CORRESPONDENT

One of my enduring images of Iraqis voting in last weekend's elections is of people holding up their purple ink-stained index fingers to indicate they had cast their ballot. It's an image that has graced newspaper front pages the world over.

While covering the country's elections from the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, I decided I wanted my own such momento of having been there.

So, when sufficient quotes had been gathered and my stories had been filed to the bureau in Baghdad, I asked my interpreter colleague to approach election officials at a polling station to see if it would be ok to dip my finger in the purple ink.

It was probably his high, unbroken voice that saved him. The US soldiers were on foot, hunting across the fields for a suspected IED bomber.

The suspect was thought to be wearing all black, but another person wearing a white hat and long brown shirt was spotted digging a hole in the road.

The US soldiers fired shots up the valley towards him, then then set off in pursuit. With guns at the ready, they were ready for action.

It was as if the fictional TV reporter Joe Rossi saw the protesters, not me.

Driving back to the AFP bureau I spotted two women sitting with placards in the driveway of a court building. They were complaining about a land dispute, and it was the first protest of its kind that I had seen during nearly a year in Vietnam.

I became obsessed with the need to talk to them, to find out why they were there. That's what Rossi would do.

After flying above snow-capped mountains and Taliban-held villages throughout the day, switching from army planes to military helicopters in the hope that we would finally, after days of broken promises, see some of the action in Afghanistan’s latest theatre of war, we touched down at Camp Shorabak, the Afghan Army’s base not far from the Helmand provincial capital of Lashkar Gah.

Ask anyone involved in public relations and they'll tell you that when a big story breaks, it's vital to take control of the news agenda.

Here in India that's rarely been the case, particularly in the public sector, with an absence of slick PR operations to keep a firm grip on who says what and when.

The 2008 Mumbai attacks, which I covered, were a case in point: the absence of any single point of contact for official information allowed rampant speculation to spiral out of control.

Hanoi is cramped, unbearably noisy, often grey, and dusty.

In the leadup to Tet, the Lunar New Year that begins on Sunday, it is even more congested and loud.

Yet, the excitement and colour surrounding Vietnam's most important annual festival has made Hanoi a more pleasant place. The delightful sight of pink peach blossom plants and bright orange kumquat trees -- a Tet tradition -- lifts one's spirits and makes the worsening traffic jams and blasting horns more tolerable.

Many people transport their plants on the back of motorcycles or bicycles. One large peach blossom was strapped to the roof of a car, the way people in North America bring their Christmas trees home.

Anyone familiar with Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" and his emphasis on the value of surprise in battle must be wondering what military planners were thinking when they decided to drop leaflets from helicopters to let the people of southern Afghanistan's poppy belt know they were coming.

But the Chinese general, who wrote his handbook on military strategy about 500 years before Christ, also knew the value of strength, morale and confidence when taking on the enemy.

Barack Obama is a politician for the grand stage, the pulsating speech, the historic pronouncement.

He seems less at ease however on the flip side of campaign politics, the grass roots back slapping and hand shaking.

New Year for me this year was pretty wild, but not in the conventional sense. To see in 2010 I abandoned my friends celebrating on one of Thailands famed beaches to watch the clock tick down to midnight in the kingdoms bizarre version of the Wild West.

Mention Thai culture and the usual images are of peoples hands pressed together in a welcoming wai, beautiful traditional silk costumes and plucked traditional Thai court music.

Gruesome pictures of bloodstained banknotes spread across the half-naked, bullet-ridden body of top drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva have raised controversy over Mexico's military crackdown on its drug gangs.

The pictures were a grim echo of battlefield trophies displayed by soldiers in wars around the world and left a blot on the government's proudest victory in its three-year crackdown on organised crime.