oosevelt Island is a long narrow strip of land beside Manhattan in New York, shaped like a fountain pen that someone dropped in the East River.

It has been used for a prison - with inmates including the jazz singer Billie Holiday in the 1920s. It has been a mental asylum and an isolation hospital.

If a Scooby Doo villain was looking for a place to put a ghost mystery fairground, it might end up there.

But this two-mile stretch is soon to become a $2bn hi-tech cradle of creativity, a “Silicon Island” launchpad for the industries of the digital age.

This is going to be the site of New York’s technology campus - a hugely ambitious project to create a research hub from scratch.The campus plans to have the biggest solar panel system in New York.

And it is an experiment being watched as a blueprint for other countries trying to find a way to kick-start such hi-tech innovation.

Big Apple, big byte

The origins of this project go back to the financial crash of 2008, when the city authorities looked nervously at an economy over-reliant on finance and banking.

The new digital giants, such as Google and Facebook, were coming out of technology clusters around Stanford University in Silicon Valley and Harvard and MIT in the Boston area.

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(Via BBC)

Mali’s neighbours are considering imposing an economic blockade to force its military leaders to step down, after rebels seized the whole of the north over the weekend.

West African leaders had given Mali’s junta until Monday to leave power or face sanctions.

The army said it had staged its coup because the campaign against the Tuareg rebels had been poorly run.

But the Tuareg fighters have responded by making rapid advances.

After seizing the historic city of Timbuktu on Sunday, rebel spokesman Moussa Ag Assarid told the BBC that his forces had no intention of moving south, towards the capital, Bamako, but would consolidate their control of the areas they had seized.

His National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) group wants independence for the Tuareg’s northern homeland, which it calls Azawad. Other rebel forces in the north have recently joined forces with Islamist militants in the region.

Former colonial power France has advised its nationals “whose presence is not essential” to leave the country - including those in Bamako.

There are around 5,000 French nationals in Mali, the AFP news agency reports.

‘Build a nation’

Coup leader Capt Amadou Sanogo has asked for international help to fight the rebels, whose ranks have also been swelled by well-armed fighters returning from the conflict in Libya, where they backed former leader Muammar Gaddafi.

ndia will not censor social media websites, Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal has said.

But he added that internet firms must obey the country’s laws.

Late last year, Mr Sibal said the government would introduce guidelines to ensure “blasphemous material” did not appear on the internet.

Internet firms say it is impossible to pre-filter material, but Facebook and Google recently said they had removed content after receiving complaints.

The firms are among a number of major internet players facing court cases and judges have threatened to block sites that fail to crack down on offensive content.

“I want to say once and for all, without any obfuscation, no government in India will ever censor social media,” news agency AFP quoted Mr Sibal as saying at an information technology summit in Mumbai.

“I never wanted to censor social media and no government wants to do so. But like the print and electronic media, they have to obey the laws of the country,” Mr Sibal said.

Crackdown threat

A court in the capital, Delhi, last month threatened a crackdown against sites which failed to take steps to protect religious sensibilities.

The Delhi High Court asked Facebook and Google India to “develop a mechanism to keep a check and remove offensive and objectionable material from their web pages” or “like China, we will block all such websites”.

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(Via BBC)

Commander of the Carrier Strike Group Nine Admiral Troy Shoemaker: “Our intention is to keep it professional and routine and so far it has been”

The US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln has sailed through the Strait of Hormuz, close to the coast of Iran, for the second time in recent weeks.

A BBC reporter on board said an Iranian patrol boat at one point passed by two miles (3.2km) from the carrier.

The carrier was accompanied by a US cruiser and destroyer.

Iranian officials recently threatened to close the channel, through which 20% of the world’s oil exports pass, in a row over oil trade embargoes.

The BBC’s Jonathan Beale on board the Abraham Lincoln says the US has insisted it will keep the busy shipping lane open.

(Via BBC)