Random Politics & Religion #00

Let me guess all Jews !

Houthi fighters opposed to Yemen's president took over the central city of Taiz in an escalation of a power struggle diplomats say risks drawing in neighboring oil giant Saudi Arabia and its main regional rival Iran.

Abdel-Malek al-Houthi, head of the powerful Shi'ite Muslim group, vowed to pursue Sunni militants behind suicide attacks on Houthi supporters and said the poor Arabian peninsula country was in danger of descending into Libya-style turmoil.

In a live televised speech, Houthi said his decision to mobilize fighters amid accelerating violence in recent days was aimed at Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for bombings that killed more than 130 in the capital, Sanaa, on Friday, and al Qaeda.

Conflict has been spreading across Yemen since last year when the Houthis seized Sanaa and effectively removed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who now seeks a comeback from his base in Aden.

Residents of Taiz, on a main road from Sanaa to the country's second city, Aden, said Houthi militias took over the city's military airport without a struggle late on Saturday.

Witnesses in the central province of Ibb reported seeing dozens of tanks and military vehicles headed southward from Houthi-controlled areas toward Taiz, while activists in the city said Houthi gunmen shot into the air to disperse protests by residents demonstrating against their presence.

The advance of the Iranian-backed group has angered Sunni Gulf Arab states led by Saudi Arabia.

The Houthi expansion into mostly Sunni areas in the center and west has led to months of clashes with local tribes and al Qaeda, raising fears of civil war.

INTERVENTION

The U.N. mediator on Yemen said on Sunday that recent events "seem to be leading Yemen further away from a peaceful settlement and towards the edge of civil war."

Saying it was illusory to think Houthi militia could take over all of Yemen or that Hadi could assemble enough troops to take back the country, mediator Jamal Benomar told the Security Council: "Any side that would want to push the country in either direction would be inviting a protracted conflict in the vein of an Iraq-Libya-Syria combined scenario."

The Security Council condemned the takeover of much of Yemen and its institutions by the Houthis and warned of "further measures" if hostilities did not end.

Iran called for dialogue, but suggested Hadi should leave to spare the country further bloodshed.

"The expectation is that President ... Hadi will resign rather than repeat mistakes, to play a constructive role in preventing the breakup of Yemen and the transformation of Aden into a terrorist haven," said Iran's deputy foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, according to state news agency IRNA.

But Gulf Arab leaders and security officials said on Saturday Hadi was Yemen's legitimate ruler and they were ready to make "all efforts" to defend the country's security.

"Yemen is sliding into a dark tunnel, which would have serious consequences not only on Yemen but on security and stability in the region," the officials, who included Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, said.

"The security of Yemen and of the GCC countries is an indivisible whole," it added.

ESCALATING VIOLENCE

On Sunday, anti-aircraft guns opened fire at an unidentified plane flying over Hadi's compound in Aden, witnesses said, in the third incident of its kind since last Thursday.

U.S. officials said Washington had evacuated its remaining personnel from Yemen, including about 100 special operations forces, because of worsening security, marking a setback in U.S. efforts against a powerful al Qaeda branch.

The Houthis are allied with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, still influential in the military despite having given up power in 2011 after mass protests against his rule. The Yemeni army has varied loyalties, with most units being controlled by the Houthis or Saleh, while some are loyal to Hadi.

In his speech, Houthi criticized the U.N. Security Council, saying it was led by countries plotting "evil" against others.

He also accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar - two among several Gulf Arab states opposed to the Houthis' rise to power - of fomenting "destruction" inside and outside the region.

First one comes in at #6.

I question the validity of this list entirely; suggesting Mark "Facebook" Zucks even got an invite to the "most powerful people" ball with the likes of Obama, Putin, and Jinping...

Though admittedly, the Pope is potentially sitting on the world's largest sleeper cell, soooo...maybe #4 is actually a little low for him.

I'd put Obama at #27, right below Bibi.

Sorry but I think having access to nuclear launch codes gets you a ticket to the top 10, at minimum.

I wouldn't be surprised if they gave him a counterfeit biscuit.

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a news conference at the United Nations in New York on March 10.Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's staff also used personal emails to conduct state business, possibly contradicting assurances that her team's communications took place on government servers.

The New York Times reported on Monday that Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner in 2016, emailed her top aides on their private email accounts when discussing the attack on the diplomacy facility in Benghazi, Libya.

"Did we survive the day?" Clinton wrote to a close adviser after being grilled by House Republicans about the 2012 incident.

The report casts new doubts on whether Clinton was being entirely truthful when she said the "vast majority" of her emails intentionally included a State Department address to ensure they were captured by government servers.

Clinton made that claim two weeks ago at a chaotic news conference in which she repeatedly insisted she did nothing wrong by exclusively using a personal email server as secretary of state. Critics accuse Clinton of trying to avoid the official disclosure process. According to The Times, this practice also violated federal guidelines.

Additionally, the report raises questions about the security of Clinton's emails, which could have been made even more vulnerable by including the personal emails of her aides. Experts previously told Business Insider that Clinton's email practice raised security concerns about whether the messages traveled over the unencrypted public internet.

"There is no way to be truly secure," Alex McGeorge, senior security researcher at Immunity Inc., told Business Insider. "But the State Department at least has teams whose job it is to detect a hack as soon as it happens — there is no indication so far that Hillary [Clinton] had this kind of active defense."

Clinton's team said the security "of her family's electronic communications was taken seriously from the onset when it was first set up for President Clinton's team.

"While the curiosity in the specifics of this set up is understandable, given what people with ill intentions can do with such information in this day and age, there are concerns about broadcasting specific technical details about past and current practices. However, suffice it to say, robust protections were put in place and additional upgrades and techniques employed over time as they became available, including consulting and employing third party experts."

At her news conference, Clinton maintained that her "@clintonemail.com" account was perfectly secure, showed no signs of a breach, and was physically guarded by the Secret Service.

Since marrying Chelsea Clinton five years ago, Marc Mezvinsky, a money manager, appears to have settled into his life as Bill and Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law. He has regularly appeared at charitable events, once introducing the former president at the Clinton Foundation’s celebrity poker tournament by dryly saying, “You may have heard of my father-in-law.” And at the recent N.B.A. All-Star Game, Mr. Mezvinsky took a seat next to Mr. Clinton and his partner in charitable endeavors, Dikembe Mutombo, the former basketball star.

Beyond the glamour, being part of the Clinton family has provided Mr. Mezvinsky with another perk: access to wealthy investors with ties to the Clintons.

When Mr. Mezvinsky and his partners began raising money in 2011 for a new hedge fund firm, Eaglevale Partners, a number of investors in the firm were longtime supporters of the Clintons, according to interviews and financial documents reviewed by The New York Times. Tens of millions of dollars raised by Eaglevale can be attributed to investors with some relationship or link to the Clintons.

The investors include hedge fund managers like Marc Lasry and James Leitner; an overseas money management firm connected to the Rothschild family; and people from Goldman Sachs, including the chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein. Some of the investors in Eaglevale have contributed campaign money to the former president and Mrs. Clinton, who is widely expected to run for president again in 2016. Some have also contributed to the family’s foundation.

Identifying who put money into Eaglevale, a roughly $400 million fund that has had underwhelming returns for much of its brief history, is difficult because hedge funds do not publicly disclose their investors. Still, the overlap between at least some of Eaglevale’s investors and backers of the Clintons illustrates how politics and finance can intersect and shows the fine line the Clinton family must navigate as their charitable and business endeavors come under scrutiny in an election cycle.

A person briefed on the matter and close to the firm said the amount of investor money recruited by Mr. Mezvinsky is not large, amounting to less than 10 percent of the firm’s total outside capital. Clinton supporters also say there are more direct ways to cultivate favor with the family, such as giving to the foundation, where Chelsea Clinton is vice chairwoman, than by investing with a hedge fund that her husband co-founded.

There are several examples of Eaglevale investors with relationships with the Clintons. Rock Creek Group, a Washington-based investment advisory firm, placed $13 million from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and another public pension fund with Eaglevale in late 2011 and early 2012. Rock Creek’s chairwoman, Afsaneh Beschloss, attended state dinners at the Clinton White House in the late 1990s and was a panelist in the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in September in New York. (Her husband, Michael, is a well-known presidential historian and occasional writer for The Times.)

For a brief period in 2013, after Eaglevale had been up and running for about a year, Rock Creek sublet temporary office space to Mrs. Clinton after she stepped down as secretary of state.

Mr. Lasry, a co-founder of the big hedge fund Avenue Capital and a longtime friend and financial backer of both the former president and Mrs. Clinton, said he invested $1 million in Eaglevale. In an interview in his Park Avenue office, adorned with many photos of him with the former president, he said that he recommended that his relative by marriage, Craig Effron, another hedge fund manager, also invest in the fund.

“I gave them money because I thought they would make me money,” said Mr. Lasry, whose $13 billion firm was one of the first places Chelsea worked after graduating from Stanford.

A number of other investors reached by The Times declined to be interviewed.

Some investors in Eaglevale, and other people briefed on the firm’s management, said that Mr. Mezvinsky’s more veteran partners, Bennett Grau and Mark Mallon, have played crucial roles in raising money for the fund. Mr. Grau and Mr. Mallon have long track records as successful traders at Goldman, and Mr. Grau’s involvement was said to be a particular draw to financial investors who run other hedge funds and money management firms. Mr. Mezvinsky worked for Mr. Grau at Goldman for a while.

Mr. Mezvinsky and his partners declined to be interviewed for this article.

Kamyl Bazbaz, a Clinton Foundation spokesman, said, “Where our supporters choose to invest is obviously their personal prerogative and has nothing to do with the foundation in any respect.”

Mr. Mezvinsky, 37, is the most prominent executive at Eaglevale, a so-called macro fund that makes trades based on global economic and political events. The fund is a relatively small one in an industry with roughly $3 trillion in assets.

Mr. Mezvinsky is a Stanford graduate who is the child of political parents himself. His father, Edward M. Mezvinsky, was a two-term member of Congress from Iowa, and his mother, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, served a term in Congress from Pennsylvania.

Mr. Mezvinsky worked at Goldman Sachs for eight years before moving to a private equity firm. He is widely credited with spearheading Eaglevale’s big bullish bet on Greek bank stocks and Greek debt. Unfortunately for investors in Eaglevale — named after a bridge in Central Park — that trade has largely resulted in disappointing returns.

When Mr. Mezvinsky worked on Wall Street, his responsibilities included pitching investment ideas to hedge funds before he moved onto the trading desk. Among his partners, Mr. Mezvinsky is the one most at ease with appearing on panels to discuss investment strategies, one of which was the firm’s bet on beaten down Greek banks. In 2013, he took part in a small private meeting a Wall Street bank arranged in New York for a number of hedge fund managers with Greece’s prime minister at the time, Antonis Samaras.

Goldman Sachs, where Mr. Mezvinsky and his partners had met years earlier, was also important to Eaglevale’s start.

Among Eaglevale’s earliest investors were Goldman partners, including Mr. Blankfein, who let his name be used to market the fund. The fund has also relied on multiple Wall Street banks to provide back-office services, including Goldman, which made introductions to investors like Rock Creek.

Goldman has a close connection to the Clintons, and its executives have been political contributors over the years. More recently, Goldman has made donations of more than $1 million to the family’s foundation, which in recent years has leased office space in a Goldman building downtown. (A Goldman spokesman, Andrew Williams, said the foundation had asked to break its lease, but the Wall Street company refused.)

Mr. Williams, though, said Mr. Blankfein had invested with Eaglevale because of his friendship with Mr. Grau, a longtime colleague and the fund’s chief investment officer.

In 2012, Eaglevale raised $15 million from an investment vehicle in the domain of Jacob Rothschild, who with members of his far-flung family has donated to the Clinton Foundation. The investment, financial records show, came before President Clinton spoke at a conference in Oxford that was sponsored by the Rothschild Foundation, of which Mr. Rothschild is chairman.

Mr. Rothschild declined to comment through Tom Burns, a spokesman for his firm, RIT Capital Partners. A person briefed on the matter and close to Eaglevale, but not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Clinton’s appearance at the conference had nothing to do with the investment from the Rothschild-managed firm, Trading Capital Holdings.

Eaglevale’s flagship fund, with about $380 million in assets, is up about 10 percent this year, but that follows a poor performance in 2014. Last year that fund lost 3.6 percent largely because its bets on an economic recovery in Greece failed to pay off. By comparison, hedge funds using the same kinds of macro strategies as Eaglevale on average rose 5.62 percent in 2014, according to Hedge Fund Research, an industry performance tracking firm.

Eaglevale had worse luck with a fund that raised $25 million solely to bet on a recovery in Greece. Its 40 percent plunge last year was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Some investors in Eaglevale have withdrawn from or reduced their investments. The investment linked to the Rothschild fund, for example, withdrew about half of its allotment.

The two public pension investors that invested in Eaglevale at the recommendation of the Rock Creek Group are out of the fund altogether. Calpers left the fund as part of a retreat from hedge fund investments. The other pension fund, whose identity could not be determined, left because of the firm’s poor performance, said another person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In letters to its investors month after month last year, Mr. Mezvinsky and his partners sounded an upbeat and confident note that Greece would soon be on the path to a “sustainable recovery.” It was not until the end of last year that Eaglevale finally acknowledged, “Our recent predictions regarding Greek politics have proved incorrect.”

Eaglevale’s flagship fund has since withdrawn from much of its Greek trading. The firm is now betting big on the United States dollar to outperform a number of foreign currencies.

That is a trade some investors attributed largely to Mr. Grau.

The Vatican Supports 'Legitimate' Violent Force Against the Islamic State

March 17, 2015 | 3:05 pm
The Vatican's top envoy to the United Nations in Geneva recently endorsed military action against the Islamic State terror group, which he said fulfilled the Catholic Church's criteria as a legitimate target under its "just war" doctrine — but he has stopped short of saying the same of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, who represents the Vatican's sovereign entity, the Holy See, commented on military action against the Islamic State on Friday in an interview with the Catholic website Crux. He spoke following the issuance of a joint statement at the UN Human Rights Council on the condition of Christians and other communities in the Middle East.

"We have to stop this kind of genocide," Tomasi remarked, referring to the abuses of the "so-called Islamic State," which is also known as ISIS, ISIL, and by its Arabic acronym Daesh. "Otherwise we'll be crying out in the future about why we didn't do something, why we allowed such a terrible tragedy to happen."

Related: UN Security Council Condemns Chlorine Weapons in Syria, but Doesn't Blame Assad

On Tuesday, the archbishop elaborated on the Vatican's uncharacteristic call to violent force in further comments to VICE News.

"Targeted are all the people who hold a different religious belief, or have a different cultural tradition, and the aim of the violence against them is their utter destruction," he said. "In the case of ISIS, it seems to me that the responsibility of the international community through the structures it has given itself for acting in emergencies, like that of the United Nations Security Council, is linked to the kind of genocide that is going on in the region."

'It's always surprising when you see church officials calling explicitly for the use of force.'
Throughout their campaign in the Middle East, Islamic State militants have massacred and carried out a litany of other war crimes against unarmed Christians despite their qualifying as "people of the book" — a protected class under Islamic law, which the extremist group claims to follow. Other religious minorities like the Yazidis have also been viciously persecuted.

Last month, the Islamic State released a video depicting the beheadings of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian migrant workers on the Mediterranean shore of Libya. The grotesque images were followed by a promise to conquer Rome, within which the Vatican City is ensconced. The Holy See's security forces are vigilantly mindful of plots by the Islamic State to assassinate Pope Francis.

Related: Syrian Refugees Are Freezing to Death as Snow Blankets the Region

"It's always surprising when you see church officials calling explicitly for the use of force," Joseph Capizzi, a professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America, told VICE News. "But we are dealing with something unprecedented. This is the singling out of innocent populations."

Government and aligned forces in both Iraq and Syria have killed civilians and been accused of committing war crimes and human rights abuses while ostensibly fighting Sunni rebel groups like the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front, an al Qaeda affiliate. In Syria, Assad's government is by most estimates responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in that country's four-year civil war. They have not, however, widely publicized their morbid exploits in the manner of the Islamic State.

Christian theologians say that Tomasi's singling out of the Islamic State does not rule out possible support for international action against Assad's regime under the doctrine of just war, which holds that "legitimate defense by military" is morally justifiable under a narrow set of circumstances, including to help save innocent lives that are in imminent danger. But Tomasi declined to respond when VICE News asked if the Vatican was considering whether Assad's crimes and the situation in Syria might similarly justify an international intervention.

Related: The Wreckage of Syria's Civil War Is More Dire Than Ever — and the UN Isn't Helping

"This is the most complicated factor here," Kevin Ahern, a theologian and professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, told VICE News. "The Holy See has been critical of the Syrian government in the past. But the Christians in Syria have largely aligned themselves — or were manipulated by — the 'secular' Assad government."

"We are seeing ancient peoples and cultures vanishing," he added. "The Iraqi Chaldean Catholic Church, for example, still uses the language that Jesus spoke in their prayers. It's an ancient culture and we are seeing it, along with other minority groups, disappear. Something has to be done. There is no excuse for the crimes committed by the Syrian government."

According to the official catechism of the Catholic Church, which outlines its theological instructions and doctrine, "the damage inflicted by an aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain" to justify war for the "common good." The conditions also stipulate that military action must have "serious prospects of success" and that "the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated."

A coalition led by the United States has launched more than 2,600 airstrikes against suspected extremist targets in Iraq and Syria over the past year. Last summer, as the coalition was beginning its campaign, Pope Francis spoke to reporters about the rationale justifying an intervention against Islamist militants in Iraq.

"In these cases, where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is legitimate to stop the unjust aggressor," the pontiff said.

Related: How the US Created the Islamic State. Watch the video here.

This position, echoed by Archbishop Tomasi, stands in contrast to the late Pope John Paul II's vocal opposition to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 — a military initiative that many geopolitical observers have argued set the stage for the evolution of the Sunni insurgency that is roiling the region.

"The critical difference between the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the present situation is that in the first instance the military action started a period of violence, while in the present case, if there is a coordinated use of force, the goal is to stop the ongoing atrocities," Tomasi explained to VICE News. "Besides, it is difficult for the international community to dialogue and to attempt to resolve the situation with a non-state group of extremists who do not abide by any internationally accepted rule."

J. Patrick Hornbeck II, a theology professor at Fordham University, noted that this is a wrinkle in the application of just war doctrine to the situation in Iraq and Syria — namely that belligerents like the Islamic State are often not, or only claim to be, part of a recognized state.

This same distinction, scholars of Islamic law have told VICE News, render the terror group's theological justification for its own actions void. Because the group's self-declaration of a caliphate is illegitimate, Islamic State leaders are not in a position to interpret Islamic law in the perverse manner that they have to justify their atrocities.

Tomasi noted that military action would only be proper if carried out under the auspices of the United Nations.

"In the end, the grave decision to use force rests with states, who have the obligation to ensure that conditions for peace exist in their own territory and throughout the world," he said. "War is always a disaster."

Follow Samuel Oakford on Twitter: @samueloakford
Photo via Flickr

Crusade time!

In other news Rolling Stone story about gang rape in UVA: No evidence it ever happened.

I for one am shocked that a hard hitting journalism magazine like rolling stone would lie !

Obama is planning to appear on Yemen's version of late night with Jimmy Kimmel. Don't worry everyone !