Day: July 5, 2024

1. Vatican excommunicates ex-ambassador to U.S., Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, declares him guilty of schism  CBS News
2. Vatican excommunicates Archbishop Viganò for refusing to recognize Pope Francis  The Washington Post
3. Vatican excommunicates former US ambassador Vigano, declares him guilty of schism  Yahoo! Voices

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The post Williamsburg’s Please Tell Me brings unique tunes and to-go wine to the neighborhood first appeared on The News And Times.

The post Brooklyn shooting victim identified as cops continue search for killer first appeared on The News And Times.

The post This is just getting strange first appeared on The News And Times.

Tensions between neighbors Pakistan and Afghanistan are running high as the Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif said this week that his country plans to continue launching cross-border attacks as part of a new military operation to curb terrorism. The comments mark a notable shift for Pakistani officials who, until now, had only admitted to one such cross-border strike in March. 

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“We won’t serve them with cake and pastries. If attacked, we’ll attack back,” Asif told the BBC.

Pakistan has experienced a surge in violence since the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a close ally of the Afghan Taliban, unilaterally ended a ceasefire with Islamabad in November 2022. Last year alone, more than 700 attacks killed nearly 1,000 people.

The Pakistani government accuses the Afghan Taliban of providing a safe haven to the TTP. In recent years, Islamabad has made various attempts to contain the TTP, including talks, erecting a border fence between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and applying pressure on the Afghan government to stop assisting the militant group. This included the expulsion of over 500,000 Afghan refugees last October, with a second phase to expel another 800,000 commencing earlier this month.

Yet experts tell TIME that Pakistan has little power to stem the violence that overwhelmingly afflicts its two border regions with Afghanistan. That’s because Islamabad can no longer leverage the wartime support it offered the Taliban during the U.S. war in Afghanistan to help rein in the TTP. “Pakistan finds itself in a predicament largely of its own making—the Taliban leadership that it supported throughout much of the 20-year insurgency in Afghanistan is now sheltering militant groups targeting Islamabad,” says Joshua White, a professor in international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.

Read More: Why Pakistan Fails to Stop Jihadi Attacks

What’s driving tensions between the former allies?

While relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been fraught in recent years, two underlying tension points—the border and cross-border violence—have been longstanding.

“No Afghan government, including the current Taliban regime, has recognized the [official] border since Pakistan’s independence,” says Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center. “And each side has long accused the other of sheltering terrorists that carry out attacks in the other country.”

The colonial-era Durand Line, which stretches over 1,640 miles, officially separates Pakistan from Afghanistan. Afghanistan has never recognized the border but the Taliban has come out more strongly on the issue, and numerous skirmishes have erupted between Taliban fighters and Pakistani soldiers putting up border fencing, leading to the closures of border crossings. “Border tensions have sharpened because the Taliban have been especially aggressive in asserting their position,” Kugelman says.

The border cuts through tribal areas dominated by the Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in the border regions of both countries. Pakistan has vowed to complete the barbed-wire fencing along the internationally recognized border, which the Taliban says separates families.

With the war in Afghanistan no longer at play, the Taliban does not need to depend on Pakistan for sanctuaries and other wartime support. Instead, it seeks more legitimacy back at home, where many Afghans have long distrusted the Pakistani government. “By lashing out at Pakistan, the Taliban hopes to buy some goodwill from the Afghan public,” Kugelman says.

Will tensions ease soon?

Despite the tensions, the two countries are engaged in regular diplomacy. During recent talks hosted by the U.N. in Doha, Pakistan’s special envoy to Afghanistan met with the Taliban, while Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, has said that his office plans to visit to Kabul in the coming months. “Make no mistake, Afghanistan has not been ignored by this government,” Dar said.

Read More: Afghanistan, One Year On From U.S. Withdrawal

But border tensions are “too contentious and complex to resolve anytime soon,” Kugelman says. Tensions may soar further if Pakistan’s new military operation leads to more frequent and sustained force at the disputed border.

Pakistan government sources who spoke to the BBC have suggested that the country’s new military operation directly stems from pressure from China. Many Chinese nationals are working on China-Pakistan Economic Corridor projects in Pakistan as part of the Belt and Road initiative. In March, five Chinese engineers in the northwest of the country were killed when a suicide bomber, who Pakistan alleged was an Afghan national, rammed a vehicle into their convoy.

At the same time, Beijing has ample leverage over the Taliban due to China’s capacity to invest in sanction-hit Afghanistan. “If Beijing, dangling that incentive of investment assistance, is able to convince the Taliban to curb militancy, both domestically focused in Afghanistan and cross-border in Pakistan, that would help both China and Pakistan,” Kugelman says.

Meanwhile, the illegal-alien crime wave continues unabated.

As everyone’s been mesmerized by the twin train wrecks of Karen Read and Dementia Joe Biden, Third World thugs continue to openly terrorize law-abiding Americans.

Thank you, Democrats! How are these open borders working out for you?

Here are a couple of unnoticed local stories from the U.S. attorney’s office last week:

The first one is headlined, “Guatemalan Man Previously Convicted of Rape of a Child with Force Pleads Guilty to Unlawful Reentry.”

This savage, Wilson Hernandez-Bautista, 34, was deported in October 2013. Because the welfare benefits are non-existent in his primitive bleephole homeland, he returned to the First World to continue his posh taxpayer-funded vacation, during which he raped a child here.

The Guatemalan rapist pleaded guilty last week in federal court to illegal reentry. I’m sure he’ll be deported – wink wink nudge nudge.

Next: “Dominican Man Previously Convicted of Drug-Related Offenses Pleads Guilty to Unlawful Reentry.”

This gangbanger is named Julio Pimentel-German. He was deported in June 2021 –surely some mistake, considering that the newly-selected Democrat president was urging every violent criminal in the Third World to crash into the United States.

Whatever, the Dominican was soon back here in civilization, doing exactly what you would expect his ilk to be doing – selling fentanyl and illegally possessing a firearm, much like the president’s son Hunter.

The Dominican is now a convicted drug dealer, and he too pleaded guilty in federal court last week to these pro forma charges of illegal reentry.

Unfortunately, these charges are just routine judicial house-keeping, going through the motions. These foreign fiends may be briefly incarcerated on the state level, then (perhaps) deported, after which they’ll just sneak back into the country.

Because… it beats working for a living.

Rarely do crimes by illegals make the news anymore. They’re here, they’re criminals, and the illegals know that no matter how heinous their crimes, there will most likely be no consequences because… Democrats.

There was a story this week in the Wall Street Journal about increasing lawlessness in the Gaza Strip. It described the “overall breakdown of law and order” because “locking up criminals isn’t an option.”

Sounds like Massachusetts, doesn’t it?

In Middlesex County, an illegal alien welfare-collecting Haitian wasn’t arrested after being accused of raping an underage female at one of the local state-funded flophouses.

Instead, a Lyft was called for him, at taxpayer expense, and the accused rapist was chauffeured in style to a different flophouse in a different county where he can continue his lifelong vacation at taxpayer expense.

What could possibly go wrong?

Another illegal-alien Haitian was accused of rape at a Plymouth County foreign flophouse. The Republican district attorney wanted bail set at $25,000.

A bleeding-heart judge just cut it to $500, even though the state knows absolutely nothing about this guy, he has no ties to the community and, needless to say, no job.

Cape Cod is gripped by an epidemic of illegal-alien crime. Last week an illegal woman from Brazil was charged with stabbing her boyfriend to death. How did we all know instantly that she was an illegal?

Very simple. The initial headlines in state-run media described her as a “Centerville woman.” Observant readers know that anyone identified as, say, “Lawrence man,” is invariably not from Lawrence, or anywhere else in the US.

And thus it was that “Centerville woman” Juscelene Guedes turned out to be illegal, and no doubt the beneficiary of multiple forms of Americano welfare. And once he shanked her busboy boyfriend, she started grabbing three more types of handouts:

A public defender.

A translator, because they never bother to learn English anymore.

A private investigator.

You should read these court filings sometimes, because you’re paying for this violent invasion. They’re wrecking the country and expect you to foot all the bills for the destruction of your own society.

“The defendant,” her public defender said, “states that she has been found indigent by the Court, and is thus unable to pay the fee required to retain an investigator.”

Oddly, however, she was somehow able to scrap together enough money to buy a shiv to shank her boy toy with.

This crime wave isn’t restricted to Massachusetts, as you know. An illegal alien from Mexico killed a Maine woman last month on the Maine Turnpike. Naturally he was identified as “Brighton man.”

You know about the Maryland mother of five murdered by a El Salvadoran murderer waved into the country by Biden. And the 12-year-old in Houston raped and murdered by Venezuelans who, ditto.

In Texas two people were killed last week at a Chick-Fil-A by one Oved Bernardo Mendoza Argueta. An “Irving man” with an ICE detainer on him and a record as long as his arm, or should I say “brazo” in his native tongue.

In Syracuse, an Ecuadorean savage suffocated a 21-year-old woman last month on her birthday. He had a Spanish interpreter at his arraignment where he claimed he was too drunk to remember killing the young woman. Maybe he “lacked the enzyme” to metabolize alcohol, as a different Ecuadorean illegal said after running over young Matthew Denice in Milford in 2011.

Then there was the rape of a 15-year-old girl in Albany in May by a Mideast terrorist. The cops didn’t even release any news about the foreign savage on the loose until the news media got wind of it and, incredibly, decided to report news that went against The Party’s narrative.

The name of this adherent of the Religion of Peace is Sakir Akkan, age 21. Last November, Akkan took Joe Biden up on his generous invitation to come to the Great Satan and embark on a career of raping underage western women while living on the dole.

Much to the chagrin of his fellow Democrats, Akkan was finally collared. Only local Republicans complained, saying that The Party was showing “a shocking lack of concern for New Yorkers’ safety.”

Seriously, was anyone in Albany really “shocked?” It only would have been shocking if the Democrats had cared in the slightest.

At the terrorist’s arraignment, the New York Post said he sported a fashionable coiffure – “a pompadour-style hairdo with buzzed sides.”

Infidels, you paid for it! You know what else you paid for? Like Juscelene Guedes, the illegal appeared in court wearing earphones. That’s right, Joe Biden’s savage foreign friend had his own interpreter.

A Turkish interpreter. Celebrate diversity!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

(Buy Howie’s latest book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at amazon.com or howiecarrshow.com.)