The government announced that Venezuela would move to privatize parts of the country’s petroleum sector and limit the involvement of the state oil company PDVSA in order to increase Caracas’s oil production (Wall Street Journal).

Pakistani officials accused India of undermining a cease-fire agreement in Kashmir by shelling villages along the Pakistani side of the Line of Control, killing one soldier and two civilians. An Indian military spokesperson claimed that Pakistan had already violated the cease-fire yesterday with attacks on four locations, while Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry summoned an Indian diplomat to lodge a formal protest against the attack (Associated Press).

A Chinese military spokesperson stated that Beijing’s air and naval forces had tracked and forced out the USS Barry, a U.S. guided missile destroyer, from the Paracel Islands, calling the ship’s presence an “intrusion” and violation of Chinese sovereignty (NBC News).

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seeks to trigger the extension of a UN arms embargo against Iran using a clause in the 2015 nuclear deal that the United States left in 2018. Pompeo said the United States is technically still party to the deal (Financial Times).

The eastern Libyan forces opposing the country’s internationally backed government in Tripoli announced a cease-fire for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, citing calls to halt fighting during the coronavirus pandemic (Associated Press).

Officials from Afghanistan’s northern province of Badakhshan said yesterday that around four hundred foreign militants are fighting alongside the Taliban. The Taliban’s use of these fighters would violate the terms of a February deal with the United States (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty).

Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe stated yesterday that they had spotted new Russian electronic warfare equipment in the separatist-controlled regions of Eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian forces spotted similar equipment in other areas within the separatist zone, corroborating these reports (Anadolu).

Israeli warplanes struck targets around the Syrian capital of Damascus yesterday, killing four Iran-aligned fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Syrian state media claimed that the Israeli aircraft killed three civilians and that local air defenses intercepted some of the Israeli missiles (Associated Press).

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro designated Tareck El Aissami, the recent Minister of Industries and National Production, as the country’s new oil minister. The United States previously sanctioned El Aissami on charges of drug trafficking and recently accused him of breaching these sanctions in a March 2020 indictment of Maduro and other high-level Venezuelan officials for narcotics-related charges (Wall Street Journal).

The U.S. military said two civilians were killed and three were wounded in a February 2019 air strike it conducted in Somalia. Amnesty International says that since 2017, U.S. air strikes have killed fourteen civilians in the country, where the United States targets al-Shabab militants (New York Times).