Donald Trump disputed that Russia was behind the attempted murder of a former Russian spy in a tense call with Theresa May, it has emerged.

Despite the widespread conclusion that Vladimir Putin's regime was behind the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia last year, the US president is said to have spent 10 minutes expressing his doubts about Russian involvement.

According to the Washington Post, Trump "harangued" May about Britain's contribution to Nato in a phone call with Britain's then prime minister in the summer of last year, before disputing Russian involvement in the Skripal case.

"Trump totally bought into the idea there was credible doubt about the poisoning," said a figure briefed on the call. "A solid 10 minutes of the conversation is spent with May saying it's highly likely and him saying he's not sure."

The Skripals were left fighting for their lives after the novichok attack in Salisbury, while a policeman was also left seriously ill. A second policeman was recently discovered to have been injured in the attack.

The presumption of innocence, as a foundation of the US judicial system, has seemingly been under attack since November 8th 2016. An allegation is made, media runs with the narrative, the seed of possibility of guilt is implanted in the minds of zombie Americans, and the accused is maligned forever - no court required. Simple.

And now, none other than former CIA Director John Brennan clarifies exactly how the deep state sees "due process"...

In an interview on MSNBC, Brennan, unblinkingly states that "people are innocent, you know, until alleged to be involved in some kind of criminal activity."

Germany is the new "sick man" of Europe, according to economists at Credit Suisse.

Slowing global trade, brought on by the trade war between the U.S. and China, has the German economy teetering on the brink of recession.

"The ongoing trade slump remains challenging for the German economy," wrote a team of London-based economists at the investment bank Credit Suisse. "Once the major outperformer of the euro-area economy, it is now the major underperformer, its huge trade imbalance a huge burden."

Germany's economy grew at 0.4 percent year-over-year from April through June, the weakest in more than six years. Its 0.1 percent quarter-over-quarter contraction made it the only major European economy to shrink.

A second whistleblower claiming to have information regarding President Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has come forward, and has already spoken to the intelligence community's inspector general.

Attorney Mark Zaid, who represents both whistleblowers, first told ABC News that the second individual is - like the first whistleblower - an intelligence official, and has firsthand knowledge of certain allegations contained in the first whistleblower complaint, which was not based on any firsthand knowledge. Andrew Bakaj, managing partner of the firm handling the case, verified the existence of the new whistleblower Sunday morning.

"I can confirm that my firm and my team represent multiple whistleblowers in connection to the underlying August 12, 2019, disclosure to the Intelligence Community Inspector General," Bakaj said, retweeting the news from ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

President Donald Trump has ordered a substantial reduction in the staff of the National Security Council, according to five people familiar with the plans, as the White House confronts an impeachment inquiry touched off by a whistle-blower complaint related to the agency's work.

Some of the people described the staff cuts as part of a White House effort to make its foreign policy arm leaner under new National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien.

The request to limit the size of the NSC staff was conveyed to senior agency officials by acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and O'Brien this week. The whistle-blower complaint, focused on Trump's conduct in a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been followed by damaging reports on the president's private conversations with other world leaders.

Sometimes, if you open up a big enough gate and stand in the void, the gate will swing back and slap you on the ass — which is where serial bungler and arch-schlemiel Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) finds himself at the end of an exhausting week's dissembling in the WhistleGate matter. Long about now, his reluctant partner in the latest impeachment gambit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, must feel date-raped just a little bit as every unraveling thread in the story leads back to another exposed deception by Schiff, the Inspector Clouseau of impeachment politics.

Maybe reading an alt-reality version of the Trump-Zelensky phone transcript wasn't such a hot idea after all, since he read into the record evidence of his own bad faith. What was at issue, of course, were the President's words, and in substituting something demonstrably other than that, and placing it on the record, Rep. Schiff set up a prima facie case for dismissal of his own case against Mr. Trump. Any way you slice the stunt, it smells like malfeasance.

Nigel Farage becoming European Commissioner is one of the reported plans to sabotage the EU if Britain is forced to accept a delay.

The proposal of nominating a Eurosceptic is one of a number of strategies looked at by ministers. One former minister has given his backing to the Brexit Party leader. Steve Baker, chair of the European Research Group, told Chopper'sBrexit Podcast: "I unashamedly back Nigel Farage to be our next EU commissioner in the unfortunate event that it transpires.

"This approach is inspired by the film Armageddon.

"There is that moment when they are trying to save the world and so what they do is they land on the asteroid and they put a nuclear weapon into the heart of the asteroid."

He concluded: "Nigel Farage is that nuclear weapon."

The last four days have shown that the ongoing US-Iran war is acutely affecting the whole region. This is now evident in Iraq where more than 105 people have been killed and thousands wounded in the course of demonstrations that engulfed the capital Baghdad and southern Shia cities including Amara, Nasririyeh, Basrah, Najaf and Karbalaa. Similar demonstrations could erupt in Beirut and other Lebanese cities due to the similarity of economic conditions in the two countries. The critical economic situation in the Middle East offers fertile ground for uprisings that lead to general chaos.

Iraq has special status due to its position, since the 2003 US occupation of the country, as both an Iranian and as a US ally. Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi up to now has armed himself with article 8 of the constitution, seeking to keep Iraq as a balancing point between all allies and neighbouring countries, and to prevent Mesopotamia from becoming a battlefield for conflicts between the US and Iran or Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Notwithstanding the efforts of Baghdadi officials, the deterioration of the domestic economic situation in Iraq has pushed the country into a situation comparable to that of those Middle Eastern countries who were hit by the so-called "Arab Spring".

Fuelled by real grievances including lack of job opportunities and severe corruption, domestic uprisings were manipulated by hostile foreign manipulation for purposes of regime change; these efforts have been ongoing in Syria since 2011. Baghdad believes that foreign and regional countries took advantage of the justified demands of the population to implement their own agenda, with disastrous consequences for the countries in question.

Whenever they talk about India and its "inevitable" rise to world economic dominance, establishment hacks like Thomas "Iraq War booster" Friedman always seem compelled to note that the country is "the world's largest democracy." They might want to talk to the residents of the now-defunct Jammu & Kashmir before invoking that phrase, but the underlying point seems to be that India — with its growing economic might and vibrant, functional parliamentary system — can provide a freedom-respecting alternative to the Chinese communist model for economic development and industrialization.

The pundits are, as usual, half right. India is being used as a testing ground and a potential model for the developing nations to follow . . . but that model has nothing to do with freedom. Rather than building some sort of system for protecting and fostering the rights of the individual, the Indian government has been quietly erecting the walls of the world's largest biometric prison.

A recent story out of India puts the bars of this prison in perspective. Last month a "citizenship check" left nearly two million people in a legal limbo that could see them become stateless foreigners in danger of imprisonment and deportation from the country of their birth. The check took place in Assam, an Indian state fraught with its own history of conflict and tension between Hindus and Muslims.

The larger story is fascinating, but suffice it to say the fast-growing Assamese Muslim minority — despite including many native-born locals — is being cast as an immigrant invading force supplied by influxes of migrants from neighboring Bangladesh. The citizenship check is the result of an accord that was struck after a particularly violent anti-immigrant pogrom in the 1980s that saw hundred (or thousands, depending on the source) of Muslim migrants killed. To appease the local Assamese population, the government promised to perform a mass citizenship check to oust the illegal immigrants.

Only now, three decades later, is this being done, and it is not difficult to see why: Prime Minister Modi and the populist Hindu nationalist wave that he and his BJP party are riding see it as another battlefront in their war against the Indian Muslim minority.

The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, which helped topple the government of Muammar Gaddafi, was done to put an end to his attempts to stop foreign exploitation of the continent, the strongman's wartime spokesman told RT.

The bombing campaign, which propped up rebel forces and ultimately led to the summary execution of Gaddafi, was justified by reports of various crimes of its government. Those were later proven to be completely false or largely exaggerated, said Moussa Ibrahim, who served as Gaddafi's spokesman at the time. In reality NATO bombed Libya not to stop Viagra-assisted mass rapes of women by government loyalists. Gaddafi sought to break Western grip on Africa and was disposed for that, he said.