The effort is being headed by Jared Kushner, the senior White House adviser and President's son-in-law, and White House Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, who have spent years developing the proposal along with the much stickier political component, which officials said would be announced later in the year. Asked for comment, Kushner told CNN in a statement that "people are letting their grandfathers' conflict destroy their children's futures. This will present an exciting, realistic and viable pathway forward that does not currently exist."

The plan will discuss four major components the senior administration official said: infrastructure, industry, empowering and investing in people, and governance reforms "to make the area as investible as possible." Kushner is said to have modeled details of the economic proposal on what has worked in Poland, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. The economic plan will include a "combination of grant money, low interest loans and then also private capital," a second senior administration told reporters Sunday.

The workshop will attempt to studiously avoid the many political issues that have made peace so elusive for so long: issues such as whether the Palestinians will get their own state, the status of Jerusalem, measures Israel takes in the name of security, and what should happen with Palestinians and their descendants who fled or were expelled from Israel around the time of the state's creation in 1948. Finance ministers, but not foreign ministers, will be invited along with delegations of business leaders.

EMPs come in three basic varieties, including a ground-level or high-altitude EMP (HEMP) released by a nuclear burst that could potentially impact power lines, transformers and other critical devices; drive-by EMPs created by high-powered microwave weapons that could silently incapacitate equipment from hundreds of yards away; and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) resulting from solar storms that could interfere with the magnetic sphere surrounding the Earth, bringing down the grid that powers the electronic devices defining our contemporary way of life.

According to the 2017 report, Russia, China, and North Korea could already have these weapons under wraps. And CMEs from solar storms are like metaphorical magnetic earthquakes: They vary in intensity from relatively harmless ripples all the way to a potential Big One that could take down a nation's grid within minutes, creating widespread destruction that would take years to repair.

In the most widespread and catastrophic EMP scenario, even motorized vehicles that aren't damaged will be impacted by the lack of functioning fuel stations as gasoline stops flowing to and from the pumps. With regular deliveries interrupted by the lack of fuel and power, major urban populations will confront empty grocery shelves and a complete breakdown in essential services — from firefighting to garbage collection — in a matter of days.

If dehydration, starvation, disease, and environmental threats don't kill most of us relatively quickly, we are likely to turn on each other. Some recent disasters, such as the hurricanes hitting Texas and Florida, have shown people rallying together to help each other prevail. And yet we still encounter all-too-frequent examples of road rage and similar primitive behavior, even when life is proceeding as usual.

By the time it is all said and done, all of the old records will probably be completely shattered. Meanwhile, powerful storms continue to pound the heartland every few days. Over the weekend, huge storms struck the middle of the country on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and more are expected on Monday. So what is causing such extremely bizarre weather to happen? Is there a reason why weather patterns have shifted so dramatically, or is all of this just a really, really strange coincidence?

Of course throughout all of human history weather patterns have always been changing, and so change isn’t something that is new. But the changes that we are witnessing in our time appear to be taking an apocalyptic turn, and nobody is exactly sure what is going to happen next…

If Trump was willing to back way down and give the Chinese everything that they want, of course China would be more than happy to resume negotiations. But that isn’t going to happen. Instead, the Trump administration demonstrated their resolve by sailing a US Navy vessel into disputed waters in the South China Sea on Sunday. Every time we send a warship into the South China Sea, it drives China up a wall, and the Trump administration understands this very well. Such a move definitely “sends a message” to China, but it also makes a trade deal much less likely.

Trump is going to continue to stand strong because he can’t afford to look weak on China with an election coming up, and the Chinese are not going to throw in the towel when they may only have to wait 18 months for Trump to be out of the picture. So for now we have a trade war to deal with, and with each passing day it is going to become increasingly painful.

Not just a trade war, but a shooting war with the Chinese seems inevitable. Because when tensions build up between states they eventually fight with each other. China is the major rising power. It’s got four times the US population, it’s soon going to be more economically powerful, and it’s going to reach military parity. It’s of a different culture than the US.

The US government may figure it’s best to take them out while the balance still favors them. It’s a bit like the situation was with the USSR in the ’80s. They could see they were going into decline, and some Soviet generals figured it was “now or never” for a successful war. Fortunately they collapsed first.

The Chinese don’t like seeing US aircraft carriers off their coast any more than we would like to see Chinese aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Mexico or off Santa Catalina Island. The last thing that we need is a war with the Chinese.

US President Donald Trump takes them all on. After China and Japan, it’s now the turn of the mighty European trade block led by Germany and France. He railed during an address last Friday, according to Reuters: 'They have trade barriers. They don’t want our farm products, they don’t want our cars. They send Mercedes-Benzes in here like they’re cookies.' 'They send BMWs here. We hardly tax them at all,' he added, according to the news wire.

On the autos front, that’s for Germany, which is petrified about its car exports to the US, where they now face import duties of only 2.5%, compared with up to 22% for American cars sold in Germany or other EU countries.

And the agricultural warning is for France, which excluded agricultural products from the EU’s negotiating mandate for a limited trade agreement with the US. France and Germany are now going through a very dangerous crisis in their ever precarious relationship, but their leaders are united in denouncing what they perceive as Washington’s unfriendly disposition toward its key European allies.

And now that the next generation of cell phone technology has arrived, millions of cell phone users are looking forward to better connections and faster speeds than ever before. In fact, President Trump says that 5G networks will be up to 100 times faster than the current 4G networks that we are using right now… But in order to achieve such vastly superior performance, 5G networks will use technology that is completely different from 4G networks.

5G waves are “ultra high frequency” and “ultra high intensity”, but they are also easily absorbed by objects such as buildings and trees. So although cell towers will be much, much smaller, but they will also have to be much, much closer together than before. According to CBS News, it is estimated that the big cell phone companies will be putting up at least 300,000 of these small towers, and it has been projected that it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to fully set up the 5G network nationwide.

Needless to say, there is a tremendous amount of money at stake, and the big cell phone companies are trying very hard to assure everyone that 5G technology is completely safe. But is it? Today, there is a growing body of scientific evidence that indicates that the electromagnetic radiation that we are constantly being bombarded with is not good for us. Hundreds of scientists that are engaged in research in this area have signed the “International EMF Scientist Appeal”. Because the 5G towers are going to be so powerful and so close together, it will essentially be like living in a closed radiation chamber 24 hours a day.

What’s further disturbing about 5G radiation is how the human body responds to and processes it. Dr Ben-Ishai from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem discovered as part of a recent investigation that human skin acts as a type of receptor for 5G radiation, drawing it in like an antenna. "This kind of technology, which is in many of our homes, actually interacts with human skin and eyes,” writes Arjun Walia for Collective Evolution about the study. “… human sweat ducts act like a number of helical antennas when exposed to these wavelengths that are put out by the devices that employ 5G technology,” he adds. In other words, our bodies are essentially magnets for 5G radiation.

So will it be worth it? Will you be willing to risk your life in order to have better connections and faster speeds? No studies have been done on the health effects of our new ultra-powerful 5G technology, and this has many scientists extremely concerned. So it won’t be too long before you are being bombarded by “ultra high frequency” and “ultra high intensity” cell phone radiation wherever you go, and most people won’t even realize what is happening.

Whether the target has been North Korea, with which warnings of “fire and fury” have become little more than an exchange of “beautiful” letters between Trump and Kim Jong Un; or Venezuela, where the threat of “all options” has failed to upset the status quo, the president has blinked. With Iran, the dispatch of a US aircraft carrier and a bomber task force, as well as reported plans to deploy 120,000 troops, were quickly followed by Trump’s insistence that he only wants to talk to Iranian leaders.

Trump has said there is no inconsistency in his administration’s messaging but that the image of incoherence can be useful. “At least Iran doesn’t know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good thing!” he tweeted Friday. But as he moves more deeply into the second half of his term with major foreign policy issues unresolved, Trump’s credibility has suffered, and his options have narrowed.

“If you make threats and then people decide you aren’t going to follow through, if you’re looking for the reaction and you stop getting the reaction, the options are either to make larger threats, or to stop going down that road at all,” said Jon Alterman, Middle East Program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Credibility is a hard thing for a president to maintain,” Alterman said.

But it remains to be seen whether Mr Trump will be satisfied with military spending that still only equates to 1.35 per cent of Germany’s GDP. It also promised a further increase to €49.67 billion (£43.5 billion) next year — the equivalent of 1.38 per cent of GDP. But the figures still fall far short of Mrs Merkel’s pledge last year that Germany would meet the NATO 2 per cent spending target within the coming years.

The spending plans also came under fire from the outspoken US ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who said in March they sent a “worrisome signal to Germany's 28 NATO allies”. Falling tax revenues amid the economic slowdown have left the Germany government facing a budget hole of €124 billion over the next four years, and Mr Schulz has made it clear he is opposed to government borrowing to cover the shortfall.