled president said.

According to Maduro, the systems had been nearly 70 percent restored when "we received another attack, of a cybernetic nature, at midday... that disturbed the reconnection process and knocked out everything that had been achieved until noon."

We discovered that they were carrying out high-tech... attacks against the power systems.

Additionally, "one of the sources of generation that was working perfectly," was also sabotaged, he added, accusing domestic "infiltrators of attacking the electric company from the inside."

President Donald Trump on Friday said Democrats have become an "anti-Israel" and "anti-Jewish" party after they overwhelmingly passed a House resolution Thursday rejecting not just anti-Semitism but hate and racism across the board.

The vote ended a week of Democratic infighting over whether the resolution should also mention Islamaphobia and other forms of bigotry following comments criticized as anti-Israel made by freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.

Trump called the vote "disgraceful" as he left the White House to tour tornado damage in Alabama.

"The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They've become an anti-Jewish party," Trump said, later repeating himself to emphasize his point.

"As members of Congress and Americans we have a solemn, urgent responsibility to fight to end the scourge of bigotry, racism and hatred in our country," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during debate on the resolution.


The measure passed 407-23, with 23 Republicans voting against it.

Ukrainian servicemen shot and killed their commander, Sergei Sobko, in the aftermath of being forced to commit war-crimes for a Ukrainian media public relations spectacle. The killing happened immediately after an incident where the commander was scolding the troops in his command for drinking alcohol. This was announced by the official representative of the operational command of the DPR, Eduard Basurin.

According to Basurin, it happened on March 6th in the 128th separate mountain-assault brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where the lieutenant at night allegedly discovered that a group of soldiers were drunk. The soldiers may have been engaged in heavy drinking as a coping mechanism to deal with the unit's increasingly problematic activities at least since the end of February.

"There was a negative reaction to a remark of the platoon commander, and during the verbal skirmish, two sergeants used firearms and shot their commander at close range," Basurin told Russian media.