In just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal - an event called singularity - according to a futurist from Google. Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, also claims that the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as 2100.

Kurweil made the claims during his conference speech at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York at the weekend. The conference was created by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov and featured visonary talks about how the world will look by 2045. Kurzweil said: 'Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold.'

He referred to Moore's Law that states the power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing. This singularity is also referred to as digital immortality because brains and a person's intelligence will be digitally stored forever, even after they die.

In one recent image a smiling Rouhani was portrayed in his mullah's robes and turban, holding out an old-fashioned key to a door with an unmistakably digital lock. It was a witty way of suggesting that for all the excitement, solving Iran's problems could be beyond him. Rouhani, 64, is most often described as a moderate rather than reformist leader. But he is also a senior cleric with impeccable revolutionary credentials who has been an adviser to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and held highly sensitive posts in parliament and the regime.

Intriguingly, he served for two years as chief negotiator on the vexed issue of Iran's nuclear programme, at the heart of the country's tense confrontation with the west and the source of the sanctions that are crippling its economy – and was defrocked in 2005 for being too accommodating.

Ben Bernanke's super low interest rate policies have systematically pushed investors into stocks and real estate over the past several years because there were few other places where they could get decent returns. As this trade unwinds (and it will likely not be in an orderly fashion), we are going to see unprecedented carnage.

Stocks, ETFs, home prices and municipal bonds will all be devastated. And of course that will only be the beginning. What we are ultimately looking at is a sell off very similar to 2008, only this time we will have to deal with rising interest rates at the same time. The conditions for a "perfect storm" are rapidly developing, and if something is not done we could eventually have a credit crunch unlike anything that we have ever seen before in modern times.

At the moment, perhaps the most important number in the financial world is the yield on 10 year US Treasuries. A lot of investors are really concerned about how rapidly it has been rising.

Sadly, most Americans have absolutely no idea how vulnerable the financial system is. Most Americans have absolutely no idea that our system of finance is a house of cards built on a foundation of risk, debt and leverage. Most Americans have complete and total faith that our leaders know what they are doing and are fully capable of keeping our financial system from collapsing. In the end, most Americans are going to be bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

The agreement was signed by Rosneft chief executive Igor Sechin and CNPC head Zhou Jiping in the presence of Putin and visiting Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli. "An estimated value of the contract in current market parameters is absolutely unprecedented - 270 billion dollars," Putin told participants of the annual Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum.

Putin has made a priority of stabilising Russia's sometimes prickly relations with its giant eastern neighbour at a time when its ties with the West are becoming ever more problematic.

This was nowhere more obvious than in the impression he tried to convey that he was taking the lead in proposing a historic “free-trade deal” between the USA and the EU. But all this called for some rather severe correctives.

For a start, China and India might have had something to say about the BBC’s claim that this was a meeting of “the eight most powerful countries in the world”. Then it was not so much a “G8” as a “G8 plus Two”, as we saw from the prominent presence, alongside President Obama and the rest, of those two spectres at the feast, Presidents José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy of the EU.

Third, and rather more significantly, Mr Cameron, as Prime Minister of the UK, has no direct status in this deal at all, since trade is an exclusively EU competence. The negotiations are to be conducted by Mr Barroso and the European Commission, not by any mere member state.

Fourth, what is being proposed is not just an EU-US deal but something much wider: between on one side, not just the EU but also the European Free Trade Area (Efta), including Norway and, on the other, not just the US but also Canada and Mexico, as members of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

Fifth, what is being proposed is not so much a “free-trade area” as a deal allowing trade between the two groups of countries subject to the harmonising of tens of thousands of regulations. This will require years of negotiations, which will be so complex and intractable that a deal may never come off at all.

It is hard to conceive, for instance, that any agreement could be reached between the powerful and highly protectionist farming lobbies on both sides. US agribusiness would find it impossible to accede to the EU’s strict animal welfare rules. The EU, so suspicious of GM, will scarcely welcome a flood of meat and cereal products made much cheaper by America’s wholesale embrace of genetic modification.

As bitter rivals in the world airline market, the US and European aviation industries have long been embattled over their rival state-subsidy schemes, each side claiming the other’s to be illegal. EU manufacturers will not be enthused by an influx of all those manufactured goods made competitive by much lower US energy costs, thanks to shale gas. The list of issues on which negotiations could founder goes on and on.

The floods have washed away roads and bridges, cut-off electricity and submerged hundreds of homes. "This is incredible," said Mr Harper, a Calgary resident. "I don't think any of us have seen anything like this before. The magnitude is just extraordinary." Alberta Premier Alison Redford warned residents should be prepared for more flooding downstream.

Some 25 neighbourhoods in Calgary, a city of one million, had already been evacuated. An estimated 75,000 residents have been ordered out of their homes. Daniel Kilgallon, who is staying with his relatives after evacuating his flat, told the BBC: "The city has stopped functioning. Nobody can remember a flood like this ever happening here."

The air force dropped paratroopers, food and medicine for people trapped in up to 100 towns and villages cut off since Sunday in the Himalayan state of Uttrakhand where thousands of people are stranded, many of them Hindu pilgrims who were visiting four shrines in the area. Uttrakhand state Chief Minister Vijay Bahguna said 556 bodies have been seen buried deep in slush and the army was trying to recover them.

Rescuers also found 40 bodies floating in the Ganges near Haridwar, a Hindu holy city, said police. Officials said the eventual toll might reach the thousands. Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde told reporters in New Delhi that 34,000 people have been evacuated so far and another 50,000 were stranded in the region. Roads and bridges were washed away by the floods or blocked by debris.

Almost 20 hours of talks late into the night could not forge a way for countries to set up an EU-wide regime that would first impose losses on shareholders and bondholders when a bank fails, followed by depositors with more than 100,000 euros ($132,000). Ministers will make a fresh attempt to break the impasse at a meeting on Wednesday, on the eve of an EU leaders summit, and resolve one of the most difficult questions posed by Europe's banking crisis - how to shut failed banks without sowing panic or burdening taxpayers.

Spain's Economy Minister Luis de Guindos underscored the sensitivity of the issue. "What's fundamental is there is agreement over the bail-in hierarchy and the protection of small depositors," he said. Germany, however, wants strict norms. Schaeuble said the new rules should not vary across the 27-nation European Union because that could put some banks at a competitive disadvantage. "There's clear disagreement between France and Germany. That's why the meeting broke up," said one EU diplomat.

The FTSE 100 index dived nearly 3 per cent in its biggest one-day fall for nearly two years. The rout was echoed around the world with shares in Germany, France, Italy and Spain all down more than 3 per cent. There were also heavy losses on Wall Street and in Asia as anxiety spread through global markets.

The Dow Jones tumbled 353 points to close at 14,758, taking the US stock index below the psychologically important 15,000 mark. The sell-off – a bitter blow for pensioners and savers – was triggered by indications the US Federal Reserve is set to wind down its stimulus programme for the world’s largest economy.

Shares around the world have soared on the back of ultra-cheap money supplied through quantitative easing (QE) by central banks such as the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. But the Fed, which has been pumping £55 billion a month into the American economy, indicated it is preparing to scale back bond-buying as the recovery gathers pace.

In a trend that could reignite fears about the euro and its banks, European Central Bank data shows the share of interbank funding that crosses borders within the euro zone dropped by a third, to just 22.5 percent in April from 34.5 percent at the beginning of 2008. Banks are now lending to other banks across euro zone borders at only about the same rate as when the single currency was first launched, 15 years ago.

The silent retreat to within national borders is most pronounced in the troubled economies of southern Europe but is seen even in Germany. Cross-border interbank funding of German banks was down by 11.2 percent year on year in March, equivalent to banks elsewhere in Europe withdrawing 29.5 billion euros from its biggest economy.

Komileva from G+ said trust would not return before banks' balance sheets are cleaned up, and the longer this takes, the harder it gets for cross-border banking to re-emerge. "The confidence wall to climb now in terms of investors returning is going to be that much higher," she said.

The Shibor overnight lending rate in Shanghai spiked violently to 29 percent, with wild moves in seven-day and one-month money. The central bank refused to intervene to calm markets, apparently determined to purge excess from the credit system. China Securities Journal, a voice of the regulators, said: “We cannot use a fast money supply growth as in the past, or even faster, to promote economic growth.”

“I am extremely concerned about China,” said Lars Christensen from Danske Bank. “They are overdoing it and are on the verge of making the same mistake as the Fed and the European Central Bank before the Lehman crisis in 2008, when they failed to see how much the economy was slowing.”

Mr Christensen said the world now risks a “perfect storm” as the Fed prepares to taper its bond purchases (QE) at the same time as tightening the spigot of worldwide dollar liquidity. The twin effects are cascading through emerging markets, pummelling commodity exporters such as Brazil, South Africa and Russia that sell to China, but also tripping up Turkey, Ukraine, Hungary and others that rely on external funding. “Everything is being hit indiscriminately,” said Neil Shearing from Capital Economics.

The Turkish lira and the Indian rupee both fell to record lows as investors pencilled in Fed tapering for September. “The party is over,” said Ceros Securities in Istanbul.

In fact, one CNN article stated that the markets "freaked out" when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested that the Fed would eventually start tapering the bond buying program if the economy improves. And please note that Bernanke did not announce that the money printing would actually slow down any time soon. He just said that it may be "appropriate to moderate the pace of purchases later this year" if the economy is looking good. For now, the Fed is going to continue wildly printing money and injecting it into the financial markets.

So nothing has actually changed yet. But just the suggestion that this round of quantitative easing would eventually end if the economy improves was enough to severely rattle Wall Street on Wednesday. US financial markets have become completely and totally addicted to easy money, and nobody is quite sure what is going to happen when the Fed takes the "smack" away. When that day comes, will the largest bond bubble in the history of the world burst? Will interest rates rise dramatically? Will it throw the US economy into another deep recession?

We are rapidly approaching a turning point. We have a massively inflated stock market bubble, a massively inflated bond bubble, and a financial system that is absolutely addicted to easy money. The Fed is desperately hoping that it can find a way to engineer some sort of a soft landing. The Fed is desperately hoping to avoid a repeat of the financial crisis of 2008. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke insists that he knows how to handle things this time. Do you believe him?

It is not fair that taxpayers rather than investors should bear the cost of bank bailouts in the eurozone, one of Germany’s leading economists told Business in Wales recently.

He added: “If at some stage we, as I hope, create the United States of Europe, then the euro in the sense of being an undisputable permanent currency would make sense. But not at this stage of history.”

Mr Paterson said that GM offers “wonderful opportunities” that could benefit human health and the environment. He said GM production in the UK would mean less spraying of pesticides and less intensive farming. Mr Paterson also said that an expansion of GM crops could lead to the creation of more nature reserves because it would allow more intensive farming, therefore freeing up “space for biodiversity, nature and wilderness”.

Mr Paterson is battling to persuade officials in the European Union to lift current rules which only allow one type of maize to be grown in the UK. Britain is pushing for scores of GM crops to be given the green light by EU regulators, including herbicide tolerant maize and sugar beet. But critics were sceptical about Mr Paterson’s claims. Lord Melchett, Policy Director of the Soil Association, said there is no evidence any GM crops provide higher yields. He said that yields could even be lower, meaning more land is taken up.

Lord Melchett, who was arrested in 1999 when he was present at an environmental protest against a GM crop trial, also said it was worse for wildlife. He said the Government's own five year farmscale testing in 2004 had found that GM was worse for wildlife. He said: “It is dinner party gossip he [Paterson] is coming out with not science and not policy.” Pete Riley of GM Freeze said it would be difficult to export GM crops to our main markets in the EU as consumers on the Continent are against the technology and the EC insist it is on the label.