Blogging judge sues over pulled plug

A judge in Jianshi county, Hubei province, is suing one of the country's largest information portals after it shut down his blog for comments he posted accusing the Party School of the Communist Party of China (CPC) of awarding him an unrecognized diploma.

Huang Zhijian, 37, a judge with the people's court of Jianshi's Guandian township, submitted a written petition to Beijing's Haidian district court last Sunday. It requires Beijing-based and NASDAQ-listed Sina.com to stop "violating his copyright", lift the block on his articles, post an apology on its homepage and compensate him 10,000 yuan ($1,462) for losses.

"Access to my blog entries was blocked from late May. Dozens of my complaints to the company's customer service department only drew a simple e-mail saying the content of my blogs was sensitive. It refused to recover the text," Huang said.