After he was listed on this year’s TIME 100 poll of the world’s most influential people, Chinese author Han Han wrote a blog post announcing, “Other Chinese nominees include sensitive word, sensitive word and sensitive word.” It was something of an inside joke, but one that Han Han’s huge fan base would immediately get. “Sensitive word” was a jab at China‘s web censors’ habit of sometimes blocking even commonplace names from blog posts and web searches. Within days his post had generated more than 20,000 comments, most in support of the writer, a few in opposition, and many grumbling about the state of online freedom in China.

Critics of China’s censorship regime have often predicted that information will inevitably circumvent efforts to restrict it. But so far China has managed, through a variety of means, to restrict the discussion of topics the government finds objectionable, such as independence drives in the regions of Tibet and Xinjiang and the banned religious movement Falun Gong.

For the tens of thousands of censors employed by the government, blocking access to restricted information both at home and abroad is an ongoing struggle. Their work is mirrored by employees of large web portals, who ensure content conforms with official directives. With what is called “the Great Firewall of China,” the authorities block access to overseas web pages deemed objectionable and shutter domestic sites that repeatedly stray into restricted territory. Search engines are prevented from linking to sensitive content. Mainland media, which face a host of regulations that limit how they can report the news, are often forced to take down controversial stories that have been posted online. (See pictures of Chinese mourning the loss of Google.)

Despite those restrictions, the Internet in China roils with debate over current events. China now has an estimated 384 million web users, more than the total population of the U.S. That size, combined with the growing popularity of interactive applications that allow users to generate their own content, has placed great strain on censors’ ability to restrict the flow of sensitive information. Often news happens and discussion spreads widely before censors have a chance to decide how to manage the subject. “In this war, the censor is obviously not winning,” says Xiao Qiang, the director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. “In the interactive space, users are winning by numbers.”

Perhaps the greatest threat that China’s censorship regime now faces is that it can’t seem to stop debate over censorship itself. Since Google declared in January that it planned to stop censoring its web search results in China, the state of online censorship has come under increasing scrutiny. The Chinese government has sought to portray its conflict with the Internet giant as a commercial dispute and a simple matter of law. But to a significant number of Chinese web users, the extensive web restrictions increasingly chafe. So they make use of widely available proxies and virtual private networks to fanqiang, or “climb the wall,” for access to everything from politics to porn. The censors can further restrict access to overseas sites by slowing or blocking the networks used to bypass the Great Firewall, says Xiao, but are reluctant to do so for fear of interfering with commercial applications, like secured communications between corporate offices. (See who will profit when Google exits China.)

Read the whole hot breaking news

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has dismissed more than 100 habeas corpus lawsuits filed by former Guantanamo captives, ruling that because the Bush and Obama administrations had transferred them elsewhere, the courts need not decide whether the Pentagon imprisoned them illegally.

The ruling dismayed attorneys for some of the detainees who’d hoped any favorable U.S. court findings would help clear their clients of the stigma, travel restrictions and, in some instances, perhaps more jail time that resulted from their stay at Guantanamo .

U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan wrote that he was “not unsympathetic” to the former detainees’ plight. “Detention for any length of time can be injurious. And certainly associations with Guantanamo tend to be negative,” he wrote.

But the detainees’ transfer from Guantanamo made their cases moot. “The court finds that petitioners no longer present a live case or controversy since a federal court cannot remedy the alleged collateral consequences of their prior detention at Guantanamo ,” he wrote.

Hogan’s ruling, issued last Thursday, but not widely publicized, closed the files on 105 habeas corpus petitions, many of which had been pending for years as the Bush administration resisted the right of civilian judges to intervene in military detentions. The U.S. Supreme Court resolved that issue in 2008, ruling in Boumediene v. Bush that the detainees could challenge their captivity in civilian court. Since then, judges have ordered the release of 34 detainees while upholding the detention of 12.

Read the whole hot breaking news

To some it may look as if President Hamid Karzai has a death wish. The Afghan leader has lately begun sticking it to the U.S. and its Western allies – the only force protecting him from a surging Taliban, which hanged the last foreign-backed president when it reached Kabul in 1996. Having infuriated the Obama Administration by continuing to drag his feet on corruption – and then cozying up to Iran and China when Washington turned up the heat – Karzai ratcheted up the rhetoric last week. He accused the U.S. of trying to dominate his country; blamed the West for last year’s electoral fraud (which his campaign had been accused of masterminding); and made comments that verged on sanctifying the Taliban insurgency as a “national resistance” against foreign invaders. The New York Times reported Sunday that Karzai had even threatened, during a meeting with Afghan parliamentarians, to join the Taliban himself if the West continued to pressure him.

But bizarre as his behavior may seem, there may be a method in Karzai’s madness. For one thing, he has begun denouncing the Western powers in his country because he knows he can – Karzai would have been cut adrift some time ago if there were any other viable alternative on whom the U.S. could pin its strategy. The wily president knows that the presence of foreign forces in his country is deeply unpopular, particularly when civilians are killed in the course of NATO military operations. Karzai, moreover, is humiliated and shown to be powerless when his protestations over such operations are ignored by his Western patrons. So, while he may have been installed by a U.S.-led invasion, if Karzai is to survive the departure of Western forces, he will have to reinvent himself as a national leader with an independent power base. He’s obviously determined not to go the way of Najibullah, the former Soviet-backed leader executed by the Taliban seven years after the Red Army withdrew. So, from Karzai’s point of view, he’s pushing back against the U.S. not only because he can, but also because he must if he is to survive politically. (Karzai talks to the enemy but is the U.S. on board?)

It’s worth remembering that Karzai was essentially parachuted into the country in the course of the U.S. invasion, tapped to lead a new post-Taliban government that would be founded largely on the Northern Alliance – the coalition of ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara former mujahedeen warlords that had always fought the Taliban. A chieftain in the Popolzai tribe, Karzai was a prominent leader in Afghanistan‘s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, which is also the social base of the Taliban. Still, his power base was limited, and creating an effective government forced him to cut deals with all manner of unsavory characters. The CIA, it should be remembered, was doing the same thing: The hundreds of millions of dollars in suitcases that the agency took into Afghanistan in the early days of the invasion was not aimed at funding women’s literacy projects; its purpose was to buy off the local warlords who control every valley, recognizing the fact that power changes hands in Afghanistan when those warlords switch their allegiances. Karzai probably considers the U.S. political leadership naive for believing that a pro-Western government there can survive without paying off a lot of very unsavory characters. (Obama’s surprise visit to Afghanistan.)

Karzai knows, also, that the U.S. commitment in his country is finite, and the need to survive after the Americans leave makes him more inclined to rely on such established hard men as Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum and Tajik strongman General Mohammed Fahim – even if that means turning a blind eye to their own transgressions. He is also keen to take charge of negotiating a political settlement with the Taliban on his own timetable, and with less of a role for Pakistan than Washington might be ready to concede to Islamabad. Just as U.S. influence in Iraq declined precipitously once its intention to withdraw became clear, so is Karzai’s own game plan premised on getting along without the U.S., even though he’ll do his best to keep it there as long as possible. That means going through the motions of satisfying U.S. demands on corruption and reform, without actually alienating the hard men on whose support he may depend once the Americans leave.

It’s a common mistake for great powers to assume that those who they engage as proxies to fight their battles or run their satrapies share the same agenda as their patrons, just because their interests coincide at a given moment. But not all of Karzai’s enemies in the region are America’s enemies; and not all of America’s allies are Karzai’s allies. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Pakistan, original patron of the Taliban which has also been going through the motions of indulging American concerns, while continuing to enable the Afghan Taliban insurgency and identifying Karzai as an adversary because of his regime’s close ties with India.

Read the whole hot breaking news