Department Of State U S

Fictional gay cowboys and a faux reporter from Kazakhstan suffered human rights abuses in 2006 as crackdowns extended beyond flesh-and-blood victims to the Internet, award-winning films and noted plays worldwide, the State Department says. Foreign governments banned or restricted access to a variety of big and little screen entertainment -- including the movies "Borat" and "Brokeback Mountain" -- as well as live events, the State Department says.

The State Department on Tuesday ordered additional revisions to the way it regulates its security contractors abroad after an expert panel issued a blistering report suggesting the current system was flawed and dangerous. The changes are expected to be the basis for legislation governing overseas contractors, who are now beyond the reach of U.S. statutes, and will bring the contractors' looser rules on use of force into line with those of the military.

Despite Beijing's often draconian punishment of dissenters, the average Chinese citizen enjoys "more personal freedom than ever before," the State Department said Friday in its annual report on human rights conditions in 194 nations around the world. The report was a striking reappraisal by the Clinton administration, which last year said China's human rights record was so bad that all the government's opponents were either in jail or in exile.

The appointment of highly regarded diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has been stalled by an investigation of his financial affairs, White House officials said Friday.

The State Department offered a $25,000 reward Wednesday for anyone who helps recover a missing State Department laptop computer that may contain highly classified information. The laptop, thought to hold information on nuclear proliferation, was reported missing from the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research in January, and investigators have not discovered whether it was stolen for its contents or merely for its value as hardware.

A defiant Paul D. Wolfowitz said Sunday that he would not resign as president of the World Bank in the face of controversy over his role in securing a State Department job and large raise for his girlfriend, a former communications official at the bank. "This is important work and I intend to continue it," Wolfowitz said when asked if he would step down after the spring meetings of the bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Top State Department officials and the head of their beleaguered private security firm, Blackwater USA, put forth a unified defense Tuesday against an onslaught of congressional criticism over the company's violent encounters with Iraqis. The State Department and security officials attempted to portray Blackwater's armed guards as highly trained professionals who open fire in the streets of Baghdad only when the lives of the diplomats they are hired to protect are threatened.

State Department security officials failed to sweep scores of rooms for bugging devices and repeatedly failed to account for highly classified documents, according to an audit by the department's inspector general. The inspector general said lax security procedures plagued the department's handling of "sensitive compartmented information," or SCI, the government's most sensitive intelligence reports. The report said 140 offices handling those materials had never been swept for listening devices.

The State Department asked Texas officials to give "careful consideration" to a clemency request from Mexican citizen Miguel Angel Flores, who is scheduled to die by injection Thursday. The State Department noted that Texas may have violated an international treaty by not advising Flores of his right to notify the Mexican consulate when he was arrested. Flores, 31, raped and murdered college student Angela Tyson in 1989. Mexico has urged Texas Gov. George W.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Sunday blamed mistakes in data collection, not political considerations, for a "very embarrassing" State Department report that said terrorist attacks worldwide had decreased in 2003 when, in fact, they had risen significantly. On Sunday TV talk shows, Powell acknowledged that the State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, issued with great fanfare April 29, was badly flawed.