webread not working for JSON

I can read from url's and api's just fine as long as the return format is not JSON. Some examples from matlab help that don't work for me

>> api = 'http://climatedataapi.worldbank.org/climateweb/rest/v1/';
url = [api 'country/cru/tas/year/USA'];
S = webread(url)

S =

     Empty matrix: 0-by-1

But this works just fine:
fullURL = ['http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange' ...
'?term=urlread'];
str = urlread(fullURL);
>> whos str
  Name      Size                Bytes  Class    Attributes

    str       1x82552            165104  char

Has anyone else had this issue? It use to work just fine for me a few months ago. I wonder if it is some internet setting issue.

[Geoff Hayes]

Leah - looking at the example at webread, have you tried to include the options parameter? What happens when you try

 options = weboptions('ContentType','text');
 data = webread(url,options);

where url is what you have described in your question?

And, what happens if you navigate (in any web browser) to the URL http://climatedataapi.worldbank.org/climateweb/rest/v1/country/cru/tas/year/USA? Do you see the alternating year data from 1901 to 2011?

[Leah]

Thanks for your response Geoff. This magically started working and I haven't been able to reproduce the problem.