The Conservatives have 330 seats - four more than needed for a Commons majority - their first such victory since 1992. Mr Cameron's rivals Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage have all resigned after election disappointment.

The Conservative leader is now beginning the process of putting together the new government, with senior Cabinet appointments expected to be announced later on Friday. Mr Cameron said he would reach out to all parts of the UK and strive to "bring the country together" in the wake of the SNP's election landslide in Scotland - where it won 56 of the 59 seats.

The Conservatives' victory means they will be able to govern without the need for a coalition or a formal agreement with other parties. Speaking in Downing Street, he said: "We will govern as a party of one nation, one United Kingdom. That means ensuring this recovery reaches all parts of our country, from north to south, to east to west." He said he would press ahead with devolution of powers to all nations as well as the referendum on the UK's EU membership.

Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, said he would work constructively with the new UK government and would consider "proposals, ideas or requests" about the UK's membership "in a very polite, friendly and objective way".

Labour has been all but wiped out by the SNP in Scotland and is failing to make enough gains in England and Wales. The Lib Dems are heading for as few as eight MPs, with Vince Cable, Ed Davey and Danny Alexander losing their seats.

The BBC forecast, with well over half of the results now in, is Conservative 329, Labour 233, the Lib Dems eight, the SNP 56, Plaid Cymru three, UKIP two, the Greens one and others 19.

Ruling on a program revealed by former government security contractor Edward Snowden, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the Patriot Act did not authorize the National Security Agency to collect Americans' calling records in bulk.

Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch wrote for a three-judge panel that Section 215, which addresses the FBI's ability to gather business records, could not be interpreted to have permitted the NSA to collect a "staggering" amount of phone records, contrary to claims by the Bush and Obama administrations.

"Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans," Lynch wrote in a 97-page decision. "We would expect such a momentous decision to be preceded by substantial debate, and expressed in unmistakable language. There is no evidence of such a debate."

ACLU lawyer Alex Abdo welcomed Thursday's decision. "Mass surveillance does not make us any safer, and it is fundamentally incompatible with the privacy necessary in a free society," he said.

Noting how the committee intends to support the ecumenical journey in Europe, "where many of the divisions that still exist between Christians had their beginning," Francis said, “today, thank God, the situation is very different.” The ecumenical movement, the Pope stated, has enabled the Churches and the Ecclesial Communities in Europe "to take great steps on the way of reconciliation and peace."

Initiatives - including the recent European Ecumenical Assemblies and the Charta Oecumenica, written in Strasbourg in 2001 - are reasons "for great hope for surmounting the divisions, though in the awareness of the long way ahead towards the full and visible communion among all believers in Christ."

Despite all its difficulties, moving forward in this way, he said, "is already an integral part of the process of reconciliation and of communion that the Lord asks of us and makes us fulfill." "The closer we are to Christ, the more we will be united among ourselves." Only by speaking with one voice, the Pope said, will the Churches and Ecclesial Communities in Europe be able to give effective answers to the new and decisive challenges they find themselves in today.

The Four Corners investigation also found evidence of routine abuse, harassment and assault, including sexual assault and exploitation, along with underpayment of wages “with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen pay going missing every year.”

With workers denied bathroom and water breaks, forced to endure up to 22 hour shifts, and, in one case, made to sleep in a dog’s bed, the report has shocked and dismayed many consumers, with calls for government regulation and an appropriate response from the major retailers identified in the report, which includes Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, Costco, IGA, and fast food chains KFC and Red Rooster.

Dread that the abominations people create will become their masters, or their executioners, is hardly new. But voiced by a renowned cosmologist, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the founder of Microsoft — hardly Luddites — and set against the vast investment in AI by big firms like Google and Microsoft, such fears have taken on new weight. With supercomputers in every pocket and robots looking down on every battlefield, just dismissing them as science fiction seems like self-deception.

The question is how to worry wisely.

The first step is to understand what computers can now do and what they are likely to be able to do in the future. Thanks to the rise in processing power and the growing abundance of digitally available data, AI is enjoying a boom in its capabilities. Today’s “deep learning” systems, by mimicking the layers of neurons in a human brain and crunching vast amounts of data, can teach themselves to perform some tasks, from pattern recognition to translation, almost as well as humans can.

As a result, things that once called for a mind — from interpreting pictures to playing the video game “Frogger” — are now within the scope of computer programs. DeepFace, an algorithm unveiled by Facebook in 2014, can recognise individual human faces in images 97% of the time.

Crucially, this capacity is narrow and specific. Today’s AI produces the semblance of intelligence through brute number-crunching force, without any great interest in approximating how minds equip humans with autonomy, interests and desires. Computers do not yet have anything approaching the wide, fluid ability to infer, judge and decide that is associated with intelligence in the conventional human sense. Yet AI is already powerful enough to make a dramatic difference to human life.

Some 52 per cent of voters say they would prefer Mr Cameron to continue in Downing Street, with 31 per cent favouring Mr Miliband. But the likely outcome remains far from clear with the Tories on 35 per cent and Labour on 34 per cent. To compound the uncertainty, 25 per cent of those likely to vote say they are undecided or may yet switch parties.

Unless there is a last-minute surge to the Conservatives, Britain is facing a Parliament so deadlocked that no stable government can be formed. Bank of England and Treasury officials are understood to have discussed potential responses if there is an extended period of stalemate.

Yesterday Mr Miliband repeatedly refused to rule out seeking to govern even if Labour finishes well behind the Tories in a hung Parliament. The country's political leaders have already started to vote this morning as the outcome of the election hangs on a knife-edge.

It would be the first time since 1924 that a second-placed party has tried to rule – prompting a furious row about the legitimacy of the government. Last night Mr Cameron made a final plea for voters not to take the country ‘back to the brink’ by letting in a weak Labour government propped up by the SNP, which is on course to seize 50 seats and become Westminster’s third party.

Voting Ukip or Liberal Democrat simply makes it more likely that Mr Miliband – who would implement higher taxes and borrowing, open the door to mass immigration and deny voters a say on the EU – enters No 10, he told the Mail. He warned Britain was in ‘grave danger’ of a French-style economic crisis if the election results in political paralysis.

Speaking in Berlin, Wolfgang Schaeuble said Greece's financial problems came from years of profligacy where the country "lived beyond its means" and failed get enough people to pay taxes. He also suggested that the radical Left government had faltered in its bid to secure financial aid from Russia for a much-vaunted gas pipeline deal. Greece managed to avoid defaulting on its creditors on Wednesday, making a €200 million loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund.

In a sign that talks over a reforms-for-cash deal were progressing, the ECB boosted its emergency cash (ELA) to Greece's banks by €2 billion on Wednesday - that largest single dose of funds since Syriza were elected in late January. This takes the total ELA limit to around €79 billion, and makes the latest dose almost double the 12 previous increments drip fed by the central bank. The ECB also refrained from increasing the collateral requirements on the country's stricken banks.

Germany's veteran minister said Europe was still willing to rescue Greece from the abyss of default, should Athens finally capitulate to creditor demands to raise revenues and cutback on spending promises.

We concluded that "It’s good to be TBTF" (to big to fail) because clearly no matter how many laws are violated and how much money is stolen (LIBOR was the reference security for nearly $1 quadrillion in global rate-sensitive derivatives) nobody ever goes to prison, there are absolutely no negative consequences, and the cost of running a criminal organization is tiny - the settlement usually amounts to far less than 1% of the gains reaped from years of illegal activities.

Frankly, at this point one should just sit back and watch in amusement, because until the revolution and/or war predicted by Paul Tudor Jones arrives and the guillotines start working overtime, nobody in a position of wealth or power will be held accountable.

Don't worry: former CFTC chief Gary Gensler will soon be US Treasury Secretary - then it will be his job to make sure no criminal with a net worth over a few million dollars ever has to face the US "judicial" system. In the meantime, the CFTC will never do its actual job and root out maniupulation and rigging in precious metal markets...

As for the piece de resistance:

“Deutsche Bank’s illegal conduct involved nearly a decade of lying, cheating, and stealing. This criminal conduct was pervasive and widespread, involving dozens of employees from Deutsche Bank offices including New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and London. Deutsche Bank’s traders engaged in a brazen scheme to defraud Deutsche Bank’s counterparties and the worldwide financial marketplace by secretly manipulating LIBOR. The conduct is appalling. It was a complete criminal fraud upon the worldwide marketplace.”

Are you really confused why "complete criminal fraud" by a bank goes unpunished? Here is a hint: go to OpenSecrets, type in Deutsche Bank, and you will find just who the German bank paid off to avoid any true penalty. To your great surprise you may even find that the biggest beneficiary of DB's generosity in 2014 is, drumroll, the Democratic National Convention...

British-made Tornado GR4 ground attack fighters and Eurofighter Typhoons are playing a central role in the Royal Saudi Air Force’s bombing campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Saudi military sources say they have an estimated 100 combat warplanes taking part in bombing operations against Houthi positions on an almost daily basis. Of these about 50 per cent are British-made Tornados and Eurofighters that have been sold to the Saudis over the past 30 years as part of the controversial al-Yamamah arms deal negotiated with BAE Systems, which makes the aircraft.

The Saudis have also spent an estimated £2.5 billion upgrading their fleet of 73 Tornados, which have been at the forefront of the bombing campaign using their British-made Paveway IV and Storm Shadow bombs.

By contrast, British military experts estimate that the RAF, which has seen the number of front line combat squadrons cut from about 30 at the time of the First Gulf War to seven, could muster just 36 Tornado GR4 bombers if it had to undertake a similar air campaign.

In a government paper, Athens said “serious disagreements and contradictions” between the International Monetary Fund and its European partners were preventing the country coming to a long-awaited agreement to extend its bail-out programme

The paper suggested the IMF has refused to concede any ground to Athens on labour market reforms and pensions policy, while the European Commission was unwilling to provide any further relief on Greece’s €315 billion debt mountain or relax its fiscal targets on the country.

The result, say the Greeks, are “red lines everywhere: pension reforms, labour reforms, and the primary surplus”. “Under these circumstances there can be no compromise. The responsibility belongs exclusively to the institutions and their weakness of communicating with each other.”

German courier workers have been affected by the strikes, meaning many cash machines have struggled to get stocked this week. The strikes come as embattled Athens is ready to impose a surcharge on all cash machine withdrawals, in a desperate bid to stop money fleeing the banking system.

Greece has also been forced to raid the coffers of its government hospitals, universities and pensions in order to keep paying out its public sector wages. The Syriza government has also proposed hitting the wealthiest 500 Greeks with a one-off levy to generate funds.

The European Central Bank, which is ultimately responsible for making sure that no eurozone bank goes under, is due to have its say on Greece today.