It was.

Less than a week after Chinese censors unblocked the sites of the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the BBC, the sites were reblocked on Saturday.

Yet, as further evidence of the seemingly haphazard method the Chinese apply to govern cyberspace, the Boston Globe remains unblocked after becoming accessible at the same time as the other sites.

China's Ministry of Public Security, which oversees the nation's Internet censors, refused to explain why it blocks or unblocks certain sites. Yet many question whether any coherent explanations even exist. As CNN's Beijing Bureau Chief Jaime FlorCruz insisted, "There's no rhyme or reason."

The reblocked sites join again a lengthy list of blocked media outlets that include CNN, Voice of America and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. China also blocks the sites of several human rights organizations and denies users access to links found through Yahoo or Google in searchs on "Falun Gong," "Taiwan," or "Tian'anmen Square Massacre."

The New York Times, unblocked in August after the paper's top editors personally appealed to Chinese President Jiang Zemin in July during a face-to-face interview, remained accessible. The Boston Globe is owned by the New York Times' parent company, but it's unclear whether that is related to the Globe's ability to remain unblocked.

Zhu Feng, an international studies scholar at Peking University in Beijing who said last week he believed the government had opened the sites to meet the demand for news on the US terror attacks, admitted he was puzzled by the latest development.

But Sophia Woodman, research director for the New York-based watchdog group Human Rights in China, was unsurprised. She had predicted the site openings might have been the result of a computer glitch, although she also thought perhaps they were a Chinese government effort to garner better international press.

"The fact that they continue to block these US newspapers despite the fact that the number of people in China who are likely to access news on them is so limited should indicate the level of censorship that's going on," Woodman said.