Twitter Bans Ayatollah-Linked Account Over Animated Video Threatening Trump

Twitter has permanently suspended an Iranian account which is part of the media operations of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, after days ago it posted a video which depicted Iranian operatives carrying out an imagined assassination of former President Donald Trump.

"The account referenced has been permanently suspended for violating our ban evasion policy," a Twitter spokesperson told AFP on Saturday. The 90-second animated video showed a drone attack on the former US president while be played gold at his Mar-a-lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

The account that's now been banned is @KhameneiSite, however, others of the Ayatollah's main official accounts remain active, but it's unclear whether the video was posted to his other accounts as well.

The video, titled "Revenge is Inevitable" was clearly meant as a direct threat against Trump. The sequence of events leads to the moment a drone circling overhead launches a strike on the former president, and ends with images and references to slain IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan.3, 2020 - in a drone strike which Trump had ordered.

The final message that flashes across the screen reads "Revenge is Definite" before the video closes with an image of Qassem Soleimani.

Last month, Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi called for the arrest of both Trump and Pompeo, saying in a speech, "If Trump and [former Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo are not tried in a fair court for the criminal act of assassinating General Soleimani, Muslims will take our martyr's revenge."

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/twitter-bans-ayatollah-linked-account-over-animated-video-threatening-trump

Ukraine changes its mind on culprit behind cyberattack

One day after blaming Belarus, Kiev has now labeled Russia the perpetrator of a huge cyberattack

A Ukrainian ministry now says “evidence” indicates Moscow was behind Friday's attack on Kiev's governmental websites. The move comes after another official earlier pointed the finger at hackers backed by Belarusian intelligence.

The statement arrived less than a day after the deputy secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Sergey Demedyuk, blamed the incident on Belarus. The large-scale hack is said to have rendered the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a number of other government agencies temporarily inaccessible.

According to Demedyuk’s written declaration to Reuters on Saturday, the defacing of the websites’ landing pages was merely a “cover” for unspecified “destructive actions … behind the scenes.”

However, the Digital Transformation Ministry now says that “all the evidence points to the fact that Russia was behind the cyberattack,” in its statement issued on Sunday. It provided no specific examples to back up the assertion and called on Ukrainians not to “panic,” assuring them that their personal data was securely stored in “appropriate registers” that were inaccessible to hackers.

“Moscow continues to wage a hybrid war” against Kiev, the ministry claimed, adding that the cyberattack was “one of the manifestations” of this conflict. It accused Russia of attempting to destabilize Ukraine by undermining public confidence in its government institutions through exposing their supposed vulnerabilities and shutting down their online services.

The previous day, Demedyuk had insisted that the “cyber-espionage group” in question is understood to be “affiliated with the special services of the Republic of Belarus." He noted that the malicious software used in the attack was “very similar” to that used by groups previously blamed for cyberattacks in the US, such as those accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Immediately after the attack, which took place on Friday, Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Oleg Nikolenko suggested Moscow might be behind it.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN in an interview scheduled for broadcast on Sunday that Russia had “nothing to do with these cyberattacks.” He brushed off the allegations against Moscow as “yet another baseless accusation.”

https://www.rt.com/russia/546209-ukraine-cyberattack-hybrid-war/

Gorbachev faces lawsuit over killings

The action has been brought forward by relatives of some of those who died in the final days of the USSR

The families of six people who lost their lives amid a Soviet crackdown against Lithuania’s pro-independence government have filed a lawsuit in the capital, Vilnius, against the USSR’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

The lawsuit, which was initiated on Thursday on the 31st anniversary of the event, seeks undisclosed damages for the now-90-year-old’s alleged failure at the time to stop the operation, which was carried out by Soviet troops.

“We have presented evidence that the then-president was in control of the army but did not act to prevent the planned criminal actions and did not stop the international crime while it was being executed,” a notice said.

The legal action “is aimed to hold Gorbachev, the highest-ranking USSR official, accountable for the January 13 massacre,” the relatives said in a statement.

Vilnius has attempted to persecute key-participants in the so-called January events in recent years. In 2019, a Lithuanian court found then-Soviet Minister of Defense Dmitry Yazov guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was jailed for 10 years in absentia for the “exercise of Soviet aggression.”

https://www.rt.com/russia/546203-gorbachev-lawsuit-killings-lithuania-families/