Latest news with #St.Patrick's
Irish Independent
2 days ago
- General
- Irish Independent
Clongeen point way to Division 4 final clash versus St. Patrick's with win over Naomh Éanna
Clongeen will face St. Patrick's in the EEW All-County Hurling League Division 4 final after pointing their way past Naomh Éanna in Pairc Uí Shíocháin on Sunday.
The Hindu
25-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Political Line newsletter: Old Boys and New Men: people in the India-Pakistan conflict
The fact that India and Pakistan (and Bangladesh) were part of the same country until August 1947 has become so remote to most of the people living in these countries that many of them might even find it difficult to believe. These modern countries were formed as a result, at least partly, of British imperial policies which accentuated and aggravated social divisions. American scholar Jeffrey Sachs recently noted that several conflicts of the world currently — in South Asia, West Asia and East Asia (China and Taiwan) — are legacies of British and western imperialism. In the Indian subcontinent, the conflicts began as 'fraternal violence' — to borrow from historian Shruti Kapila. The long history and myth of violent fraternity goes all the way back to the Mahabharata in which the war was within the family. As of today, the rivalries have acquired a new edge that is sharper and more dangerous than in the past. A key factor in the current tone and character of this conflict is the generational shift in both countries. For the first time in history, India and Pakistan are led by people who were born after Independence and the Partition. Three generations — 78 years — have passed since the Partition. In 2014, Narendra Modi became the first Indian Prime Minister to be born after Independence (1950). In Pakistan, this shift had happened seven years earlier. Pervez Musharraf was the last ruler/army chief of Pakistan who was born before the Partition. Ashfaq Kayani, who succeeded Musharraf, was born in 1952; The current army chief of Pakistan, Asim Munir, was born in 1968. Musharraf and Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq — who tilted Pakistan irreversibly in the direction of radical Islamisation — were both born in Delhi, and both left the city in 1947. Musharraf as a four-year old and Haq as a graduate of St. Stephen's College. K. Natwar Singh, who joined St. Stephen's a year after Haq left, went to Islamabad as India's High Commissioner when the latter was the ruler of Pakistan. Singh later recounted how Haq would give his private jet to a group of students from St. Stephen's who went to Pakistan. This was not a one-sided affair — Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Leader of Opposition L.K. Advani were both born in what would later become Pakistan. Singh, as PM, would famously dream of a day when one could have 'breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul'. In 2005, Mr. Advani went to Pakistan, and also visited the St. Patrick's school in Karachi where he studied. He would nostalgically recall stories of his childhood. When Musharraf came to India, he visited his family's home in Old Delhi. Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto shared 'pedigree and degree', as a commentator put it; it was his mother and her father who signed the Simla Agreement. In her last book that she finished before her assassination in 2007, Benazir wrote that Pakistan's ISI suspected her to be an Indian asset and sabotaged her ties with Rajiv. The military leadership of both countries also had personal contacts in the early decades. In 1947, Sam Manekshaw was a Lieutenant Colonel and Yahya Khan was a Major in the British Indian Army. Military assets were partitioned — two-thirds of the personnel going to India and one-third going to Pakistan. Khan purchased from the future Field Marshal a red motorcycle but apparently did not pay the promised amount of ₹1,000 around the time of Partition. During the 1971 war, Manekshaw was the Indian Army chief and Yahya Khan was the President of Pakistan. As per an account by Pakistani columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee in 2008, Field Marshal Manekshaw said after the 1971 Bangladesh war, half in jest: 'I waited for 24 years for ₹1,000 which never came, but now he has paid with half of his country.' Even more dramatic is a slice of the story of the surrender of the Pakistani army in Dhaka. Lieutenant General Kuldip Singh Brar gave this account in an interview to an online news portal about the eventful day of December 16, 1971. Major General Gandharv S. Nagra was leading a contingent of Indian troops to Dhaka. He and Lieutenant General A.A.K. Niazi, the commander of Pakistani forces in East Pakistan, had gone to college together. There was no direct communication between the two armies. The Indian Army chief was asking the Pakistani troops to surrender, over a radio broadcast. Nagra's convoy approached an abandoned post of the Pakistani army near Dhaka, and used the phone there to connect to its command headquarters. Niazi was on the line. 'He (Nagra) said, 'Abdullah, this is Gandharv here' and General Niazi asked, 'Gandharv, where are you?' He said, 'I am at the gate of Dhaka and waiting for you to surrender.' General Niazi said, 'We are ready to surrender, but we don't know who to tell.' General Nagra said, 'We are here.' General Niazi said, 'I'm sending a few cars, you come into Dhaka and we'll work out the surrender terms.' We then went into Dhaka in Pakistani vehicles and saw the hospital, university, airfield en route. We arrived at the HQ, Pakistan Eastern Command. General Niazi came out and embraced General Nagra. They went into the office to talk. Meanwhile, we informed Calcutta that we were in Dhaka, and the Pakistan army was ready to surrender.' The rest of the formality followed. Even through wars, terrorism and continuing conflicts, leaders of both countries had some memories of these countries being one, and this was very personal too. Not only did they share the same country in their memories, all of them were also trained in the western education system. With the complete passing of those generations, the India-Pakistan conflict is in a new phase.
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New Latino restaurant ‘Boricua Bites' comes to Springfield
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) – A new Latino cuisine restaurant has opened on State Street in Springfield. The owners of Boricua Bites held the grand opening for their western Massachusetts location Saturday evening. To better serve all customers, the restaurant accepts orders through both a kiosk and a counter, as well as a drive-thru window. Thunderbirds host post-parade party following St. Patrick's festivities The owner of Boricua Bites told 22News that they want to showcase Puerto Rican culture beyond the food. 'On the tables, you'll see fun facts about Puerto Rico that people didn't know, see sports figures, historical figures that people didn't know were from Puerto Rico,' said Eric Maldonado, general managing partner and owner of Boricua Bites. 'That's what we wanted to create and showcase along with the great food.' The restaurant also offers catering services and is open most of the week, except Mondays. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Dark leprechaun Conor McGregor: MAGA's latest manfluencer
During the ritual humiliation of Irish prime minister Micheál Martin's pre-St. Patrick's Day visit to the White House — which I wrote about here last week — Donald Trump was asked to name his favorite Irish person. The president appeared briefly baffled, and witticisms flowed for the next day or so on both sides of the Atlantic. (Does Sean Hannity count as 'Irish'? Does Shaquille O'Neal?) His eventual response was 'Conor,' meaning mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor. Martin winced and chuckled, but said nothing, which was the basic principle of his entire performance. As he and Trump were both aware, former MMA champion McGregor was recently found liable in a Dublin civil suit for sexually assaulting a longtime acquaintance in December 2018 — the same charge for which Trump was found liable in the E. Jean Carroll case. Although the cases are broadly similar, the two men's versions of events are different: McGregor admits he had sex with the woman in a hotel room but says it was consensual; Trump says the Carroll incident, in a department-store changing room, never happened at all. In retrospect, the 'Conor' moment in the Oval Office on March 12 looks like a set-up — or, more to the point, like a devious and especially petty work of MAGA-world chicanery. Five days after Martin's visit, on St. Patrick's Day itself, McGregor himself showed up at the White House — looking rather too much like an evil leprechaun in his overly tight pinstripe suit — for a series of photo-ops with Trump and Elon Musk and supposed 'meetings' with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other functionaries. Three days after that, McGregor announced his intention to run in Ireland's presidential election this fall, something he's been threatening for months. That's a bizarre and terrible idea from every point of view, and it almost certainly won't work — we'll get to that. (Given recent history, categorical predictions are unwise.) McGregor's appearance in Washington was framed to look like an unscheduled or spontaneous event, and the White House press corps was only told about it a day earlier, but as later reporting by the Irish Times has made clear, it was nothing of the kind. McGregor's visit had evidently been scheduled weeks earlier, long before Martin even received an invitation for the traditional St. Patrick's meeting between the Irish taoiseach (literally, 'leader') and the American president, which is meant to celebrate the intimate historical relationship between the two countries. In other words, Trump knew he'd be seeing 'Conor' in a few days, and his administration had already selected a MAGA-friendly tough-guy celebrity with no official status and a permanently tarnished public image as its preferred avatar of Irishness, over the Republic of Ireland's democratically elected leader. Given the Trump regime's all-out assault on freedom of speech, higher education, the legal profession and the courts, the McGregor affair wasn't even the biggest story in Washington on the day it happened, let alone of last week. It's not even slightly surprising that McGregor — like Andrew Tate, another accused rapist, 'manfluencer' and caricature of toxic masculinity — appeals to Trump and, no doubt, to many of his followers. But the fact that Trump or Musk or someone close to them bothered to stage this event serves to illustrate the MAGA vision of full-spectrum dominance in action. First of all, this was a transparent attempt to Trump-wash the reputation of a fading global superstar (who remains a highly recognizable figure to millions of MMA fans) by associating him with right-wing 'issues.' It's not clear what McGregor and Hegseth may have discussed in their so-called meeting — perhaps their impressive tattoos, which seem to light Donald Trump's fire a bit — but the Pentagon later issued an empty-words press release headlined 'U.S., Ireland Both Suffer Impacts of Illegal Immigration.' (I couldn't tell you what the defense secretary and a semi-retired fighter have to do with that, even hypothetically. But nothing makes sense anymore.) That points us toward the second goal of the Trump-McGregor tryst, which was to undermine the elected government of a small nation that is almost entirely dependent on U.S. trade and is clearly considered insufficiently subservient and overly woke. It would have been absurd to make the latter claim about Ireland even 15 to 20 years ago, but it's now clearly true: In the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandals surrounding the Roman Catholic church, Ireland has legalized divorce, abortion and a full range of LGBTQ+ rights. Of course racism, misogyny and homophobia exist, but expressing such views is generally seen as socially unacceptable; in broad strokes, Ireland has become one of the most open and tolerant societies in Europe. Over the past few years, Conor McGregor has tried to position himself as the spokesman for 'common sense' (i.e., reactionary) pushback against those dramatic changes, and especially as a spokesman for anti-immigrant sentiment, the greatest source of social friction everywhere in the Western world. Ireland is virtually unique among European countries in having no far-right, anti-immigrant political movement of any consequence, largely because Irish nationalism is historically associated with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist attitudes, and often with socialism. McGregor would like to be the guy who creates and leads such a movement; the Trump-Musk team, it would appear, is eager to help. That said, McGregor's presidential campaign is likely to end before it begins, not because he's an ignoramus and a liar and a misogynist — we now understand those are not impediments — but for baked-in structural reasons. It's probably a media play aimed at the American market more than anything else. First of all, the Irish presidency is a largely ceremonial and nonpartisan position with little or no political power; it's a retirement gig for eminent figures, more like being the queen of Denmark than the president of France. The current and widely beloved president, Michael Higgins, was known more as a poet and academic than as a politician. Secondly, Irish citizens can't just decide to run for president and then pour millions in dark money into scary attack ads about trans people (just for instance). It simply doesn't work that way. The presidential election is effectively a closed shop; candidates must be nominated by at least 20 members of the Oireachtas, or national legislature, or by at least four of Ireland's 31 elected local councils. It's almost impossible to imagine the amount of Trumpian transatlantic arm-twisting, coupled with a catastrophic loss of Irish national confidence, that could make that happen for scientist Clare Moriarty noticed an important theme in McGregor's White House remarks, one which suggested his true audience wasn't the people of Ireland — for whom he's very close to persona non grata these days — but their distant cousins on this side of the pond. McGregor has a standard spiel about how Ireland has been so swamped with immigrants that it doesn't feel 'Irish' anymore (a categorically false statement, by the way), but added a particular twist for St. Paddy's Day in D.C.: There are rural towns in Ireland that have been overrun in one swoop, that have become a minority in one swoop, so issues need to be addressed and the 40 million Irish Americans need to hear this because if not there will be no place to come home and visit. As Moriarty acridly notes, the argument here amounts to 'we should stop immigration so the descendants of immigrants can have an appropriately nostalgic-feeling holiday destination to visit.' But in a sense, that's precisely the point: Conor McGregor is only pretending to run for president of Ireland, which is a job he can't have, doesn't want and definitely couldn't perform. He's really running to be the symbolic president of Irish America, or at least of the millions of conservative Irish Americans who are deeply uncomfortable with both contemporary Ireland and contemporary America, and who dream of reverse-engineering a past that never existed. This syndrome, I hardly need to add, is far more general, and is in danger of reducing what remains of our civilization to self-parody and self-destruction.
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Yahoo
City of Harrisburg increases police patrols as weather warms
HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — As the weather gets warmer, police are increasing patrols on the weekends in Downtown Harrisburg. It comes in an effort to increase safety after last year's summer surge of violence across the city. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now 'Our mission is to make the streets safe for the public to come out and enjoy Harrisburg in the warmer weather and certainly in the areas that people can frequent the downtown, the nightlife,' said Atah Akakpo-Martin, Captain of Harrisburg's Uniform Patrol Division. 'What we want to get across to everyone is to come out here in maintain themselves and stay safe.' Therefore, you might start noticing more and more local and state police around the Capitol City. 'Those patrols have run throughout the city, not only in the downtown area, but they also have run through upper Allison Hill and the uptown area,' Akakpo-Martin added. While this increase might seem to come following St. Patrick's celebrations, it is nothing new. 'So, the bureau has been running extra patrols since January and that's been in response to earlier in the year,' he explained. 'We had a rash of shootings, and we had the couple of homicides that occurred in a short period of time.' Meanwhile, some business owners near Harrisburg's popular Second Street tell abc27 News there's always been a good police presence. 'On a whole, I think it's always been a pretty safe city to come out in,' said Adam Sturges of McGraths. 'It's good for the city. It's good for making people just feel comfortable and coming out.' Police say increasing patrols has been effective in years past. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
