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 problem being that there – as across the world – bridges are cheap places to route water pipes from place to place.

All of which makes sense, until you get a foot of rain in 24 hours.

Then of course, you have no bridge anymore and no water mains either. So it is that many Cumbrians tonight are hunkering down by candle light with no water listening to the rains that are still coming down.

Let’s hope they’ve plenty of their first class beer laid in. It tastes fine and you can probably bath in it too.

In town like Cockermouth another deluge today as all manner of rescue services mill about with one common problem: there is nobody to rescue. You have to question whether there might have been a bit of a overreaction.

Last night I had a kind offer to go up in a coast guard helicopter today. They were flown down all the way from the Western Isles. This morning I was told they’d flown back. That wasn’t cheap.

And in Cockermouth itself we have volunteers of all manner of rescue services and churches. This enticing little town has its fair share of churches of course.

But now they have Church of Scientology volunteers padding the streets in high vis rigout on the off chance that lost souls might still need saving from the rain or flood that some have called biblical.

I’m not sure – maybe the precipitation is getting to me too.

The only way to move around – given the universal ban on private vehicles that has successfully staved off the predictable attack by the Taliban – was on foot. The traffic that usually blocks the city vanished.

We found ourselves learning that routes between places we normally travel actually take 20 minutes on foot, rather than an hour by car in the gridlocked streets.

The emptiness just added to the surreality of the occasion. Behind high walls, with foreign dignitaries, an almost virtual president of a virtual government was taking office for another five years.

I may be being too harsh, but there are times when President Karzai’s writ seems almost non-existent.

Granted, he has power: but it is power over power and its assets (the police, army, ministries, government business), not power over a country.

So much of Afghanistan is outside of Nato and the Afghan government’s reach that today’s target of handing over the worse areas to Afghan security forces seems remote at best, vacuously rhetorical at worst.

The ceremony that took place under high security was the ugly end to months of electoral chaos in which democracy here began to look like a cycle of backroom dealings and arm-twisting, quite removed from the Afghan people’s mandate.

Perhaps it was a fitting climax to an electoral process whose second round was cancelled as the only opponent dropped out, fearing it would be too fraudulent to even partake in.

Still, we have walked around empty streets and almost run to the British Embassy to hear David Miliband do his best to explain why he believes President Karzai’s statements of intent this time.

Today does not feel like the beginning of something new – Karzai’s second term, for instance – but the end of the period in which Western countries could pretend they would leave behind an Afghanistan fashioned in their image.

An independent panel, the US Preventive Service Task Force, has recommended against routine screening for breast cancer for women under 50.

They say there is insufficient evidence to suggest it’s worth screening women in their 40s unless they have a family history of the disease or other risk factors.

It sounds exactly like the kind of debate over healthcare we are very used to hearing in the UK. Except that here the cost of the treatment is apparently not the issue.

There is no equivalent of NICE in the US. In fact the British National Institute of Clinical Excellence, which evaluates the cost effectiveness of various NHS treatments, is the example Republicans use when they are talking about “death panels” in America.

Instead the breast cancer debate is being driven by arguments over whether women are being given so much treatment it’s bad for them – that it is not a good idea to subject women to unnecessary biopsies, stress and, most importantly, the radiation from the mammograms which many women are given every year after age 40.

Any Brit who starts to use the American healthcare system, assuming they have good health insurance coverage, is immediately shocked by the amount of treatments and diagnostic procedures they are prescribed.

A full MRI is performed, it seems, if you complain of the slightest discomfort, and it’s impossible for any non-doctor to know whether this contrast shows how few of these procedures the NHS is able to offer or whether a privatised system inevitably produces unnecessary but highly profitable treatments.

There has been a huge outcry here from women who are used to getting screening from 40, and experts say they have been trying to change the advice to testing from age 50 since 1997 but haven’t been able to because of the political uproar such a suggestion causes.

My own reaction to this confusing debate has been a very personal one. Just last week I received a very joyous email from a good friend in America who was able to announce to the world that after a successful mammogram she was now completely breast cancer-free because the disease had been caught early enough.

But she pointed out that if she had been living in the UK the outcome might have been very different, as routine screening does not start in Britain until age 50.

Many doctors here say they intend to ignore the new advice and keep screening women in their 40s, which means I will probably have to soon decide whether I want to join in myself.

The degree of choice offered within American healthcare can be deeply perplexing for someone born and brought up under the NHS.

Neither took questions from reporters at the end of this stage-managed tour, which has been likened by some to an embarrassed debtor visiting his bank manager: China is the largest foreign holder of US government bonds and enjoys a trade surplus with the US.

So it was no wonder the president sounded as if he was courting rather than cajoling his hosts. True, he did ask them to talk to the Dalai Lama, and he told students in Shanghai yesterday that “I think the more freely information flows, the stronger society becomes”. But this was predominantly about the current superpower paying its respects to the emerging one.

The Chinese said little of much substance. If they still seem in search of a voice on the world stage, maybe it is because they negotiate a tortuous path – worrying about what message to send back to their own cloistered people, while to outsiders they risk sounding as if they only care about themselves.

As for the Americans, well, they believe their values are so universal that the world stage is naturally theirs.

After Iraq, where months of pressure from the media and serving soldiers meant that translators working for the British army – and facing regular threats from the Iraqi insurgency – were eventually offered the chance of asylum in the UK, it seemed impossible a similar situation could be recurring here in Afghanistan.

Over the past few weeks here, we’ve been interviewing former interpreters for the British Army. All served in Helmand. Some were injured at work.

One man, Yusuf, who lost his eye and teeth in an explosion in Helmand on 3 June, told us how he was shipped out of British care on Camp Bastion after five days and sent to an Afghan army hospital in Kandahar.

There, doctors found on his unconscious person (he was in a coma for 22 days) his uncle’s number. They rang it. And after eight days, Yusuf’s family finally knew where he was. They then took him to Kabul where he says he paid for his own medical care.

The story that followed – which he told us edgily in his uncle’s house (he’s scared to go home at the moment) – was about his regular trips to Camp Souter, the British base where he was hired.

He asked for his salary at first – monies earned while working in Helmand. He got that. Then he asked for compensation, or his medical bills to be covered, or the sick pay normally given. He didn’t get that.

He went back again and again. Doctors looked at his wounds and did what they could, but still he didn’t get a prosthetic eye or new teeth, or any treatment, he says.

Nearly six months and nothing, bar, he says, the occasional gruff comment that he wasn’t owed anything. This Saturday – a few days after we’d interviewed him – Yusuf was paid two months’ sick pay. $1200. And that’s all he’s seen since losing his job and his shot at a normal life.

What seems to pain him most are the promises: the promise of medical care he says he got when he joined up; the promise of a prosthetic eye a very senior British officer appears to have made in a letter to him; the promise of money that still – after all the contact with him the British have had – has simply not come.

Yusuf’s not one to keep quiet, and he was the only interpreter we talked to prepared to speak openly on camera. His story carried: other interpreters were furious about it. Eight, we were told, quit in protest at his treatment.

They were also angered at the alleged abandoning of the body of another interpreter, Tariq, earlier this year, on the battlefield. One of them we spoke to – Habib, let’s call him – said he was not being treated as “a human being. I’m thinking they just treat us like a slave.”

He says the resignations have now left the British Army in Helmand with lesser quality translators. And he said it in pretty good English, replete with soldiers’ drawl and idioms.

The Ministry of Defence didn’t take issue with how Yusuf was treated, and said that his being sent to an Afghan army hospital was standard practice. They said they didn’t think there had been that many resignations (we’ve spoken to four of the eight, who all say the same thing). They insisted they would pay Yusuf compensation and for his medical expenses.

But this is just the complaints about mistreatment. There’s another broader issue we came across. These men are terrified of the Taliban. One we interviewed was kidnapped by them in Pakistan and tortured for two months.

His captors seemed to know everything about him – how he had travelled to Peshawar for routine surgery, where he had worked. They made him pay a ransom and promise to given them the addresses of other interpreters for Nato.

When we saw him he hadn’t seen his family for 21 days, as he was afraid he’d lead the Taliban to them. He had reason to be afraid. Two men on a motorbike drove up to him in the street days before we met and gave him a letter, reminding him the Taliban were still waiting for those addresses.

The stories of fear of the Taliban were universal, as was knowledge of the death of one interpreter, apparently beheaded on the road to Kandahar. The men we spoke to – many of them – had heard of the LEC programme enacted by the MoD for Iraqi interpreters. They wondered why they weren’t eligible for the same thing.

The MoD had this to say about whether Afghans working as interpreters had the right to asylum claims in the UK –

“We take our responsibilities towards locally employed staff in Afghanistan very seriously and have put in place a number of measures to reduce the risks they face. The scheme established for our locally employed Iraqi staff reflected our judgement at the time that the circumstances in which they had served the UK had been uniquely difficult. The same conditions do not currently apply in Afghanistan.”

Today’s leaking of a memo from the US Ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, to Washington about his concerns over sending more than 10 to 15,000 reinforcements here, is not the first leak this week.

There’s been a flurry of backhanded information coming out of Washington in the past few months.

Unless this is genuinely a reflection of an administration in chaos and head spin about one of its most important decisions yet, the leaks aims are pretty clear: the Obama administration wants the public to know they thought about it a lot before they decided.

Most people on the ground here seem to think the announcement by President Obama - first expected round about now, and now anticipated in December – will send over 30,000 more troops. 40,000 is very possible.

If Obama does not commit to the war he won an election on by framing as vital, then he lays himself open to entirely owning defeat here.

But nothing is final: a senior military figure I spoke to told me that he really had no idea what Obama was thinking and he thought top Nato commanders didn’t either. It is possible Obama is really undecided about this one.

But are there other possible reasons for the delay?

Aside from pressure from his own Democratic party, Obama has another arm to twist.

The Karzai government here – now reinstalled after an immensely dodgy electoral process which eventually saw an electoral committee the president had appointed rubber stamp his return to power – makes no secret that it would like more American troops here. They really do need the bolstering and the security.

Hence the endless mantra from Downing Street - and more importantly from Washington – about corruption here. And bad governance.

There is a perhaps naive hope that Karzai – who has proven himself the only real option here over the past two years – will suddenly wake up and fire anyone with bad money or blood on their hands, and appoint some luminary like Paddy Ashdown as his top advisor. That probably won’t happen.

But the pressure is everywhere building and that’s why Eikenberry’s memo counts.

He points to corruption as a problem, but also the Afghan government’s habitual dependence on the US and its military to solve its problems. His fear is more troops here will simply promote that tendency. And bolster a government that doesn’t want to govern.

His opinion matters, but not just because he’s the US’s top diplomat here. He was the top US commander here and has previously clashed with the head of Nato – Stanley McChrystal, who wants 40,000 troops to swamp areas now dominated by insurgents.

Kabul’s top two American officials are now publicly at odds over whether a tiny force of 10,000 or a massive contingent of 40,000 should battle this booming insurgency.

The decision maker has yet to decide, and the leaks about his deliberations and advice continue.

This is perhaps the most vital time yet in this eight year campaign, and Nato here is left waiting, rather than doing.

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The massacre at Fort Hood is definitely not being treated as terrorist attack in the US. Investigators have concluded that there were no co conspirators either inside or outside the US military and so they are content to treat this as the act of a crazed lone gunman.

The fact that they intend to try Major Nidal Malik Hasan in a military court, not a civilian one, further confirms that they don’t think anyone else will be charged and that they don’t consider this terrorism.

In the UK we clearly find the idea of anyone running rampage with guns terrifying in any circumstances. But in the US it’s too horribly familiar. There are all the very high-profile incidents we can instantly recall – from Virginia Tech to Columbine – and there are other incidents that don’t make huge headlines happening all the time.

Even whilst we were reporting the Fort Hood killings on Friday, there was another gunman on the loose in Florida – but I bet you hardly even heard about that one. And the Texas town where Fort Hood is located, Killeen, has seen this before. In 1991 a gunman killed 24 people in a cafe there for no apparent reason before he shot himself.

Mad men who are – legally – armed to the teeth shooting innocent victims is not unremarkable in America. Because it’s not unusual, it isn’t too scary. Not like terrorism – the most frightening word in American-English language.

But why is what happened at Fort Hood definitely not a terror attack? The more we find out about Major Hassan’s internet posts and emails to a radical jihadist, the more it seems there is at least the possibility he was politically motivated.

The Collins dictionary says terrorism is the systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal. And that a terrorist is a person who employs terrorism, especially as a political weapon. It doesn’t say they have to come from abroad, be working with others, have met Osama Bin Laden or have strapped on a suicide vest before they attack.

According to the New York Times, investigators have not ruled out the possibility Major Hassan “believed he was carrying out an extremist’s suicide mission,” but so far they have no evidence he was directed into violence or “ever travelled overseas to meet with extremist groups”.

Senator Joe Lieberman is the only person I’ve heard in America call Hassan a terrorist. He calls him a “self-radicalised, home-grown terrorist” and therefore concludes this was “the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11″.

I suspect the reason you have not heard others condemn this as a heinous terrorist act is because America is very uncomfortable with the very idea of home-grown terrorists.

They can’t deal with the idea that people born and raised in the US want to attack it. Or work out how to identify the so called “clean skin” operatives who carry passports with the Stars and Stripes on them.

Najibullah Zazi, the terrorist suspect arrested just before 9/11 this year and accused of plotting to bomb New York, is a naturalised US citizen but he is originally from Afghanistan.

If the authorities are right about what he was planning, then that would have indisputably been a home grown terror attack on America, carried out by a man who passed the vetting process to work as a shuttle driver at Denver airport.

But at his trial I am sure we will hear plenty about his Afghan and Pakistani connections, as well as his life in the US.

The idea that a major in the US army could have become radicalized to the point of committing terrorism is too much to bear. Much easier to conclude that no-one noticed he’d been driven to such desperation that he committed an act of mass murder than to think of using the “T” word.

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Aside from feeling rather old, I also seem to have reached an age when I am telling stories which, however familiar they may be to me, need re-telling for a new generation.

A generation which may never have heard of Lech Walesa (I am not sure my producer had) and a generation for which the falling of the Twin Towers, not the Berlin wall, is the defining political event.

So, thanks to said producer, I found myself writing a script which assumed the viewer knew nothing about the Berlin wall at all.

At worst this can come across as patronising to those who remember the tumult only too well, but audience research suggests we have one of the youngest audiences of any news programme, and we forget this at our peril.

The point I was trying to make in yesterday’s Berlin blog, that Berlin’s anniversary is so much bigger than 9/11, is made rather more clearly by Ross Douthat, a columnist in today’s International Herald Tribune.

“Twenty years later, we still haven’t come to terms with the scope of our deliverance”, he writes. ”Even 9/11 didn’t undo the work of 89…Islamism isn’t in the same league as the last century’s totalitarianisms…yet nobody seems to believe it. Instead, we keep returning to the idea that liberal society is just as vulnerable as it was before the Berlin wall came down.”

Douthat suggests that Osama Bin Laden just doesn’t make the grade in terms of a global threat. And that we pose far more of a threat to ourselves than Mahmoud Ahmedinejad or Kim Jong-il are ever likely to, though the IHT’s columnist sees our fears of self-induced implosion as a “pseudo-Marxist vision of global capitalism, destined to be undone by peak oil, climate change, or the next financial bubble.”

Doutha, who does a good impression of a psychotherapist with the west on his couch, concludes that we are paranoid, afraid to reckon with our own apparent permanence.

That we are a Rome in search of somebody to sack us, a Nineveh in search of a Yahweh to chastise us, because the “possibility of dissolution lends a moral shape to history”. In other words, we still see reds under our beds everywhere, even though, 20 years after the Berlin wall fell, the reds have well and truly gone.

But what if there is indeed a new existential threat, in the shape of climate change? Mr Douthat doesn’t quite say this is paranoia, but he does suggest that mind games lurk behind all our fears: “it may be that the only thing more frightening than the possibility of annihilation is the possibility that our society could coast on forever as it is.”

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“Do we add that to the total dead?” asked an American producer.

I told her firmly that in the UK we certainly did not.The unborn twins killed by the Real IRA in the Omagh bomb have never been counted in the total death toll. And we would not be reporting that there were now 14 dead in Texas.

“Absolutely we count children in womb” asserted another American journalist as he walked past. Adamant that was another American life lost and that 14 souls had therefore been murdered.

“Does it matter how far along the mother was?” asked the first producer.

I pointed out that it’s a very fraught philosophical argument, the question of precisely when life begins, and then quickly exited before that discussion began. I have learnt to my cost not to discuss that question in a country where the debate over abortion rages daily with a burning ferocity.

It’s amazing to someone like me, who comes from country where the right to choose or the right to life so rarely enters the political discourse, to watch how often and how significantly abortion affects so many decisions in America.

Even as the Democrats are celebrating the passage of their health care reforms through the House of Representatives late on Saturday night their victory is marred by compromises they had to make over abortion to get the measure through.

They had to agree that no federal funds would ever be used to pay for abortions – and that means that millions of women who would, under the legislation, be able to buy health care coverage with the help of government subsides will not be entitled to have an abortion paid for by their health insurance. Unlike women who get their health insurance from the employers where almost every policy covers the procedure.

Pro-choice groups are furious. Saying it’s the greatest blow to abortion rights in the US for many years as it will make it harder for millions of the poorest to get access to terminations. It may also make it harder for the bill to pass through the Senate where some will try to strip this amendment out of the legislation.

When he was still a candidate for the Democratic nomination and was trying to steal the votes of left wing women away from Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama proudly boasted about his pro-choice voting record and beliefs.

But there was no a mention of abortion on Sunday when he appeared in the White House Rose Garden for a moment of self congratulation about the bill’s passage.

He had to discuss abortion earlier in the week though, when he was taking calls in the White House from the sole Republican Representative who voted for the bill – Anh “Joseph” Cao.

He phoned the president to tell him he might be able to support the bill but only if abortion limits were included and Cao is now proudly boasting that he forced the Democrats to accept this measure.

We know that Obama was very keen to get at least one Republican vote so he could claim bi-partisan support for his reforms. And we know that as late as Saturday afternoon he was working hard for every single vote. We know he called Cao himself that afternoon for another conversation that must have included discussion of the abortion amendment.

What we don’t know is how much damage the president has done himself among his loyal base of female supporters who will feel they have just watched him give away an important concession reproductive rights in exchange for a fig leaf of bi-partisanship.

Abortion is always very poisonous subject whenever it’s injected into American politics – and it’s now right at the heart of health care reform bill that was already one of the most divisive issues in the country