(The author lived in Indonesia from 1992-1995 and 2000-2005, with various assignments in between)

It was not that long ago that Indonesia was lurching from crisis to crisis, even drawing some (misplaced) predictions it could go the way of the former Yugoslavia and break apart. These days it rarely makes the front page. It has a steady president in Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, probably the freest press in Southeast Asia and political violence appears to be a thing of the past. The last major bomb attack blamed on Islamic militants was in 2005.

It's worth recalling how bad things were in Indonesia as this country of 226 million people prepares to vote in parliamentary elections on Thursday, which will set the stage for the more important presidential poll in July. The parliamentary election will be the third time voters in the world's most populous Muslim nation have elected their representatives at a national level since the downfall of former autocrat Suharto in 1998. As the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial on April 8, Indonesia
shows that democracy and Islam aren't mutually exclusive.

All this progress seemed so unlikely early in 1998 when the country's economy was in freefall. It's hard to imagine a currency losing 85 percent of its value, but that's what happened to the rupiah when the Asian financial crisis savaged Indonesia. I remember stunned Indonesian colleagues in the Reuters Jakarta bureau, their hands on their head, as the rupiah crashed to a low of 17,000 to the U.S. dollar. Months before, one U.S. dollar bought 2,500 rupiah. Food prices soared and the "wong cilik", or little people, rebelled. Food riots hit markets. Protests escalated. Students demanded democratic change. Then Suharto -- under pressure from the International Monetary Fund -- hiked fuel prices on May 4, 1998. A week later, violence exploded, killing 1,200 people in Jakarta. Suharto was forced out a few days later.   

After three decades of authoritarian rule that combined rapid economic growth with political repression and breathtaking corruption, Suharto's "New Order" government had collapsed. It was replaced by a vacuum. Communal animosity that had simmered for years in the eastern Moluccas, an idyllic group of islands evenly split between Muslims and Christians, erupted. Thousands
were killed. President Abdurrahman Wahid, an affable moderate Muslim cleric with a penchant for cracking jokes, was toppled in 2001 in an impeachment vote, effectively for incompetence.

International perceptions of Indonesia, already pretty grim, got worse in 2002 when Islamic militants bombed two nightclubs in Bali, killing 202 people, mostly foreign tourists. As I stepped over debris the following morning, bits of flesh still under twisted metal, all I could think of was why? Why Bali? Why this beautiful island? The answer was obvious of course -- kill holidaymakers enjoying themselves on one of the world's most famous islands and you will get the world's attention.

And then came the Asian tsunami. A massive undersea earthquake of 9.15 magnitude unleashed giant waves that smashed into the Indonesian province of Aceh in December 2004, killing around 170,000 people. The toll was unbelievable. Bodies lay rotting for weeks. I still remember Adnan Ibrahim, who had spent days searching refugee camps in the local capital Banda Aceh for his son, Syawaluddin, 17. "The boy is very smart. He is good with computers," said Ibrahim, before breaking into sobs. I am sure he never found him.

Beside elections of that year -- which brought Yudhoyono to power -- the tsunami was a turning point for Indonesia. In the early days after the disaster, Yudhoyono decided to allow foreign militaries and aid workers to descend on Aceh to help with rescue and recovery efforts. He had opened the door to a province that until then was virtually sealed off to foreigners, scene of a vicious conflict between the Indonesian military and separatist rebels that had killed 15,000 people over the past 30 years. The tsunami was a catalyst for a peace deal between the government and the rebels in 2005. It confounded sceptics who predicted it would never last. Former rebels will even run for local office in the elections on Thursday.

Few thought Indonesia would make such strides and be where it is today. Democracy is well entrenched -- "taken root and flourished" -- in the words of the Economist in its April 2 edition. Sure there are problems. It's a huge, unwieldy place to govern. Corruption is still a major problem and the country's infrastructure needs an overhaul. And it is still poor. But compared to a little over 10 years ago, Indonesia has done pretty well. It has a huge civil society. Think of any issue and there will be an NGO in there fighting for justice and accountability. Indonesians are a people of great warmth, humour and openness. They deserve the international praise that now comes their way.

The end of the Bush administration will likely bring an end to one of my favourite guilty pleasures of reporting on North Korea, which is the verbal battle between Washington and Pyongyang. Prickly North Korea will undoubtedly fire rhetorical volleys at Barack Obama's team but it may be hard to match the vitriolic language it has levelled at the administration of outgoing President George W. Bush, which in North Korean parlance is "a bunch of tricksters and political imbeciles who are the center of a plot breeding fraud and swindle".

The Bush administration came into office pledging to take a tough line toward Pyongyang to force it to end its nuclear weapons programme, stop threatening its neighbours with ballistic missiles and halt human rights abuses that are regarded as some of the worst in the world. North Korea bristles at any criticism of its leaders or its communist system. It unleashed its first insults directed at Bush weeks into his presidency in 2001, after his team labelled the North a dangerous state.   

In 2002, Bush bracketed the communist state of Kim Jong-il with Iran and pre-war Iraq as being part of an axis of evil. Later that year, according to Newsweek magazine, Bush astonished a meeting of Republican senators by launching a vivid personal attack on the North Korean leader. Newsweek quoted Bush as saying: "He's starving his own people, and imprisoning intellectuals in a Gulag the size of Houston." It said the president had called Kim a "pygmy" and compared him to a "spoiled child at a dinner table".

The North shot back and called the United States an "empire of evil". U.S. officials then called the North "an outpost of tyranny" and "a criminal state".

The North welcomed Bush's second term by saying his administration was "stuffed with Cold War hotshots".

North Korea did not fire off any insults specifically directed at Christopher Hill, the main Bush point man for nuclear negotiations. Pyongyang can show restraint when it feels it is being treated as a serious country.

A list of top insults the North has directed at the Bush team will follow. It seems the last insult hurled at Bush came a few weeks ago. This was after an Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at Bush at a news conference in Baghdad. http://www.reuters.com/article/mediaNews/idUSLF8894820081215. The North's cabinet newspaper said in an article that Bush looked like "a chicken soaked in the rain" at the lectern.

But anyway, here it is -- a list (in no particular order) of some of the North's greatest verbal swipes at the Bush team. And for anyone who wants to experience the fiery language of the North's propaganda machine, I would recommend the "random insult generator" of this web site http://www.nk-news.net/index.php.

North Korean insults of Bush:

1/ Bush is a hooligan bereft of any personality as a human being, to say nothing of stature as president of a country.

2/ He is a half-baked man in terms of morality and a philistine.

3/ No one can expect to hear reasonable words from Bush, once a cowboy at a ranch in Texas.

4/ His remarks often stun audience as they reveal his utter ignorance.

5/ Bush is an incompetent and rude president who is senseless and ignorant.

6/ He does not know even elementary diplomatic etiquette and lacks diplomatic ability.

North Korean insults of Vice President Dick Cheney:

7/ Cheney is hated as the most cruel monster and blood-thirsty beast.

8/ He has drenched various parts of the world in blood.

9/ Cheney is a mentally deranged person steeped in the inveterate enmity towards the system in the DPRK (North Korea).

North Korean insults of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

10/ Rice is bereft of any political logic.

Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan arrived in a city gripped by panda-mania today. You would think David Beckham or Tom Cruise had just flown into Taipei.

Local TV stations announced the arrival of the two giant pandas from China with the rolling headline: "We're coming!" TV anchors working the story have given viewers across Taiwan every detail imaginable about the four-year-old pandas -- from the fruit and corn buns they love to eat to hopes they will mate at the Taipei zoo and produce a cub.

Michael Turton, a widely read English-language blogger in Taiwan, said China had scored a public relations coup by donating the pandas to its political rival across the Taiwan Strait. "Pandas are so non-threatening ... They're so cute and they're so widely accepted all over the world as a symbol of China. It's very successful."

Not long ago, the pandas would probably have flown to Taiwan via Hong Kong. But since Taiwan's pro-China President Ma Ying-jeou took office in May, once icy ties have warmed and the pandas flew direct from China, courtesy of direct daily air links that took effect last week.

Merchandise of the two pandas -- whose names said together mean "unite" -- has been a big hit in Taiwan. At the Taipei airport, softball-sized ceramic images of the pandas sell for $100 in the departure terminal. At shops in the city, stuffed pandas or panda mobile phone ornaments are on sale.  Taipei's zoo, where Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan will be shown to the public after a month in quarantine, is also stocking up on toys with as many as 30,000 people expected to walk through the pandas' garden-like hillside enclosure each day.

Communist officials in China hope the pandas will help people in Taiwan, a self-ruled island that China wants to take back into its fold, see Beijing in a more positive light.

Do you think the gift is a publicity stunt or shows China really wants better relations with Taiwan?

When Chinese President Hu Jintao spoke to the nation this week, an unusual six-second pause may have said more about elite politics in this secretive state than the other 90 minutes of
stolid Communist Party rhetoric. In an address marking 30 years of economic reforms, Hu appeared to lose his place in the middle of a sentence, halting awkwardly for 6.5 seconds -- the only such break in his speech and an extremely rare bump for Chinese officials long-practised in flawlessly reading out speeches.

When Hu picked up again, he skipped a chunk of the prepared comments, forming a sentence that appears in none of the official transcripts of his speech, nor any Chinese press report. "One
centre", he said, then went silent before continuing, "is the lifeline of our Party and our nation." The official transcript read, "one centre and two basic points are mutually linked,
mutually dependent", a slogan coined in the 1980s in which "one centre" has a purely economic meaning.

In skipping the second part of the slogan, some thought Hu was using "one centre" in a political sense, referring to himself as that nation's paramount leader. Hu's pause could have been a simple verbal misstep. But it came in a passage broaching the touchiest of issues for the 65-year-old president, who also serves as Party chief: how much power does he wield and has he
won the "core" status accorded early leaders. And some observers spied a message in Hu's silence.

Faced with his stiffest challenge yet as the economy slows sharply, Hu may have been trying to stress to the Party that he was still firmly in charge. Even had he lost his place during the address, the "one centre" phrase leads into a slogan repeated so often by Chinese officials that it would be unusual for Hu to have missed its second part. "One centre is the lifeline. It doesn't imply another way," said a Chinese scholar, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of talking about the top leadership.

The setting for Hu's speech, given before ranks of senior officials, retired and in office, seated in the huge Great Hall of the People magnified the potential significance of his comments. The highest-ranking Party officials sat on the stage behind Hu and directly to his rear was Jiang Zemin, Hu's predecessor as president who still wields huge influence. Hu had paid tribute to Jiang earlier during his speech, using an officially sanctioned phrase to call him "the core of the Party's third generation of leadership". The assembled Party members gave Jiang a strong round of applause. Hu, the paramount leader of the so-called fourth generation, is still not referred to as its "core" despite having ascended to the presidency in 2003.

The "one centre" phrase also recalled comments reportedly made by army officials in 2003 when Hu was consolidating his power but Jiang was still chairman of the Central Military Commission. "One centre is called loyalty. Two centres strung together is trouble," two military delegates to the National People's Congress, or parliament, told Hu and Jiang, according to the Liberation Army Daily newspaper.

Speculation that the omission in the speech may hint at cracks at the top of China's leadership pyramid is officially denied and also dismissed by many observers. "Take what is in the People's
Daily as accurate," the State Council Information Office, the media arm of the government, told Reuters. The People's Daily transcript included the text skipped by Hu in his speech, effectively erasing his one-centre-as-lifeline comment.

Jin Zhong, publisher of Hong Kong's monthly Kaifang, or Open, magazine, said Hu may simply be trying to alter Deng's "one centre" slogan, looking to replace the second half that he left out with his own views.

What do you think?

China's economic reforms have made a huge difference in the availability of affordable and spacious housing.

After I graduated in 1988 from a university in Wuhan, I found a job in Beijing and lived in a dormitory on the top floor of a five-storey office building.

Sixty graduates from all over China who had come to Beijing to work lived in dormitories in the building. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang even stayed there at the time.

We had only one kitchen for all 60 people. Sometimes people queued to cook dinner. We struggled to find restaurants open after 6 p.m., even in downtown Beijing.

There was one telephone in the middle of a long corridor on the fifth floor, outside a room with a television, which was the only place for us to relax. We had no privacy.

In 1995, a year after I got married, my "danwei", or work unit, allocated me a room with a kitchen and bathroom in a "newly-married-couple building" or "yuanyang lou".

In 1998, under the "welfare housing allocation system", I managed to get a small apartment, the last such free allocation following China's housing reforms.

Then, new apartment buildings started sprouting up. Individuals were encouraged to buy their own homes, not like before when the danwei allocated an apartment based on the number of years you had worked.

I now have my own apartment -- not 100 percent as land still belongs to the government -- but I still have my own property with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. It was a dream come true.

Visit Reuters.com for a special package on the 30th anniversary of economic reforms in China

By Emma Graham-Harrison

"Long live Chairman Mao Zedong" is scrawled on a thin strip of wood stuck into the ground where a peasant in tattered clothes is urging on a weary-looking ox. Near "Ploughing with Mao" are beautifully composed shots of young, fanatical Red Guards smashing antiques, and another group roughly tormenting a "counter-revolutionary" old man. 

Even though I know they are coming, it is still a shock to move on and see pictures of flawless models lounging on a bench in Beijing, rich young kids drinking in a bar and a group of smiling old women in a technicolour riot of outfits holding pictures of their younger, sterner, revolutionary selves.

The pictures lining the walls of the "China: Portrait of a Country" exhibition are a sharp visual reminder of the changes that have taken place in just one generation, almost unimaginable to those who didn't live through them, even those like me who have tried to study China and made their home here for years.

In little over three decades, it has gone from an isolated, poor, ideologically rigid backwater to an international powerhouse with the world's fourth-largest economy.

But there is also a reminder of things that have not changed.

The exhibit skips from the mid-80s to the early 90s, avoiding all reference to the student protests in Tiananmen square in 1989 and the bloody crackdown that followed.

And the later images catch those who have been left behind in the rush of reform, or even hurt by the changes. Sweaty manual labourers, people pushed off their land to make way for a giant dam, children in schools without even a roof.

Officially the transformation is chalked up to "socialism with Chinese characteristics". After years covering the creation of vast new fortunes amid social repression and environmental degradation it can often seem more like ruthless capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

Beijing is now trying to balance its rapid growth, levelling inequalities to create a "harmonious society" and a greener economy, in the hope that another photographic portrait of China in 30 years will show equally dramatic changes.

Visit Reuters.com for a special package on the 30th anniversary of economic reforms in China

I first arrived in Hong Kong in 1982 and stayed, on and off,  for 14 years. One of the most exciting day trips for tourists to the British colony back in those days was to the border, by clattering, non-air-conditioned train and then a short taxi drive to a vantage point, close to the fancy Fanling Golf Club, where you could look across the paddy fields at the stange goings-on in Communist China.

Old Hakka women in their broad-rimmed hats would pester you to buy postcards and Mao badges as you peered by telescope at what was once the tiny fishing village of Shenzhen to watch the villagers in their Mao suits go about their business -- leading ducks down narrow paths between the rice fields, or carting vegetables on baskets hung over shoulders on bouncing, bamboo poles. Hong Kong farmers were doing the same thing in the New Territories, but this was fascinating, Communist China!

Shenzhen, thanks to the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, became a hugely successful "special economic zone" of China and now is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world with a population of 8.6 million and a skyline to match Hong Kong.

Perhaps there is a place in Shenzhen where people now look across the border to quaint old Hong Kong...

I never thought I'd ever go to China. This may not sound strange, except that from the age of 16 I knew I wanted to study Chinese at university.

It was the early 1990s, and memories of what happened around Tiananmen Square a few years ago were still fresh in everybody's minds.

I'd just read a biography of Chiang Kai-shek, the man who "lost" China to the Communists and was forced to retreat to Taiwan with his rump Nationalist government.

It was not China that fascinated me then, but Taiwan. China was this strange, closed place with apparently no respect for human rights or democracy, while Taiwan was busy lifting martial law and having free and open elections.

After graduating from university with a degree in Chinese, I returned to Taiwan to live, having studied there as an undergraduate. And I still had no desire to go to China.

It was not until 2000 that I finally set foot on the mainland, visiting a friend who had moved to Beijing from Taipei.

The prospect of going scared me. Would I be able to bring in foreign magazines? Would I be able to understand the simplified Chinese characters used in China? Would I be totally confused by the guttural Mandarin Beijingers are renowned for?

Looking back on these concerns I wonder what on earth could I have been thinking. I have now lived in China, in both Beijing and Shanghai, for the past eight years, and I wouldn't live anywhere else.

What it comes down to is the people. Beijingers are incredible. Noisy, in your face and sometimes just downright rude. Yet also willing to meet you face on, not afraid to tell you exactly what they think, and endlessly generous.

As a journalist, you also could not ask for a better place to be. There's never a dull moment, and it's now China I find endlessly fascinating.

I still love Taiwan, and go back regularly. But today Beijing is home.

Ben Blanchard is a Reuters correspondent based in Beijing, continuing a long tradition the news agency has had in covering China. Jonathan Sharp also reported on China for Reuters, beginning in the early 1970s.  The bike-crowded streets he saw then are a stark contrast to traffic jams and the glass and steel buildings of Beijing today.

"In essence, Obama has declared the war in Iraq all but over," the story said, noting the Democratic presidential candidate's vow to shift troops away from Iraq to the worsening conflict in Afghanistan.

At a time when U.S. military statistics show less violence in Iraq than at any time since early 2004, it's worth asking the question -- is the war over?

It is not over for Iraqis in some northern provinces, where al Qaeda militants remain active. And there may be more days like last Monday when four suicide bombers killed nearly 60 people in Baghdad and the city of Kirkuk.

But in Baghdad, something dramatic has happened in the past couple of months. There is an air of hope and even optimism despite the occasional major bombing in the capital.

I asked some Iraqis if they thought the war was over.

Absolutely said five friends, all men aged between 19 and 22 who were sitting on a bench in a park alongside the Tigris River just before dusk last weekend. Scores of families were at the park, children playing on swings or flying kites.

    "There is rebuilding, people are getting jobs. A year ago I couldn't go to university because militias would check your ID," said student Ahmed Ali, referring to the chilling militia practice of finding out who was Shi'ite and who was Sunni.

    "Now, I just go there," he added with a shrug.

    The optimism of youth? Perhaps.

    Mohammed Radhi, 45, was enjoying a picnic with his wife and four children at the park. He said much hinged on whether local elections -- scheduled for October but which seem destined to be delayed by political bickering -- were held peacefully.

    "It's certainly better now but we have elections so our security will depend on the politicians. It's up to them to decide if the war is over," said Radhi.

    Baghdad still looks like a city at war.

    Concrete blast walls up to 12-feet (3.5 metres) high snake through entire neighbourhoods, encircle markets and government buildings. Iraqi troops man countless checkpoints. U.S. military Humvees rumble through the city. Even the park has checkpoints.

    But Iraqi officials now talk about investment as much as security operations.
    Kuwaiti investors want to build a multi-billion dollar housing and tourist complex in the southern city of Najaf. A foundation stone was laid this month for a luxury hotel in Baghdad, albeit in the fortified Green Zone government compound.
    Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, derided as an ineffective leader only a year ago, has won praise.
    The main Sunni Arab bloc has returned to the government after a year-long boycott and last week Maliki hosted Obama in Baghdad before jetting off to meet German and Italian leaders as well as Pope Benedict.
    The Bush administration has longed for this sort of progress in Iraq. The flipside has been growing Iraqi confidence.
    At Baghdad's insistence, Washington has accepted the idea of a "time horizon" for U.S. combat troops to leave. Maliki says he hopes U.S. combat forces could be out of Iraq in 2010 -- roughly in line with Obama's promised timetable for withdrawal.
    A lot might still go wrong in Iraq.
    The elections could spark violence. Al Qaeda in Iraq might be on the ropes but it has regenerated itself before. Sunni Arab insurgents who switched sides to fight al Qaeda might come into open conflict with Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated security forces.
    For now, Iraqis at the park by the Tigris River reflect on the possibility that the worst could be over.
    "To see everyone out and about like this makes you feel good about the country," said Hassan Qado, 22, a policeman.