Malaysia's bruising 13th General Election is a game changer.

It has shifted the country's multiracial trajectory, weakening the political compact that has guided it since 1971.

That arrangement, contested in the 2008 elections, was rebuffed in last Sunday's polls, with possibly far-reaching consequences.

INDONESIA is behaving less than responsibly over the haze. Wondering why this is so sent me back 16 years ago, when I was based in Jakarta as a correspondent for this newspaper. The 1997 haze was one of my big stories. But covering it from Jakarta was an intensely ironical exercise: It was a non-story there. The clear blue sky made people ask what the fuss elsewhere was all about. In Jakarta, life went on as usual - biasa saja in Indonesian.

It still does today as I write this in Jakarta on a week-long visit, as the PSI crosses the 400 mark in Singapore.

"Oligarchs  in Indonesia today have such a stranglehold over the political process that the outcome of next year's presidential race will largely be in their hands. Outsiders eyeing the top post will not get far, even if they are popular, without the approval of one of the nation's powerful families."

"Ten years ago, this newspaper dispatched me to cover the Iraq War and its impact on the Middle East on a two-month odyssey that took me to Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar....The good news is that Iraqis are winning that peace, as they should. How well they consolidate their gains has implications for the region in the immediate future....Iraq will contribute to the process if it can show that day- to-day democracy can work in ethnically-divided societies, and that the Middle East is not fated to be a group of tribes forever in quest of a region."

THE thought of Singapore being inhabited by even a hypothetical 6.9 million people by 2030 has focused minds with a vengeance that is normally reserved for Toto or football match results. As in a lottery, there is a harrowing sense of winners and losers; as with football matches, visceral emotions have been brought into rough play, writes Derwin Pereira. But, he says, "some of this angst would be eased if Singaporeans were to think of demographic change as inevitable. They have only to look at what is occurring elsewhere to place in perspective the choices which they will have to make if they want their country to survive and prosper."

Singaporeans, aghast at the recent slaying of schoolchildren by a gunman
in the United States and the gang-rape of a young woman in India, might
well ask whether there is any link between the atrocities and the fact
that those countries are democracies.

"The coming general election in Malaysia will be a watershed no matter who wins. It will demonstrate how ethnicity and economics interact today, four decades after they threatened to tear the country apart," writes Derwin Pereira for Malaysia's The Straits Times.

"Terrorism is like a giant wave that sweeps up on shore. It will fall back to sea, but not without leaving its imprint on the sand or the soil of the shore. The imprint of extremism on Indonesia’s religious shoreline is cause for worry," writes Derwin Pereira in The Straits Times.

By beginning his National Day Rally speech with a reference to the Singapore story of having traveled from Third World to First, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong drew attention to what the next chapter could be in the coming two decades.