The BBC news website is no longer blocked, but they’ve stopped Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo and other social networking and video uploading sites.

In other words, the Chinese authorities are now more worried about what their own people think, film and say than about news and views from the outside world.

The sites have been blocked since riots in the western province of Xinjiang in July. They feared the Iran phenomenon, when protestors used mobile phones to film events and sent messages out via Twitter when foreign correspondents were banned.

In fact, initially foreign reporters were allowed to report from Urumqi, because the government thought the story of how Uighurs had taken out their anger about discrimination on Han people would reflect badly on the Uighurs, not the government.

Now pretty much all information from Urumqi is banned, apart from brief government news reports of people being executed. I don’t know what’s happening there, but I have a nagging suspicion that the truth may conflict with the government message that “harmony” has been restored.

The latest clumsy attempts at censorship involve Obama’s interview here last week. The Americans refused to let him be interviewed by CCTV, the state network. Instead they said he would talk to Southern Weekend, a pioneering newspaper with a reputation for pushing the boundaries.

But even Southern Weekend comes under the dreaded Publicity Department, which duly sent a list of questions. The editors did not dare ask any others, because this was a matter of state.

The full interview, bland as it was, appeared in the newspaper, but the online version was censored in part. The questions had been written by the censors themselves, but some answers were clearly deemed dangerous.

A few months ago a Chinese diplomat asked me if China wasn’t much more open than when I first came here three years ago. From what I’ve seen since my return, I would say: “Up to a point, Lord Copper” .

The hairy beards are still there nonetheless, and President Obama issued another appeal to them today, on the 30th anniversary of the hostage-taking at the US Embassy.

“This event helped set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion, mistrust, and confrontation,” he said. “I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect.”

But that’s looking less and less likely. We tend to report the international dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme and the internal dispute over the elections as if they were totally separate. Analysts often point out that the opposition leaders, including Presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, would probably follow a similar, secretive nuclear programme as President Ahmadinejad.

But there is a link, and it’s the pressure the hairy beards are under from all sides. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to office in 2004, power has shifted away from the mullahs and to the Revolutionary Guard. They have taken control of many businesses, and are very close to the President. The day after the election in June, when they began to feel that it had been stolen, protestors started to shout “Down with the coup d’etat government!” They meant that the Revolutionary Guard were taking over, at the expense of the hairy beards.

One of the difficult issues for those who try to negotiate with the Islamic government is that there are so many overlapping centres of power, you can never be sure whether you’re dealing with the real decision-makers. The Revolutionary Guards are believed to take the hardest line on the nuclear programme, and have no interest in improving relations with the USA. That may be one reason the negotiations of recent weeks seem to be going round in circles – even if the hairy beards wanted to compromise, their room for manoeuvre is circumscribed. And they’re more divided amongst themselves than ever before.

Last week, the Supreme Leader was addressing a gathering at Sharif University when he was challenged by a maths student called Mahmoud Vahidnia, who harangued him for 20 minutes.

He complained that no-one was allowed to criticise him, that state TV and radio had misreported the demonstrations after the election, and even chastising him for the arrests and beatings protestors have suffered. The live TV broadcast was quickly cut, but the Supreme Leader had no choice but to listen.

Now today, students and others are out on the streets in great numbers, while basiij militia and Revolutionary Guard use violence to try to quell the unrest.

Are the hairy beards in control of all this? I doubt it. They can’t control what people think, and it’s not clear they control what the armed forces do.

The Taliban is trying to disrupt the second round of the Afghan elections, hence today’s attack on UN staff in Kabul. Having risked death to vote in the first round, and seeing how the government tried to cheat to stay in power, it seems likely that many Afghans won’t bother to vote on 7 November. Who can blame them?

The Americans say democracy is the answer to Afghanistan’s problems, but democracy works well in places where politicians define themselves by ideology, not in countries like Afghanistan where ethnicity is all.

If the Americans abandon their project to keep the Taliban at bay, it’s hard to see how the weak Afghan government can cling on. Sending in more foreign troops is bad as more people will die, and success – meaning stability and development – is unlikely. But withdrawing is also bad, as Afghanistan would likely fragment further as warlords battled for power and territory, some undoubtedly sheltering al-Qaida again.

A counsel of despair comes from Matthew P Hoh, the US Senior Civilian Representative in Zabul Province. In his letter of resignation last month he wrote, “I fail to see the value or worth in continued US casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war.”

When the US and its allies started this fight eight years ago, many Afghan Talibs and al-Qaida fighters, including Osama bin Laden, moved to Pakistan’s tribal areas. Now the Pakistani military – which once sheltered these people and still has sympathy for them – is battling to clear them from their stronghold in Waziristan. As a result, many may be pushed back into Afghanistan.

In Pakistan, the militants take their revenge in daily bombing – this morning up to 90 were killed in Peshawar.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who’s visiting Islamabad, said, “This is our struggle as well,” but many Pakistanis say they don’t want US aid and support. When President Obama came to office, he said it was impossible to separate the problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was right, but good analysis doesn’t always lead to effective action, and America’s options are decreasing daily.

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It’s hard to find the words to express the relief and joy felt in the Channel 4 newsroom. Maziar, who is also a correspondent for Newsweek, has made films for us in Iran, Iraq and beyond. Our team worked alongside him in Tehran during the June elections.

He was arrested on 21 June, just as we were leaving, and held in solitary confinement, accused of working with the foreign media to foment a “velvet revolution”. He was charged with espionage.

During his incarceration, we tried hard to say nothing about his case which could endanger him or make his situation worse, all the while campaigning for his release. In time, he may choose to tell us what he has endured during these long months but for the moment all that matters is that he should be with Paola and – very soon – their baby.

My delight is tempered by learning that Kian Tajbakhsh, who works for the Open Society Institute, has been sentenced to between 12 and 15 years. Saeed Laylaz and Isa Saharkhiz, commentators we have interviewed several times, also remain behind bars alongside reformist politicians and others.

Maziar has been released, but we won’t forget those he leaves behind in Evin prison.

Since I left in 1989, I’ve visited every year or so, but this is the first time I’ve been back to the arid north where Samburu, Turkana, Pokot and other people herd their cattle, goats and camels.

I’m shocked and angry at what I’ve seen. We bounced along rocky, rutted tracks – in the quarter of a century since I was last here, the Kenyan government has done nothing to improve the roads. People remain cut off from services and supplies.

We went to a village called Mpagas where skinny, malnourished children were sitting listlessly under a tree. No health worker had visited them and the nearest clinic was 20km away.

The older children received a free school meal but the under-fives, the most vulnerable, were getting nothing apart from occasional general food aid deliveries.

The only change I could see is that the Samburu warriors in their beads and finery now have mobile phones, and more of them carry AK 47s to supplement their spears and traditional knives, so raiding over water, cattle and pasture is more deadly.

It’s a world away from Nairobi, where Kenyan MPs – who are, incidentally, paid more than their British counterparts – drive around in fancy cars and plot for the next election.

“The government isn’t focussed on the dry areas where pastoralists live,” said Joseph Lepariyo, who runs a local non-governmental organisation in the small town of Maralal. “Our problems don’t get any attention.”

Drought has ravaged northern Kenya; the land is littered with the carcasses of cattle and goats. In the Samburu Game Reserve we saw the corpse of a baby elephant, and desperate impala dying of thirst in the dry bed of the Uasin Giru river.

Lindsey Hilsum’s route through Kenya.

Climate change scientists say northern Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia can expect more extreme weather events like this. Later this month heavy rains associated with El Nino are expected, but they may not improve the pasture so much as cause erosion by flooding.

The aid agencies call this a “climate and poverty hotspot”, a desperate conjunction of misfortune. The people here need money to build dams to conserve water when the rains come. They need new laws on land tenure to minimise the risk of conflict between different groups and tribes over scarce resources. They need alternative employment opportunities, or they’ll end up leaving pastoralism, which remains the best way of using this arid land, and add to Kenya’s growing population of unemployed slum-dwellers.

Aid agencies, both foreign and national, can help alleviate the worst of the suffering but in the end a government is responsible for the welfare of its people.

As we drove south I thought how China has lifted 400m people out of poverty in the last 30 years. That’s the population equivalent of 10 Kenyas. What has the Kenyan government done in that time? It hasn’t even built a decent road from Baragoi to Maralal.

See a picture gallery of the Kenya drought here.

Er, not exactly. This morning’s news story from Press TV – the Iranian government’s English language mouthpiece – shows what Iran wishes today’s talks were about: namely, nothing which begins with “n” and ends in “r”. Their “package of proposals” reads like a beauty queen’s wishlist: world peace, multilateral disarmament, international justice. Certainly not the newly-exposed nuclear enrichment plant, dug into a mountain inside a revolutionary guard complex near Qom. Or the suspicion of western intelligence agencies that Iran has restarted its attempts to engineer nuclear warheads.

Maybe it’s all a big misunderstanding. The Intercontinental Hotel, where many delegates for the Geneva talks are staying, is hosting another meeting. The sign outside the conference room reads “The World Muslim League welcomes the participants to the conference of the initiative of the custodian of the two holy mosques on dialogue and its impact in disseminating human values.”

Maybe the Iranians think that’s the conference they’re attending.

The Iranian nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, is to meet what some call the P5+1 and others the E3+3. That means the permanent five of the UN Security Council plus Germany, or – if you’d rather – three European countries (France, UK, Germany) + China, Russia and the USA.

The idea is that Iran tells them all about its nuclear programme, and in response the Islamic Republic is invited back into the fold, sanctions are withdrawn and everyone goes home happy. The western officials who I’ve been talking to don’t seem to think this scenario is very likely.

“The Iranians like to argue that the ball is never in their court,” mused one. “In fact, they argue that there is no ball and there is no court.”

A veteran of such meetings, he predicted that Mr Jalili would start the plenary session with a two and half hour diatribe on martyrdom in the Iran/Iraq War. “Then we’ll have lunch and if he goes on for another two and half hours afterwards, then I don’t think it will be a success.”

The Iranian government has put forward a series of items for discussion, none of which involve its nuclear programme which it says is not up for debate. President Ahmadinejad said today he sees this as an opportunity for the USA and European countries to change their attitude.

Diplomats always try to play down expectations the day before a meeting, so any small movement can be deemed a success, but maybe this time the pessimism is for real.

His report, leaked to the Washington Post, makes bleak reading for those who would say that if only they had a few more troops all would be well.

“Focussing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely,” he writes. “The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.”

What it boils down to is more hearts and minds, less trying to kill the Taliban.

And he points up a very interesting issue: force protection. This is something we noticed when the American troops first arrived in Baghdad. Simply put, they killed Iraqi civilians rather than risk their own lives.

As a result scores of Iraqis were killed when they approached checkpoints simply because – at first – they didn’t know to get out of their cars and put their hands in the air.

I remember how our driver and fixer did indeed, as Dick Cheney predicted, see the Americans as liberators on Day One. But on Day Two we watched marines shoot at two carloads of Iraqis rather than theoretically risk exposing themselves by moving into the middle of the road with a notice in Arabic (not that they had a notice in Arabic) saying: No Entry.

The result: three dead and three wounded, including a five-year-old girl. Unsurprisingly, our Iraqi colleagues immediately changed their view of the Americans.

General McChrystal says US troops (and presumably other Nato forces as well) need to change their “operational culture”. I don’t know how easy that will be, especially in the one year time frame he’s given for reversing the “insurgent momentum”.

After eight years, it’s very hard for soldiers to see the local population as anything other than potential enemies, especially when every patrol runs the risk of improvised explosive devices. When soldiers are dying every day, of course they look with suspicion at those who around them who may be sheltering – willingly or unwillingly – those who are trying to kill them.

General McChrystal’s analysis is spot on. He seems to understand why so many Afghans are hostile to American soldiers. Yet I suspect he underestimates most Afghans’ over-arching suspicion of foreigners (especially those are occupying their country), and the wariness of his own troops.

He knows what’s gone wrong. But whether it’s really possible for a new strategy to put it right, well, that’s much more difficult.

Since mid July it’s been pretty much impossible for large crowds to gather – every time they do, basiij militia come out to beat people up or arrest them. The opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi said he had evidence that rape had been widely used in prisons.

And yet yesterday, when the government called people onto the streets for the official anti-Israel demonstrations, tens of thousands got out their green wristbands, green banners and posters and started shouting “Not Gaza, Not Lebanon, We will die for Iran!”

We saw pictures of anti-government protests in Shiraz, Tabriz and Isfahan. The opposition hijacked the demonstration and proved that they’re active, determined and numerous.

Interestingly, the protests don’t seem to have been put down as viciously as on previous occasions. In one piece of footage we saw a black-clad riot police and protestors milling around together quite peacefully; one was even smiling.

Something has changed in Iran – but not President Ahmadinejad. He was out there denying the Holocaust again today, provoking Israel and the West, ensuring that Iran remains isolated, reducing any chance of détente with America.

Some things then stay the same…at least for the moment.

“I don’t know about the government controlling it… That’s a little scary to me as far as socialism and stuff,” she said. I pointed out that the plan for a government health insurance scheme might mean she too could be insured. She was unconvinced.

“I dunno if it’s from watching the news or what, but I just feel like we wanna keep our individual freedoms,” she said.

All through the summer, Americans have been bombarded with TV ads and talk shows telling them that the healthcare reform proposed by President Obama would mean turning their private system into something like the NHS, which is “socialised medicine”.

Sarah Palin (remember her?) says it’s the first slip on the slope to compulsory euthanasia or “pulling the plug on Grandma”. To someone like me, born in the NHS, such fears seem strange, and yet it is true that America has the best healthcare in the world – provided you have insurance.

Go to the Cleveland Clinic and you’ll see higher technology than anything we have in the NHS. All records are kept electronically (whatever happened to the NHS computer??). People come from all over the world to be treated here.

So what gives? Dr Steve Nissen, the top cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, says it’s possible to insure more people while retaining high technology. “We waste more on healthcare than most countries spend,” he told me. With 17 per cent of GDP devoted to health, it should be possible to square the circle. Part of the problem is that 29 per cent of healthcare costs – according to Dr Nissen – go on private insurance administration.

What strikes me most is how the system as it stands encourages doctors to perform multiple procedures by paying them per treatment, rather than giving them a salary or rewarding positive outcomes. And it doesn’t cover most preventive measures.

But then real prevention in America and everywhere else means changing what people eat, stopping them smoking, making them exercise and eradicating poverty. Which means social change. Which isn’t going to happen through President Obama’s healthcare plan. Or the NHS.