An interview with a prolific Twitter user accused by the British government of being a "Russian Bot" quickly turned heated as challenged their arguments, particularly their claim that by not toeing the UK government line, he was "anti-Britain" - and perhaps even a Kremlin agent.


It all started with a blog post from the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the DC-based, Gulf-funded think tank Atlantic Council, which said that some of the conversations about the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal "appear to involve organized activity, including possibly fake accounts masquerading as English users, in the well-known pattern of the 'troll factory' in St. Petersburg." The post devotes a substantial portion of space to Twitter user @Ian56789, cited as an "unusual account" that was "especially active" on the subject.


​The British government claimed on Thursday to have concluded that there was a 4,000 percent increase in activity from Russian trolls following the Skripal poisoning and the West's attack on Syria on April 14, naming @Ian56789, hereinafter 'Ian,' as one of the Kremlin's accounts.

The US government, for its part, claimed there was a "2,000 percent increase in Russian trolls," as opposed to activity therefrom, although that was just in reference to Syria, not the poisoning in Salisbury.

Twitter banned Kaspersky Lab ads from its platform and, two months on, has failed to explain the decision. The head of the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm is now demanding public answers about an apparent act of censorship.

On Friday, Eugene Kaspersky, the head of Kaspersky Lab, revealed in a blog post that Twitter has banned the adverts of the Russian company. The decision was taken in January, when Kaspersky Lab received a brief email stating that Twitter has made "a determination that Kaspersky Lab operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices," according to a screenshot of the message.

Kaspersky says he was baffled by the justification because Kaspersky Lab's business model is essentially the same as that of any other reputable cybersecurity firm: It provides protection from malware for money. "We didn't violate any written or unwritten rules," he said. "The ban, I believe, violates Twitter's declared commitment to freedom of expression." After all, just a few years ago Twitter declared itself "the free speech wing of the free speech party."

Why do so many People find Jordan Peterson so threatening? I think a clue can be found in the bitter argument between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud that led to their parting of ways, way back in in the early 20th Century. Freud was looking for a rational, causal explanation for the subconscious world, which he reduced to taboos, family romance, sex and death drives. Being a hard-nosed 19th Century empiricist, he was skeptical, or perhaps even terrified, of esoteric phenomena; he told Jung to beware what he saw as a 'black tide of mud' in mysticism. But Jung was a mystic, and his interest lay precisely in the world of the unseen and occult.

The etymology of the word 'occult' is something like: 'what is hidden, concealed, or covered over'. Being so apparently rational, Freud had no room for occult speculation: he seemed to view mysticism as a neurotic disease, or at least something that should be understood in scientific terms. My sense is that this same Freudian fear and loathing of mysticism - a certain terror of the irrational, the dark, and the unknown - is what people fear in Jordan Peterson, who is a scientist but also a Jungian mystic. It is therefore no surprise that Pankaj Mishra's recent hit piece is entitled: 'Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism'.

This fear of 'the black tide of mud' continues on in the culture wars. The 'hard-nosed rationalists' are at war with the 'mystics'. People like Sam Harris, whose view is that 'intelligence is a matter of information processing in physical systems[i]' seems similarly worried about mysticism. Neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Iain McGilchrist, on the other hand, believes that this is a reductive view: "Is consciousness a product of the brain?', he wrote. 'The only certainty here is that anyone who thinks they can answer this question with certainty has to be wrong[ii]'. Freud and Jung fought this same eternal war between reason and mystery, and the conflict rages on.

Certainly, fear of fascist mysticism is not unfounded: after all mysticism, the occult, and the 'collective unconsciousness' are terrifying because we don't understand that much about them - and some doors are best left shut. Nazism, for example could be thought of as a kind of pre-rational mysticism, and Hitler a kind of negative mystic monster. However, was Jung a Nazi, as Pankaj Mishra seems to suggest? Actually, such rumors have since been proved unfounded: Jung actually risked his life in a conspiracy to bring down Hitler[iii].

On April 14, the Syrian Arab Army and its allies liberated the town of Douma and thus the entire region of Eastern Ghouta, near the Syrian capital of Damacus. Government forces also captured all the infrastructure created by Jaish al-Islam in Douma.

A Syrian photographer, Wassim Essa, has released a big photo report showing Jaish al-Islam's key HQ in Douma.

Dozens of gang members, some of whom belonged to the notorious MS-13, were shielded from deportation and released due to "sanctuary" policies last year, according to newly released stats from the Department of Homeland Security.

The revelation could jolt the escalating "sanctuary" debate, especially in California where many of those gang members were located.

"Two-thirds of the releases occurred in California, which has had a strict sanctuary policy in effect since January 2014," the Center for Immigration Studies said in a post on the data, pointing to "obvious public safety problems."

One more Syrian boy, 10-year-old Mustafa, who was portrayed as a victim in a video of the alleged chemical attack's aftermath in the city of Douma, told Sputnik that the kids had been given cookies and bags of potatoes for their featuring in the staged filming.

Mustafa, thereby, entirely confirmed the account of the events shared by another minor participant of the footage, which was used to justify the Western countries' military action against Damascus.

Earlier in the week, 11-year-old Syrian boy, Hasan Diab, and his father told the Rossiya 24 TV channel that the kids got dates, cookies and rice for featuring in the video. The boy said that he was in a basement in Douma with his mother when someone shouted to go to the hospital. When they came, somebody grabbed him, poured water on him and put him on a bed with other people in order to shoot a video. The man added that there was no chemical attack in the city.

For weeks, British Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson have insisted that there is "no alternative explanation" to Russian government responsibility for the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury last month.

But in fact the British government is well aware that such an alternative explanation does exist. It is based on the well-documented fact that the "Novichok" nerve agent synthesized by Soviet scientist in the 1980s had been sold by the scientist - who led the development of the nerve agent - to individuals linked to Russian criminal organizations as long ago as 1994 and was used to kill a Russian banker in 1995.

The connection between the Novichok nerve agent and a previous murder linked to the murky Russian criminal underworld would account for the facts of the Salisbury poisoning far better than the official line that it was a Russian government assassination attempt.

Sanctions against top Russian aluminum producers are likely to hit European car production, according to Germany's WVMetalle, a lobbying group for 655 metals companies.

The group says unless actions are taken, many car plants in Germany and Europe will be closed, and others will face supply disruption, Bloomberg reports.

"Re-jigging all of those trade flows is really, really tough. You've cut off the US and Europe from its traditional supplier," Michael Widmer, head of metals markets research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London, told Bloomberg.

Kyle Kashuv, a pro-Second Amendment student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, roasted former President Obama on Twitter Thursday for writing an essay praising only the school's pro-gun control student activists for Time magazine.

Seventeen people were killed and seventeen more were wounded at the Parkland, Florida, school on February 14, making it one of the deadliest school massacres ever.

On Thursday, Time released its list of the 100 most influential people. It included some Parkland survivors -- but only pro-gun control survivors: Cameron Kasky, Jaclyn Corin, David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez, and Alex Wind.

Is General Khalifa Haftar dead or alive? The leader of the Libyan National Army disappeared from the public eye earlier this month, and now rumors surrounding his health are beginning to circulate. Some media reports say he is dead, others insist he is alive.

If we are to trust a quote by Libyan Express of the French foreign minister, Haftar is alive and recovering after medical treatment in Paris. Yet, the possibility of him losing his position of power has already fueled fears about the future of Libya and its oil wealth. These fears are very likely to stoke oil prices further.

Haftar's LNA, affiliated with the eastern Libyan government based in Tobruk and not recognized by the UN, was responsible for the revival of Libya's oil industry after two years ago it retook the four export terminals in the Oil Crescent from the Petroleum Facilities Guard. The LNA made it possible for the National Oil Corporation to lift the country's daily production rate to 1 million barrels and above. That's up from about 300,000 bpd before the takeover of the terminals.