Censorship

A U.S.-based philanthropy that funds human rights groups in Israel is under fire amid accusations that its recipients provided the bulk of evidence to a U.N. commission that issued a report highly critical of Israel's Gaza Strip war a year ago. Leaders of the Washington-based New Israel Fund, whose recipients include several groups that promote Palestinian rights, said Sunday that they are being unfairly targeted by conservatives in Israel seeking...

Los Angeles City College officials have infringed repeatedly on the rights of student journalists at the campus, according to two national civil liberties organizations. "No institution in SPLC's recent memory has attempted censorship as persistently or with as many diverse methods as Los Angeles City College," officials from the Student Press Law Center and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education wrote in a recent letter to Mona Field, president of the Los Angeles Community College District's board of trustees.

Reporting from Caracas, Venezuela, and Quito, Ecuador -- Protests broke out in Venezuela on Monday after cable companies dropped transmission of a popular channel that the government declared had broken telecommunications laws by not broadcasting President Hugo Chavez's speeches. Government critics and supporters of Radio Caracas Television took to the streets of Caracas, the capital, and several other cities after companies dropped RCTV's programming under threat of losing their licenses.

The U.S.-Chinese relationship, already being tested by rising trade tension during President Obama's first year, has been rocked by new turbulence as the administration has sought to prove its commitment to human rights around the world. The two governments are at odds over planned U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, American overtures to Tibet and, now, the issue of Internet freedom that has been vividly raised by allegations against China from Google. After Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton complained in Cold War terms on Thursday about China's Internet intrusions, Chinese officials shot back Friday that her remarks were "harmful to Sino-American relations" and demanded that U.S. officials "respect the truth."

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton Thursday urged China to investigate cyber intrusions that led Google to threaten to pull out of that country -- and challenged Beijing to openly publish its findings. "Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century," she said. Clinton said the U.S. and China "have different views on this issue, and we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently" as part of a cooperative relationship.

The decision by Google Inc. to stand up to censorship in China is a marked turnaround from just a few years ago, when the Internet giant agreed to gag parts of its search engine to enter the lucrative China market. Google's threat to bolt from the Asian nation has brought praise from politicians and Silicon Valley business leaders, along with many of the human-rights activists who had condemned the company for going along with China's restrictions on Internet access. Whether Google's reversal sprang from political idealism or corporate realism, the Mountain View, Calif.

Zhang Shan never paid much attention to Internet censorship in China. The stylish art gallery clerk said it didn't really matter in her daily life. Then last year, she lost access to some of her favorite websites. First YouTube. Then Twitter. Then Facebook. It was her first memorable brush with the so-called Great Firewall of China -- one of many powerful mechanisms the Chinese government uses to block content deemed too sensitive for the eyes of its 384 million Internet users.

Bouquets were laid in front of Google Inc.'s headquarters in China on Wednesday, a show of support for a company whose threat to exit the country rather than be party to more censorship is a dramatic shot across the bow of the Chinese Communist Party. But while Chinese cyberspace was awash with chatter about Google's gambit, state-controlled media downplayed the story, reporting that Google had been a victim of cyber attacks in China but making no mention of the company's allegations that human rights activists' e-mail accounts had been hacked.

For a couple of precious hours Monday, the Chinese government's Web censoring system, popularly known as the Great Firewall, was lifted. Suddenly, Internet users had access to websites that had been banned for months, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Cautious excitement spread on some social-networking platforms that authorities were expanding Internet freedoms. But by the time most Chinese woke up the restrictions were back. Error messages once again flashed across computer screens for sites blocked by the nation's censorship filter.