Man jailed for saying AOC ‘should be shot’ tells police he’s ‘very proud’ he did it

An Ohio man charged after writing on Facebook that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "should be shot" told police he was "very proud" that he did it.Timothy James Ireland, 41, was indicted in Toledo for making interstate threats against AOC in addition to separate counts of being a felon and fugitive in possession of a firearm, the US attorney's office in Ohio announced on Friday.Officials say a concerned citizen reached out to U.S. Capitol Police on July 23 to warn of the threatening Facebook post, which they later confirmed was written by Ireland."She should be shot. Can't fire me, my employer would load the gun for me," Ireland wrote, according to police.The statement was apparently posted to Facebook along with a news story about the Democrat congresswoman, leading Capitol Police to call Ireland on August 2 after finding his phone number in public records.The man took full responsibility for the statement while speaking with police, adding he was "very proud" of his work, according to a criminal complaint.Ireland also admitted to having firearms that he "always carries concealed," police say.An FBI criminal history check revealed Ireland had two outstanding warrants, one for violating probation in a felony case in Florida and the other related to a failure to appear for a possession of marijuana charge in Cook County, Georgia.Ireland was also convicted in 1996 on four felony counts of dealing in stolen property in Sarasota County, according to the criminal complaint.The man was present when police raided his Toledo home five days after the phone call, the complaint read. He was detained for the active warrants and admitted to having ammunition inside his house.Investigators say they found three rounds of .32-caliber ammunition, and four rounds belonging to a .45-caliber weapon, stashed in kitchen drawers."There is absolutely no place in the marketplace of ideas for threats of violence against any person, especially those who are elected to represent the American people," US Attorney Justin Herdman said in a release."Disagreement on political issues cannot lead to acts of violence, and if it does, we will seek federal prison time."A spokesman for the Department of Justice said Ireland waived his hearing and will remain in custody at least until a bond hearing next week.Last month a police officer in the US state of Louisiana also took to Facebook to say AOC should be shot, suggesting that she “needs a round – and I don’t mean the kind she used to serve”.Charlie Rispoli, a 14-year veteran of the police department in Gretna, went on to call her "this vile idiot". He was sacked.His comments came after Donald Trump lashed out at 'The Squad', a group of four congresswoman including AOC, in a roundly condemned racist attack where he told them to "go back" to their countries \- despite them having lived in the US for decades.The Washington Post



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Masahiro Tanaka Delivers a Gem Just When the Yankees Needed It

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Anti-Putin Leader Detained as Russians Hold New Election Protest

(Bloomberg) -- Russian opposition leader Lyubov Sobol said she’d been detained by police as tens of thousands protested against the exclusion of anti-Kremlin candidates from Moscow city council elections.“They won’t succeed in frightening us, they won’t be able to stop us demanding our electoral rights,” said Sobol, a lawyer who’s been on hunger strike for nearly a month in protest against the rejection of her candidacy, in a video posted on Twitter Saturday as armed and masked police broke into her election office. “It won’t stop us going out to protests because we will keep doing it for as long as the authorities won’t listen to Muscovites.”Almost 50,000 people attended Saturday’s protest, which had been agreed with the authorities, the White Counter crowd-monitoring organization said on Facebook. Police said 20,000 took part, the Interfax news service reported. Organizers had sought permission for as many as 100,000 to attend.Sobol was later bundled into a van by police and driven away. She was practically the last major opposition figure still at liberty amid the harshest state crackdown on dissent since Vladimir Putin suppressed months of protests against his return to the Kremlin as president in 2012 after four years as prime minister. Most of the other leaders were given jail terms after riot police beat and detained protesters in the largest numbers for years at unsanctioned meetings held in the capital on each of the past two weekends. More than 20,000 people attended an authorized demonstration in Moscow last month.Protesters DetainedRiot police blocked off parts of the city center after the demonstration ended and detained at least 106 people, according to the OVD Info monitoring group. Another 78 were detained by police at a protest in St. Petersburg, it said.Sobol is one of the leaders of the protest movement that erupted after officials last month refused to register opposition and independent candidates for September’s elections, saying they failed to gather the required number of signatures from supporters. Opposition leaders insisted they had met the threshold and accused the Kremlin of seeking to crush any challenge amid a slide in Putin’s popularity among Russians after a slump in living standards over the past five years.Armed police also entered an internet TV studio used by supporters of opposition leader Alexey Navalny on Saturday and detained 10 staff and volunteers, according to a post on his Twitter account. Navalny himself is in prison after being jailed for 30 days last month for urging supporters to join an unsanctioned protest.Investigators have also targeted Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation as part of efforts to dismantle the revived opposition movement, alleging that unnamed employees laundered about 1 billion rubles ($15 million). The investigation came as at least 10 people arrested at the peaceful rallies face mass unrest charges that could see them jailed for up to 15 years.(Updates with detentions in fourth, fifth paragraphs)To contact the reporter on this story: Irina Reznik in Moscow at ireznik@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Gregory L. White at gwhite64@bloomberg.net, Tony Halpin, John DeaneFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.



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Jeffrey Epstein's death is a perfect storm for conspiracy theories

The death Saturday morning of financier Jeffrey Epstein, an accused sex trafficker with connections to some of the most powerful people in the world, represents a perfect storm in the world of conspiracy theories.

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Manhunt over: Escaped Tennessee inmate Curtis Ray Watson captured, death penalty possible

Curtis Ray Watson, 44, was charged with the murder of a correctional administrator after he escaped in the midst of a 15-year kidnapping sentence.

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Tesla electric car catches fire after hitting tow truck in Moscow

UPDATE 4-Norway mosque shooter may have killed family member first -police

The man suspected of a shooting at a mosque in Norway may also have killed a relative before launching the attack, police said late on Saturday. "A young woman was found dead at the suspect's address," assistant chief of police Rune Skjold told a news conference, adding that the man was suspected of murder.



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Beto O’Rourke says Trump retweeting Jeffrey Epstein conspiracies to distract from ‘terrorist attack in El Paso’

Beto O’Rourke has lashed out at Donald Trump for retweeting a conspiracy theory connecting Bill Clinton to Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide in prison, saying the president was distracting from “an epidemic of gun violence” occurring “every single day” under his watch.The former Democratic congressman from Texas called out Mr Trump and “unfounded conspiracy theories” in an interview with CNN on Sunday after the president retweeted a post over the weekend that read: “[Jeffrey Epstein] had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead”. Epstein, a disgraced billionaire and accused sex trafficker, was found dead in his prison cell early on Saturday morning while facing federal sex trafficking charges, according to the US Bureau of Prisons.“This is another example of our president using this position of public trust to attack his political enemies with unfounded conspiracy theories,” Mr O’Rourke said Sunday, “and also to try to force you, and me, and all of us to focus on his bizarre behaviour instead of the fact that we just lost 22 people in this community.”“We’re seeing an epidemic of gun violence every single day in this country, and the attack in El Paso — that terrorist attack in El Paso — was motivated in part by the president constantly warning of ‘invasions’ and ‘infestations’ and ‘predators’ and Mexican immigrants who he described as ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals’ though we know they commit crimes at a far lower rate than those who are born in this country,” Mr O'Rourke said.Mr O’Rourke, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2020 elections, is from El Paso, where a gunman stormed a local Walmart last weekend, killing 22 victims after posting an anti-immigrant screed on the online messaging forum 8chan. The Democrat suspended his campaign and returned to Texas to meet with community members, victims’ families and survivors of the attack, which occurred just hours before another mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio left nine dead.He accused the president of “changing the conversation,” adding: “If we allow him to do that then we will never be able to focus on the true problems, of which he is a part, and make sure that we get to the solutions.”Mr O’Rourke went on to list possible “solutions,” including “legislation that keeps guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have it,” and “focusing on domestic terrorism of white supremacists that [Mr Trump’s] own FBI director warned us about.”The president retweeted a series of accusatory messages appearing to connect Mr Clinton with Epstein’s reported suicide over the weekend. One tweet Mr Trump shared read: “Documents were unsealed yesterday revealing that top Democrats, including Bill Clinton, took private trips to Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘pedophilia island’”. Epstein, who was accused of sexually abusing countless young girls through an international sex trafficking ring, was found unresponsive in his cell around 6:30am on Saturday. He was previously found unresponsive just three weeks earlier with seemingly self-inflicted bruising on his neck. He was reportedly not on suicide watch at the time of his death.

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Hong Kong Police Deny Rumors of Plans for Mass Arrests: SCMP

(Bloomberg) -- Hong Kong police dismissed online rumors about plans to arrest protesters en masse this weekend, the South China Morning Post reported on Saturday.The rumors started Thursday after speculation that a hard-line officer was being brought out of retirement to help the city cope with protests that have shaken the financial center for weeks, the newspaper said. Online rumors circulated that the police would no longer break up crowds, but arrest them immediately and charge them with rioting, an offense that could carry a maximum prison term of 10 years.Jim Ng Lok-chun, the senior police superintendent in charge of operations on Hong Kong island, said the rumors aren’t true and that the “accusation is wrong,” according to the paper.To contact the reporter on this story: Lulu Yilun Chen in Hong Kong at ychen447@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net, Linus Chua, James PooleFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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Dozens arrested at huge opposition rally in Moscow

Nearly 50,000 opposition supporters rallied and dozens were arrested in Moscow on Saturday at one of the largest authorised protests since President Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin in 2012. Demonstrators crowded the central Prospekt Andreya Sakharova street, where city authorities deployed a massive police presence, including officers in riot gear, after giving permission for the rally to go ahead. The White Counter, an NGO that tracks participants in rallies, counted 49,900 people, while Moscow police gave a much lower attendance figure of 20,000.

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Biden Misdates 2018 Parkland Shooting in His Latest Blunder

(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden said he was vice president when the deadly high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, took place. Except, it happened in 2018, more than a year after he left office -- the latest gaffe by the Democratic presidential front-runner.Biden told reporters in Iowa on Saturday that “those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president.” But when they visited Capitol Hill to talk with members of Congress, lawmakers were “basically cowering, not wanting to see them. They did not want to face it on camera.”The former vice president was making a point about the changing conversation around gun violence in this country, and how as more and more ordinary people are touched by mass shootings, they are more likely to call for action.An official with the Biden campaign said the former vice president was thinking of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, when he misspoke. That attack, in which 20 children between six and seven years old were killed along with six staff members, was in December 2012.Survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, made national headlines for their demonstrations and calls for action, including visits by some students to the nation’s capital. The shooting, the deadliest high school killing spree in U.S. history, occurred on Feb. 14, 2018, and left 17 dead and injured more than a dozen others. The assailant was an expelled student.Biden, along with former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat who was shot in the head during an event with constituents in Tucson in 2011, met with Stoneman students in Washington days after the 2018 incident.The statement was the latest in a string of gaffes that have plagued Biden on the campaign trail. On Thursday, Biden, 76, told a group of Asian and Hispanic voters that “poor kids are just as bright” as white children. And last week he referred to mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, as having taken place in Houston and Michigan.In both cases he quickly caught himself. And on Saturday Biden told reporters he misspoke on his “poor kids” comment but said that overall, people understood the point he was trying to make.“I don’t think anybody thinks I meant anything other than what I said I meant,” Biden said.President Donald Trump, who’s spending the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, was quick to seize on Biden’s blunder. He said on Twitter that the former vice president “doesn’t have a clue.”(Updates with Trump tweet in final paragraph.)To contact the reporter on this story: Emma Kinery in Washington at ekinery@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny, Ian FisherFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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Andrew Yang breaks down in tears over gun violence as 2020 Democrats in Iowa call for action after Santa Fe shooting

A week after two mass shootings left more than 30 dead, the issue of gun violence was unavoidable for Democratic presidential candidates at the Iowa State Fair.As children zoomed down slides and munched on deep-fried Oreos, caucus goers still working out which Democratic candidates to support flocked to ask candidates how they might address the epidemic of shootings.Of the 14 candidates who attended a last-minute forum in downtown Des Moines on Saturday, it was Andrew Yang, a businessman and long-shot candidate, who stole the show.At the Everytown for Gun Safety forum, when asked by a woman named Stephanie, who lost her 4-year-old son to a stray bullet, how he would address the unintentional shootings of children in America. Mr Yang asked to give her a hug and broke down in tears.“I have a six- and three-year-old boy, and I was imagining,” Mr Yang began, before becoming too choked up to continue. “I was imagining it was one of them that got shot and the other saw,” he eventually managed, before again choking up. “I’m so sorry.”It’s a feeling that runs raw with Iowa caucus goers, and has a renewed sense of urgency after the killings at a Walmart in Texas and a bar in Ohio last week.Heaven Chamberlain, a 23-year-old shift leader at a trampoline park in Des Moines who came to the Iowa State Fair to see as many candidates as she could, said she is among the generation of Americans who grew up with school lock downs for shootings.Now, Ms Chamberlain is worried about her two little sisters, who she thinks could be facing the prospect of gun violence at school any day.“My sisters are afraid to go to school, because they’re afraid that they won’t come back,” Ms Chamberlain said of her 10- and 11-year-old sisters. “Sorry, I always tear up when I think about them.”For many who came to see the Democrats, the fixes for mass shootings seem like common sense. They would like a ban on the semi-automatic versions of military rifles sold freely in many states and are used in many of the mass shootings that have shocked the county. They would like universal background checks. They want action.“That’s the one thing I’m looking for in a candidate,” Makayla Warrick, a 19-year-old college student who wants to become a teacher, said. Ms Warrick was waiting to ask a question of John Delaney, and said she’s a Republican, but doesn’t necessarily support Donald Trump. “Now it’s coming to the point where I’m scared to go into some classrooms.”Candidates, for their part, provided many answers. While congressman Beto O’Rourke stayed in his home town of El Paso to help his community, others forged ahead.Senator Cory Booker stopped during the annual Iowa Wing Ding – a Democratic fundraising dinner - on Friday night and dedicated his entire speech there to the issue.Kamala Harris promised to give Congress just 100 days to act, before she would take executive action on the issue. Joe Biden told a town hall he would push for background checks, and common-sense reforms.And many, like Elizabeth Warren, said that the shootings in recent years – in Parkland, Florida, Las Vegas, and these recent two, among others – had shifted the momentum in favour of gun control.“We are going to make change. We are going to pass gun safety laws in this country,” Ms Warren said.Darla Connell, a 73-year-old who drove two hours to see Mr Biden and Montana governor Steve Bullock on Thursday, said the shootings in Texas and Ohio showed just how fragile things are.“That can happen anywhere,” Ms Connell said. “And it could just as easily have happened to either the soapbox for Steve Bullock or Joe Biden. There’s a big group of people here. And, god forbid it doesn’t happen here at all. But it could.”

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Steve Scalise: Don’t blame Trump for mass shootings

“The president's no more responsible for that shooting as your next guest, Bernie Sanders, is for my shooting,” the Louisiana congressman said.

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Harris Takes Pragmatic Stance to Stand Out in Democratic Field

(Bloomberg) -- Kamala Harris portrayed herself as a pragmatist rather than an ideological politician as she seeks to differentiate herself among the top tier of candidates in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary.“My motivation is truly about how can I fix the problems that wake people up in the middle of the night,” she told Bloomberg News Sunday aboard her bus on a five-day trip across Iowa. “Wherever that fits on someone’s ideological spectrum, have at it.”In explaining her approach, Harris said issues that matter most to voters don’t fall along ideological lines.“When it comes to the basic things that do wake people up in the middle of the night, where would you put on the spectrum of ideology that everyone should have health care?” Harris said. “Where would you put on the spectrum that every child should have a decent education?”She added: “I think it’s just a nice subject for a graduate school class, but it’s not how people are living life.”Harris, 54, has been unable to whittle away support from front-runner Joe Biden or top Elizabeth Warren after seizing the spotlight at the first debate in July with a harsh critique of the former vice president’s opposition to busing in the 1970s. A Quinnipiac poll last week showed Biden leading nationally at 32%, with Harris in fourth place at 7%. Among African-American voters, Harris, who is black, fares worse: Biden 47%, Harris only 1%Earn Support“I was not a national figure before this race,” Harris said. “There are people who were national figures. There were people who ran for president before at least once, if not a couple of times, and so it is perfectly logical to me that I have to earn people’s recognition and support.”Harris declined an opportunity to discuss Biden’s two most recent gaffes -- saying “poor kids” are just as smart as “white kids” and confusing the 2012 Sandy Hook and 2018 Parkland school shootings.“I just think that I can’t speculate about where he was coming from when he said it,” he said.But she was harshly critical of President Donald Trump’s trade policies and its effects on Americans as she prepared to visit a farm in Laconia, Iowa.“I’ll tell you what trade should not be and it’s what Trump has done,” she said. “He made a bunch of promises to everyone from farm workers to auto workers that he broke, he betrayed all these people. He took unilateral action, meaning he worked with no one, to implement his so-called trade policy by tweet and it has resulted in Iowa farmers now looking at bankruptcy.”Harris said her administration would take a collaborative approach to trade.“I think we have to have a trade policy that is about protecting the American worker and all that we want in terms of wages and benefits and workplace safety,” she said.To contact the reporter on this story: Tyler Pager in Washington at tpager1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Steve GeimannFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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Versace apologies in flap over T-shirts sold in China

Italian fashion house Versace apologized Sunday in China for selling T-shirts that it said attached incorrect country names to cities, after being attacked on social media for challenging China's territorial integrity. Versace did not identify the T-shirt in its own post on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media site, but the Global Times newspaper said the item mislabeled Hong Kong and Macao as countries. Both are former European colonies that were returned to China in the late 1990s.

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Escaped Tennessee inmate captured after 5-day manhunt

A Tennessee convict suspected of killing a corrections administrator before escaping prison on a tractor was captured Sunday seven hours after homeowners recognized him on their outdoor surveillance camera, authorities said. Curtis Ray Watson put his hands up and was arrested as he came out of a soybean field Sunday in the west Tennessee community of Henning, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director David Rausch said at a news conference. The field is 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the prison Watson escaped from Wednesday and near a home where he was seen on a surveillance camera earlier Sunday, Rausch said.

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Salvini could take Italy out of EU, former PM warns

Matteo Salvini, who plunged Italy into turmoil by pulling out of a coalition government, could eventually take the country out of the EU, a former prime minister warned Sunday. Interior Minister Salvini, who said last week that he was pulling his anti-immigrant League party out of an increasingly acrimonious coalition with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), "has no principles," Enrico Letta told AFP. With Salvini, an Italian 'Brexit' is not impossible," said Letta, who was Italy's premier between April 2013 and February 2014.

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Biden: 'Look, I misspoke' about poor kids

“Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids," Biden said earlier this week.

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The Latest: More than 100 join in 'Unity' march in El Paso

More than 100 people have marched through downtown El Paso, Texas, on the one week anniversary of a mass shooting that authorities say was carried out by a gunman targeting Mexicans in the Texas border city. The League of United Latin American Citizens organized Saturday's march. Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke, a former congressman from El Paso, spoke to the crowd.

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Indians mobilise for 'resettlement' amid warnings over Hindu nationalist occupation of Kashmir

Rohit Kachroo can still remember flinging open his backdoor and playing on the banks of the vast River Jhelum dissecting the city of Srinagar, the capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir. But recollections of his home town stop age four-and-a-half when he was forced to flee to Delhi with three generations of his family as brutal majority Muslim mobs ran riot. “I hope that no child in the world has to see what I have seen,” Rohit said.   Rohit, 33, is one of many Pandit Hindus now mobilising for the 'rightful' return home after Narendra Modi revoked Kashmir's special status, tearing up rules that had barred outsiders from owning land there. But fears are growing that Mr Modi, whose Hindu nationalism won him an extraordinary re-election in May, is exploiting the plight of the Pandits to encourage Hindus across India to follow suit - leading to a Palestine-style occupation that will cement a new 'unified' nation. Police personnel struggle to detain an activist of Jammu and Kashmir Youth Congress Credit: RAKESH BAKSHI/AFP Across the border in nuclear-armed Pakistan, president Imran Khan has warned of ethnic cleansing, while militants are already plotting a renewed insurgency.  For now Kashmir lies in darkness after Mr Modi ordered an unprecedented militarised lockdown, curfew and communications blackout as tensions threaten to boil over. Mr Modi's nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party ended self rule in Kashmir for the first time since 1947 on Monday. He scrapped Article 35A that banned non-permanent residents of Kashmir from buying land and property or seeking employment in the state.  In a rare interview with western press by a BJP official, Ram Madhav, the party secretary, told The Sunday Telegraph the government was already looking to set-up special territories in Kashmir for returning Hindus, adding that all legal channels were now open. “Someone who has the key for his home could claim it and if someone stalls him he could go to the police or the court to get his property back,” added Krishna Saagar Rao, Chief Spokesperson at the BJP, citing party ideology. He said that new powers giving greater control over the state through the national police force will make it safe for returning Hindus. A security guard stands on a street in downtown Srinagar amid a communications blackout Credit: SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP Googlesearches for “land rates in Kashmir” and “plots in Kashmir” skyrocketed this week across India suggesting residents were seriously considering making the move once tensions diffused.  A hoax real estate advert was also widely circulated on social media, which seemingly offered land for sale in Kashmir while non-Kashmiri Indians requested the phone number of estate agents in Srinagar on Twitter.  “What do you think would be [the] rate of a 200 square yard plot in [a] decent colony of Kashmir, which ANY INDIAN CAN BUY?” speculated lawyer and political analyst Ishkaran Singh Bhandari.  Womens’ rights groups condemned a deluge of social media posts from Indian men who celebrated the removal of Article 35A arguing that it was their chance to marry a Kashmiri woman, favoured by some for their fairer complexion. In Pakistan, which maintains its claim to rule Kashmir in its entirety, Pervez Musharaf, the former president, accused Mr Modi of emulating Israeli policy by annexing land for resettlement, while Raja Farooq Haider Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, warned “there will be a great unrest in Kashmir, there will be killings in Kashmir” if mass Hindu migration caused demographic change. The two countries currently govern half of Kashmir each, split along a heavily militarised Line of Control over which artillery fire breaks out almost daily.    “Establishing Hindu settlements is a nefarious act to change the fabric of Kashmir from a Muslim majority to a Hindu majority,” said Mr Musharaf, the former President of Pakistan.  Kashmir | Read more Mr Khan meanwhile suspended all bilateral trade with Delhi, expelled the Indian High Commissioner and reported its neighbour to the United Nations Security Council.  Kashmiris living under the current lockdown told The Sunday Telegraph that tension was already high. Residents said the strict curfew meant they would be shot on sight if they left their homes, adding that many were starving as they are unable to access food and dying in the streets as they were refused access to hospitals.  Up to 500 people - including university professors, business leaders and political activists - have also allegedly been detained by the Indian authorities.  At home in India Mr Modi is under fire from opposition Congress party who have accused the prime minister of "trivialising Kashmiri Pandit’s undoubted right to return".  “By doing so the BJP has taken their pain and converted it into a theatre of affliction for their own hateful, selfish purposes," LaToya Ferns, a spokesperson for the opposition, said. Mr Rao, the BJP spokesperson dismissed the "highly preposterous, wishful and speculative" allegations.     In a stirring address to Indians on Thursday, Modi justified his actions in Kashmir arguing that the removal of Article 370 would "rid Jammu and Kashmir of terror and separatism." Unsurprisingly, emotional Hindu Pandits welcomed the BJP’s policy.  Their plight is still fresh in the minds of many. The Pandit community, which made up 5 per cent of Kashmir's population, were forced to flee in the mid-1980s after mobs belonging to the majority-Muslim community began killing, raping women and damaging their temples and properties. “Even at that age you do understand what is murder and you do understand what is rape," Rohit said. The brutality peaked on 19 January 1990 when mosques in Kashmir began broadcasting messages that Pandits should either leave the state, convert to Islam or be killed.  The exact number of those who fled is contested but it is thought to constitute almost the entire community, as high as 150,000 people.  “If anyone can settle us back, it’s Prime Minister Modi,” said Renuka Dhar, now an Associate Professor at Delhi University, “no-one else has ever shown the desire or gumption.”  For Kachroo, a historical wrong metered out to his people can finally be righted.  His mother has kept the key to their beautiful lost bungalow ever since they fled Srinagar. She might now be finally going home.

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Venezuela: New US sanctions pressure Maduro but ‘risk exacerbating humanitarian crisis and torpedoing negotiations’

When Juan Guaidó raised his nation’s tricolour flag in January and swore himself in as interim president to the rapturous cheers of thousands in Caracas, many hoped – and believed - President Nicolas Maduro was finally on his way out.A long-fractured opposition had reorganised, mass protests returned to the capital, and within minutes the US - followed by 50 other nations - officially recognised the National Assembly head as the country’s legitimate leader.The successor of Hugo Chavez’s failed socialist project, Maduro had long been in the White House’s diplomatic crosshairs. The country’s economy was now collapsing and an international consensus was forming that his latest elections were fraudulent. “Both the Venezuelan opposition and the US government thought this was going to be a quick win,” says David Smilde, a Venezuela expert and senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. But seven months on, political change has proved more elusive: despite the US’ best efforts to pressure Maduro with bellicose rhetoric and waves of economic sanctions, the embattled leader holds on to power.“They completely underestimated the sociology of authoritarian governments, which are often more resilient than you think,” Smilde says.Last week, the US took centre stage at a Lima Group meeting to announce its latest efforts to turn the screw on Maduro. In the company of 14 other nations allied in seeking a resolution to the Venezuela crisis, it spelled out its boldest, most sweeping economic sanctions on the country to date.The executive order froze Venezuela’s assets in the United States, banned entry to Venezuelan citizens aiding the dictator, and pledged to sanction foreign companies – or governments - dealing with Maduro’s government.Guaidó swiftly welcomed the news. The wiry leader stressed to reporters in Caracas that the “sanctions are against Maduro, not the Venezuelan people”; items that alleviate human suffering – clothes, food and medicine – are exempt.The measures would “protect Venezuelans” from the government plundering the nation’s assets, he tweeted.Predictably, Venezuela’s foreign office blasted the sanctions, describing the order as “economic terrorism against the Venezuelan people” and the formalisation of “a criminal economic, financial, and commercial blockade that has already started.”While the US has already imposed targeted sanctions on individuals (figures close to Maduro), specific companies, and industries, the latest measures cast the net wider. For the first time they include secondary sanctions (targeting those outside the US), threatening to cut off foreign businesses with America and its financial system should they not comply."Do you want to do business in Venezuela, or do you want to do business with the United States?,” US national security adviser, John Bolton said to reporters in a message to foreign businesses around the world. “That includes any foreign entity, government, corporation, person, who contributes to keeping the Maduro regime in power”.Although both the US and Guaido deny that the measures are an embargo, experts in international law, international relations, and NGOs operating in the country told The Independent they will still exacerbate an already dire humanitarian crisis - and hinder efforts to restore democracy.> The new US sanctions worsen the suffering of Venezuelans, they should be personally targeting members of the stateRodolfo Montes de Oca, Venezuelan human rights lawyer “Although it is not technically an embargo … the order will have a chilling effect on any transactions with Venezuelans,” predicts Mary Ellen O'Connell, international law expert at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. The academic adds that the move is “unlawful”, violating World Trade Organisation Standards. Mismanagement of the most oil-rich nation in the world - and once the wealthiest of Latin American nations - has caused widespread food and medicine shortages, a spike in crime, and rampant hyperinflation, predicted by the IMF to reach 10 million per cent.Over four million have fled the crisis, according to the UN Agency for Refugees, and nine out of 10 Venezuelans now say they go hungry, according to local polls.The new sanctions are, according to the US, intended to alleviate that suffering by strangling Maduro’s finances and forcing him out of power. But some fear that the Venezuelan people will hurt more than its leaders.“The new US sanctions worsen the suffering of Venezuelans, they should be personally targeting members of the state,” says Rodolfo Montes de Oca, lawyer at leading Venezuelan human rights organisation, PROVEA.As many as 40,000 people have already died in Venezuela as a result of US sanctions since 2017 that made it harder for ordinary citizens to access food, medicine and medical equipment, according to a report released by the Washington-based think tank, the Centre for Economic and Policy Research.Bolton boasted that Venezuela now joins Cuba, Iran, Syria and North Korea in the “club of rogue states” exiled from the US market.Academics researching the impact of US sanctions on those countries say none offer a positive case study in restoring democracy; more likely, they weaken resistance to authoritarian governments as local populations are ground down by suffering.“This tends to hurt ordinary people far more than it hurts governments, as governments have control of hard currency,'' says Barbara Slavin, an Iran expert at the Atlantic Council think tank.“This is cruel and counterproductive. The sanctions look tough but how is this tough if it’s killing innocent people?”Several NGOs told The Independent that they are already facing banking difficulties due to over compliance with previous sanctions. As Slavin says, financial institutions commonly avoid working with organisations - even if exempt - due to fear of draconian measures from the US.More salient than the potential exacerbation of the already grave humanitarian crisis, Smilde says, is that the announcement could have torpedoed ongoing talks between Maduro and Guaido.As the crisis drags on but Guaido’s opposition loses momentum, international observers have increasingly looked to ongoing negotiations in Barbados, now in their third round, as the most likely peaceful way out. Late on Wednesday, the government announced in an official statement that it would not be sending delegations this week "due to the grave and brutal aggression" being “carried out by the Trump administration against Venezuela”. It is not known if they will return to the table.“The ramping up of sanctions by the US provided the perfect excuse for Nicolas Maduro to withdraw from this round of negotiations,” Smilde says.“The only viable way the opposition has of translating its popularity and legitimacy into power is through some sort of political settlement”.

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