NIO problems, no answer from aljazeera

Question

I'm sending a HTTP request (shown below) to www.aljazeera.net
GET /NR/EXERES/0065325B-D83C-43BB-8B1A-DD15E0A05608.htm HTTP/1.1
Host: www.aljazeera.net
and it hangs indefinitely.
The exact same code works for a bbc news site, returning me the webpage I want. My code is posted below, thanks in advance for your advice. This code is the run method of a thread which has "link" set to " www.aljazeera.net/NR/EXERES/0065325B-D83C-43BB-8B1A-DD15E0A05608.htm" when this code is run.
try
               SocketChannel sChannel = SocketChannel.open();
             sChannel.configureBlocking(false);
             URL url = new URL(link);
            // System.out.println(url.toString() + " is the link");     
             sChannel.connect(new InetSocketAddress(url.getHost(), 80));
             while (!sChannel.finishConnect()) {
                  if(this.interrupted())
                       return;
             ByteBuffer buf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(1024);
             CharBuffer cBuf = CharBuffer.allocate(1024);
             //System.out.println("request " + url.getQuery());
             String s = "GET "+ url.getPath() + " HTTP/1.1\r\n";
             s += "Host: " + url.getHost() + "\r\n\r\n";
             System.out.println(s);
             Charset charset = Charset.defaultCharset();
             CharsetEncoder encoder = charset.newEncoder();
             CharsetDecoder decoder = charset.newDecoder();               
             sChannel.write(encoder.encode(CharBuffer.wrap(s)));
             String resp = "";
             while (sChannel.read(buf) != -1) {
                  if(this.interrupted())
                      return;
                  buf.flip();
                  decoder.decode(buf,cBuf,false);
                  cBuf.flip();
                  resp += cBuf;
                  buf.clear();
                  cBuf.clear();
             System.out.println(resp);
             sChannel.close();
          catch(Exception e)
                        e.printStackTrace();
               System.exit(0);
}

Answer 1

          sChannel.configureBlocking(false);
             while (!sChannel.finishConnect()) {
                  if(this.interrupted())
                       return;
             }   Why not just connect in blocking mode with a timeout?
             sChannel.write(encoder.encode(CharBuffer.wrap(s)));Here you are ignoring the write-count returned by the write() method. You have no assurance that anything got written at all, let alone the complete request string.