The evidence for this goes beyond the carping of Luddites. It’s there, cold and hard, in a growing body of research by psychiatrists, neuroscientists, marketers and public health experts. What these people say – and what their research shows – is that smartphones are causing real damage to our minds and relationships, measurable in seconds shaved off the average attention span, reduced brain power, declines in work-life balance and hours less of family time.

They have impaired our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think creatively. They make us more vulnerable to anxiety. They make parents ignore their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense then for all intents and purposes.

Now, some of the early executives of these tech firms look on their success as tainted. “I feel tremendous guilt,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice-president of user growth at Facebook, in a public talk in November. “I think we all knew in the back of our minds… something bad could happen. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” he went on gravely, before a hushed audience at Stanford business school. “It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave.”

Here is a partial transcript of Klein’s remarks:

“If we continue every year to give $600 million to the Palestinian Authority … why would they stop supporting terror if they keep getting their money? Why would we continue to perpetuate a deal with the Iranians when openly they support terror around the world and openly they are trying to destabilize the world at the expense of American national security. Why would they stop if we don’t do anything about sanctions or if we further this deal?”

“So Donald Trump, even if he does eventually give money to the Palestinian Authority, I think they have been put on notice right now – they have to be – that we are at least looking at this. Also by Trump moving the embassy to Jerusalem after decades of the United States not doing that – and by the way, many presidents, when they ran, promised that they would and then they delayed – this also puts the Palestinian Authority on notice. If you continue to bolt peace negotiations than you are actually going to lose ground. You’re going to lose momentum. And also just think about it. How are they a peace partner if they need to be blackmailed into making peace? That makes absolutely no sense.”

The US provides about $600 million per year in assistance to the Palestinians. This includes direct aid to the PA, assistance through the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UN’s Palestinian “refugee” agency UNRWA.

"In fact, it is possible for us to begin a process of working the land and improving agriculture – making it a very successful factor in our country," Ramaphosa said, addressing King Goodwill Zwelithini at Osuthu Palace – explaining the ANC’s decision to implement a policy of land expropriation.  Ramaphosa emphasised that the implementation of the ANC's policy must not harm the economy, the agriculture sector or food security.  

"We can make this country the garden of Eden," the new ruling party head said at a meeting to introduce the ANC’s new top six leaders to the Zulu king. Ramaphosa said redistributed land must be used productively. He estimated that increased food production could grow the economy by two million jobs. 

The week's haul at Christie's and Sotheby's topped $US1.5 billion, with Asian buyers snapping up Monets. Fernand Leger's abstract Contrastes de Formes fetched $US62 million. It screams late-cycle liquidity, recalling Japan's impressionist fever in the late Eighties before the Nikkei collapsed and the bottom fell out of the art market.

Bitcoin clinches the argument. It has risen 1200 per cent over the past year to $US7800 - five times an ounce of gold - on a "greater fool" presumption. This is not a criticism of blockchain technology. It will flourish. But you cannot yet buy and sell things in any meaningful way with cryptocurrencies worth $US180 billion.

Bitcoin will end badly, either when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launches its futures contracts in two weeks and allows traders to short it, or when the global cycle turns. A runaway asset boom can last a long time when the G4 central banks are holding real interest at minus 1.5 per cent and spending $US2 trillion a year soaking up "safe assets".

This global expansion is the second longest since the mid 19th century. It has been stretched because the recovery was so weak and because it was slowed by the eurozone banking crisis and the Chinese fiscal slump. Above all, it has been stretched by debt creation.

“Those statements are just absurd,” Pompeo said. “Just pure fantasy … The president is engaged, he understands the complexity, he asks really difficult questions of our team at the CIA so we can provide any information that he needs to make good, informed policy decisions.”

He also fired back at assertions the president isn’t fit to be in office, declaring Trump is “completely fit.” “It’s just a ludicrous question,” he said. “These are from people who just have not yet accepted the fact that President Trump is the United States’ president. I’m sorry for them."

In his White House tell-all, “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff reported that economic adviser Gary Cohn claimed that “Trump won’t read anything — not the one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

“Today, North and South Korea will engage in talks in a serious and sincere stance,” Ri Son Gwon, the chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, said. Ri, who leads the 5-member North Korean negotiation team, shook hands with his South Korean counterpart, Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon at the start of the talks, saying he hopes for “precious” results.

During the course of their discussions, Seoul proposed reviving military talks with Pyongyang, which would include engagement on the critical issue of denuclearization, Yonhap reports. South Korea also suggested convening a reunification meeting next month for families separated by the Korean War. “North Korea said that they are determined to make today’s talks fruitful, and make it a groundbreaking opportunity,” South Korean Deputy Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung said.

The US, meanwhile, cast doubt on Pyongyang’s motives and the overall purpose of the talks, with State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert suggesting the North Korean leader is not to be trusted as he essentially may be trying “to drive a wedge” between the US and South Korea during the talks.

Hamstrung by her inability to move the “big beasts” and constrained by the need to preserve the fragile balance of power over Brexit around her Cabinet table, the UK prime minister largely stuck to the status quo, keeping the figures — or in Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the most beastly figure from the vantage point of 10 Downing Street — who have made her life so difficult these past 18 months in power. “Is that it?” tweeted Nicholas Soames, a long-standing Tory MP and Winston Churchill’s grandson.

In a sign of just how fragile May’s authority has become, an attempt to move her former ally, Justine Greening, from education to work and pensions ended with Greening refusing to take the new job and leaving government altogether. “It was a very big mistake letting Justine go,” said a Tory MP who did not want to be named. “The reshuffle was a farce showing the prime minister is weak.”

So dismal is the prospect of stability in Afghanistan that, in 2016, the Obama White House cancelled a planned withdrawal of its forces, ordering more than 8,000 troops to remain in the country indefinitely.

In the American failure lies a paradox: Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy. Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.

In one of history’s bitter ironies, Afghanistan’s unique ecology converged with American military technology to transform this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s first true narco-state – a country where illicit drugs dominate the economy, define political choices and determine the fate of foreign interventions.