The standards are poor at the Bank of England these days, I don't know why anyone would want to do business with them. George Galloway gives British banking, and justice, a triple-fail rating.

It used to be "a thing" when I was growing up. "As safe as the Bank of England" was the acme of trustworthiness and security. But as Venezuela - and any other Global South country foolish enough to entrust the British with their sovereign wealth just found out in the High Court in London - the Bank of England isn't any longer safe at all.

Almost a billion dollars worth of Venzuelan gold bullion has just been stolen by the British government, theft has just been legalized, and the thieves didn't even bother to wear a mask.

The prime minister lauding Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal" this week is just the latest step along the Conservative Party's long road to leftism. He's not so much a "Brexity Hezza" as a wetter version of Ted Heath.

The Conservative Party appears to be increasingly in need of a name change. Devotees of the Guardian, New Statesman and lefty Twitter would have you believe that Boris Johnson's Tories are the "most right-wing government in 50 years." They act as if BoJo is Maggie Thatcher on amphetamines, about to deregulate everything, slash the top rate of income tax to about 15 percent, deport anyone who doesn't have a double-barrelled surname, and sell Wales to Best Western Hotels. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There is virtually nothing about this government, nor the previous nine years of Tory-led rule in Britain, that can be construed as a "conservative" policy. Indeed, in many ways they have in fact been more left wing than any Labour government in history, particularly on cultural and social issues.

Just by asking the question of whether the next Presidential election matters, I am obviously suggesting that it might not. To explain my reasons for this opinion, I need to reset the upcoming election in the context of the previous one. So let's begin here.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump

The first thing which, I believe, ought to be self-evident to all by now is that there was no secret operation by any deep state, not even a Zionist controlled one, to put Donald Trump in power. I would even argue that the election of Donald Trump was the biggest slap in the face of US deep state and of the covert transnational ruling elites this deep state serves. Ever. My evidence? Simple, look what these ruling "elites" did both before and after Trump's election: before, they ridiculed the very idea of "President Trump" as both utterly impossible and utterly evil.

As somebody who has had years of experience reading the Soviet press or, in another style, the French press, I can honestly say that I have never seen a more ridiculously outlandish hate campaign against anybody that would come even close to the kind of total hate campaign which Trump was subjected to. Then, as soon as he was elected, the US neo-liberals (who are not liberals at all!) declared that Trump was "not their President", that Trump was put into power by Putin and that he was a "Russian asset" (using pseudo-professional jargon is what journos typically do to conceal their abject ignorance of a complex topic) and, finally, that he was a White racist and misogynist who will deeply divide the country (thereby dividing the country themselves by making such claims).

The fact is that for the past four years the US liberals have waged a total informational war against Trump and it would be absolutely unthinkable for them to ever accept a Trump re-election, even if he wins by a landslide. For the US Dems and neo-liberals, Trump is the personification of evil, literally, and that means that "resistance" to him and everything he represents must be total. And if he is re-elected, then there is only one possible explanation: the Russians stole the election, or the Chinese did. But the notion that Trump has the support of a majority of people is literally unthinkable for these folks.

While accusing Russia, without proof, of paying the Taliban to kill American soldiers, US politicians are conveniently ignoring facts about who really armed and financed terrorist groups in Afghanistan.

The allegation by some US intelligence agencies that Russia paid the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan has kicked up a partisan furore in Washington. It has renewed the tirade by the Democratic Party that President Donald Trump is soft on Russia and raised fresh demands for additional sanctions on Russia.

With a US presidential election due shortly, reusing the 'Russia' card to paint Trump as incompetent on national security or as a commander-in-chief who treacherously colluded with Russia to spill the blood of American troops is a handy political attack tool.

On Thursday, Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation said that the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility "is operating as usual", since the reactor was not damaged in an explosion and there were no casualties following the incident.

The Kuwaiti daily al-Jarida has quoted an unnamed "senior" source as saying that Israel was allegedly behind last week's explosion at Iran's Parchin military complex and Thursday's blast at the Natanz nuclear site in the Islamic Republic. Israeli government officials have not commented on the matter yet.

The Jewish state has repeatedly accused Iran of supporting "terrorist" groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, and of waging proxy wars in countries such as Syria which could pose a threat to Israel's security. Tehran, which refuses to recognise Israel's right to exist, denies the charges, saying that there are only Iranian military advisers in Syria.

Top committee staff for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, were briefed in February on intelligence about Russia offering the Taliban bounties in Afghanistan, but he took no action in response to the briefing, multiple intelligence sources familiar with the briefing told The Federalist. The intelligence was briefed to Schiff's staff during a congressional delegation, or CODEL, trip to Afghanistan in February.

Schiff, who has acknowledged President Donald Trump was never briefed on the so-called intelligence, has thus far refused to disclose that his staff was personally briefed. The revelation raises serious questions that Schiff is once again politicizing, and perhaps even deliberately misrepresenting, key data for partisan gain.

The Trump Administration has frozen funding intended to help people in Hong Kong evade surveillance by the Chinese government, sources with knowledge of the matter tell TIME, just as Beijing prepares to impose a new national security law that protesters fear will erode civil liberties there.

The funding freeze came on June 9, five days after Michael Pack, an ally of President Trump, was confirmed by the Senate to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees federal funding of several Internet freedom and foreign news initiatives, including Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.

Senior staff at the agency were informed in an email, obtained by TIME, that Pack had suspended funding on a range of activities at the agency. In the email, USAGM's chief financial officer Grant Turner cited a request by Pack to immediately freeze "new contracts or extensions of any contract" from the agency's federal operations and grantees, as well as on new hires and promotions.

Iran has recently been helping Venezuela, another nation hit by US sanctions, by supplying it with fuel after the country's own refineries lost most of their capacity to work with the ultra-heavy blend of crude extracted from Venezuela's oilfields, leading to petrol shortages.

The US has made another attempt to stop the oil trade between Venezuela and Iran as federal prosecutors have filed a new suit seeking to seize gasoline that Tehran has purportedly sent to Caracas in four tankers, The Wall Street Journal reported. According to the newspaper, Washington is looking to both stop the delivery of gasoline to Venezuela as well as the payments for the shipped resources, which will allegedly be used to fund the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) - a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces that the US has designated as a "terrorist organisation". US Attorney for the District of Columbia Zia Faruqui claims in the filing:

"[These payments] support the IRGC's full range of nefarious activities, including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, support for terrorism, and a variety of human rights abuses, at home and abroad."

The US prosecutors claim that an Iranian businessman, Mahmoud Madanipour, is affiliated with the IRGC and has been using his firms based in the United Arab Emirates to organise the sale of Iranian crude while evading the unilateral American sanctions, according to the newspaper.

The "news service" of multi-billionaire Bloomberg echoes the New York Times lie that Russia paid the Taliban to kill US occupying troops:

"Lawmakers from both U.S. political parties demanded President Donald Trump hold Russia accountable over allegations it offered cash bounties for the killing of American troops. Trump has denied reports by several major news organizations that he was briefed on the matter; he has not demanded an investigation of the allegations; and he has yet to even threaten Moscow with retaliation should the reporting be confirmed. Trump's lack of action has reignited concerns that the Republican is more interested in maintaining cordial relations with Vladimir Putin than defending American interests — including its troops."

Notice all the innuendos in this dishonest report:
"Trump has denied," "he has not demanded an investigation," "he has yet to even threaten Moscow," 'Trump's lack of action," "more interested in cordial relations with Putin than defending American troops."

The claim itself is so absurd that it indicates the media regard Americans as completely stupid. The US and Taliban have been killing each other since October 2001 when the Cheney/Bush regime illegally attacked Afghanistan. For 19 years the Taliban has known who its enemy is and does not need Russian bribes to kill US occupiers.

As the fallout from dubiously sourced allegations about 'Russian bounties' on US troops in Afghanistan continues, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for fresh sanctions against Russia's defense and intelligence sectors.

Moscow paid Taliban fighters bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, and President Donald Trump ignored intelligence briefings on the matter, an anonymously sourced New York Times report claimed last Friday. Trump called the story a "phony hit job" against him, his Defense Department found no corroborating evidence, and National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien said on Wednesday that the president was never briefed, due to the flimsiness of the intelligence.

However, the report has whipped up yet another wave of 'Russiagate' hysteria in Washington. Pelosi called on Thursday for the application of sanctions on Russia's intelligence and defense sectors.

"When Congress in a bipartisan way passed sanctions on Russia, the administration told us to take out the sanctions on the GRU - the intelligence, as well as the defense sectors of Russia. We should have those in there."

The bipartisan bill likely referenced by Pelosi is the 2017 Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. Despite signing this bill into law, the Trump administration opted not to enforce sanctions on Russia, with the State Department claiming the threat alone was deterrent enough.