HONG KONG, China – It’s the eve of former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun’s funeral and, even though I am sitting in the CNN newsroom in Hong Kong, I can’t help but feel melancholic.

President Roh never quite fit the mould of a president. He was an everyday man who altered the authoritarian bent of the job.

I don’t live in Korea, but I am Korean-American and have a strong affinity or attachment — “jeong” in Korean — to the country.

I interviewed President Roh while he was on the campaign trail ahead of his election in 2002. I remember how approachable and hopeful he was and how different his demeanor was compared to previous presidential candidates.

He was a human rights lawyer who had passed the rigorous bar exam by studying on his own. He despised the abuse of workers and, in his estimate, fought for the little guy. But because of that, to me, his suicide is even more tragic.

Korean society, though changing, is highly goal-oriented and can oftentimes, I think, be unforgiving for those who don’t quite fit the accepted social norms. People have to go to the right school, get the right job, marry the right person. The university system doesn’t allow for late bloomers. And though events such as the Asian financial crisis have challenged those expectations, in Korea, as one of my friends always tells me, conformity is a virtue.

President Roh never quite fit the mould of a president. He was an everyday man who altered the authoritarian bent of the job. Many people appreciated his different approach. However, my fear now is the message his suicide sends to young people struggling to find their own way in a nation where calling a psychologist is still seen as a weakness.

I think fondly of my meeting with President Roh and can only imagine his agony as he stood on that cliff. President Roh was unable to fight his demons. Please don’t succumb to yours.

HONG KONG, China — I called a fund manager in Seoul today to get his take on the nuclear test in North Korea.

“There was a nuclear test?” he asked me, half-jokingly.

He was at lunch where he said everyone was talking about the suicide of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun. No word on the secretive neighbor to the North.

I know it seems unbelievable to people outside of the country, but South Koreans have grown largely immune to North Korea’s threats — even a nuclear test. They have been living with the fear of North Korea for decades and have what my colleague Andrew Stevens calls “North Korea fatigue.” Pyongyang’s sharp rhetoric is discounted in the streets of Seoul as well as in the nation’s financial markets, which after falling initially on the shock, bounced back by the end of the trading day.

South Koreans are more concerned today about the political rift that is forming as a result of Roh’s death. The ex-president, known as an average Joe with integrity, killed himself in the face of a corruption scandal. His supporters blame the conservative administration of Lee Myung-bak for Roh’s death, saying prosecutors went too far. Riot police have gathered in Seoul’s city center in anticipation of protests.

The concern now is how Lee, nicknamed the Bulldozer, will bridge the political divide and keep the nation united at a time when the economy is fragile.

Even by the standards of Silvio Berlusconi’s epic life, it was an extraordinary week.

Silvio Berlusconi says the Italian people are behind him.

Italian newspapers were burning with gossip about how his relationship with an 18-year-old family friend was leading to his divorce, an Italian judge ruled that he had bribed his British tax lawyer and Berlusconi called his country’s immigrant detentions centres ‘concentration camps.’

“Really, he wants to talk to CNN this week?” That was my reaction to our producer, Gisella Deputato. For months she’s been working hard to secure a sit-down interview with Berlusconi where he could be more personal and reflective.

And so the date was set, well sort of. First it was Thursday, then Friday morning, then Friday afternoon.

Ok, we’re set, or so we thought. A couple of hours before the interview was to start, one of Berlusconi’s aides called to say the whole thing was off. Off? Did he get a hold of himself and think maybe it wasn’t such a good time to speak to CNN? No, they told us, his neck had seized on him. Watch Paula Newton’s interview with Berlusconi

So, the interview was thankfully rescheduled for Saturday morning. We arrived at Palazzo Grazioli, his official residence in Rome. The Palace is stately and filled with antiques but quite impersonal despite the dozens of personal photos on tables and desks.

Berlusconi was clearly in a bit of discomfort but was above all gracious. The interview lasted more than an hour and although there were some tough question about the corruption scandal, immigration and his private life, to my surprise the more revealing answers came from the more personal questions.

I was truly shocked to hear how much he thought his job was now a burden to him and the fact that he truly believed his gaffes were a creation of the media.

On and on he went, rallying against the Italian left and the evil newspapers who he said continue to print lies about him.

But it was still interesting to see a glimpse of the leader who seems to steal the show at every summit or meeting with his demeanour. He openly admits he tries to crack jokes during all his political gatherings just to try and cut the tension. But, he assured me, the jokes are always on him.

And so there he was, telling me a jokes. My favourite was about one of his first meetings with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He told her he wasn’t sleeping well at night because he was reading the next day’s papers before he went to bed and they were upsetting him. Thatcher told him that was his first mistake, she only read the favorable articles and slept fine.

Berlusconi then tells me he returned to Rome determined to follow Thatcher’s strategy and told his staff to bring him only favourable articles. With perfect comic timing he pauses and says: “I didn’t see them for two months.”

Berlusconi did at times seem obsessed, even downright paranoid about the criticism from the newspapers, the opposition and the country’s judges. It reflects his long-held belief that they are all out to get him.

Still, the interview was much more revealing than I thought it would be and Berlusconi put on the record that politically he believes he has never been more powerful. Despite all the scandal and criticism, Berlusconi pointed out that he has never been more popular with the Italian people.

To his critics dismay, in Italy Berlusconi is still the life of the party.

JERUSALEM — The question of whether Pope Benedict XVI would dare enter the minefield of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was answered within minutes of him touching down in Tel Aviv.

Pope Benedict XVI walks in Jerusalem with the Western Wall's chief Rabbi at Judaism's holiest prayer site.

He indeed dared, calling for a Palestinian homeland. Not using the political phrase “two-state solution” — he’s a pilgrim not a politician — but saying “a homeland of their own, within secure and internationally recognised borders.” Welcome news to Palestinian Christians, but they’re a tiny minority. Many Palestinians wonder what difference a spiritual leader can make if leaders of the United States and much of the international community haven’t managed to accomplish much yet.

A sobering visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial site, a must for visiting dignitaries to honor the victims of the Holocaust. Some disappointment from the chairman of Yad Vashem that the pontiff did not condemn the Nazis more strongly. Pope Benedict comes to the Holy Land with historical baggage having been in the Hitler Youth movement as was obligatory at the time of him growing up in Nazi Germany. But his first speech included strong unequivocal condemnation of anti-Semitism in any form or any place.

The tone of his first day in Israel has been one of working together for peace. He reminded religious leaders that they all worship the same God and they should focus on what unites and not what divides them.

But on Monday evening he was briskly reminded of the political minefield he is currently visiting. At the interfaith meeting in Jerusalem, Sheikh Tayssir al-Tamimi, chief justice of the Palestinian Islamic court, delivered a spontaneous six-minute speech calling on Muslims and Christians to unite against what he called “the murderous Israelis.”

Here was proof Pope Benedict really is following in his predecessor’s footsteps: Pope John Paul II listened to a similar speech by the same sheikh during his visit to the holy land nine years ago.

The pre-dawn streets of Pretoria are filled with flashing blue lights and police sirens as the city prepares for Jacob Zuma’s presidential inauguration.

On our bus’s TV, a Bollywood actress is rolling across an emerald lawn to a love song. Her performance is apparently being screened to entertain its usual passengers – the Indian Premier League cricketers playing their matches in South Africa instead of back home.

Today, however, the bus is filled with sleepy journalists on their way to the Union Buildings and our wait for the presidential ceremony to begin.

We are dropped off in the darkness 3km from where we are supposed to be. 

“Why?” we ask.  The officials and police shrug their shoulders. 

It is our first indication of how the day will be. 

We lug our heavy equipment across the lawns and up on to the scaffold far away from the main proceedings.  Shortly after we set up the rain starts to thunder down.

No one had thought to provide a roof for the camera crews and their equipment, so it was impossible to broadcast  because of the risk. 

Our only consolation was that the VIPs in the amphitheatre of the Union Buildings were also getting drenched as they tried to huddle together under umbrellas.

Finally, though, the sun comes out, we dry our equipment and the heads of state arrive.

Cheers from the damp but enthusiastic crowd greet Muammar Gaddafi, Robert Mugabe and the North Korean representative. 

A frail, but dignified Nelson Mandela is cheered every time his image appears on the large screens set up for the crowds.

The man who followed him as the country’s leader, Thabo Mbeki, is booed with a deep angry roar. 

And then, the man himself arrives; the cheers are defeaning. Jacob Zuma is their hero. The man they came to see.

He takes the oath and the crowd goes wild as the planes from the now traditional fly-past roar overhead.

President Zuma’s speech is dignified and reconciliatory. 

He speaks of wanting to re-invigorate South African society with the values of the Mandela era.  He also speaks highly of Mbeki, his arch-rival in a battle for political power which lasted seven years. 

Zuma, the victor, then descends to the lawn where his people are gathered.

There is not a single white South African in the crowd, which is  made up almost entirely of the black poor - the power behind Zuma.  They believe he will change their lives for the better. 

He did not sing his trademark anthem ‘Umshini Wam’ or ‘Bring me my machine gun.’  He is president now, no longer a revolutionary.

NEW DELHI, India — Covering political rallies in India is never peachy. The weather is gruesome, the wait is long, the music is blaring at its cacophonous best and as we experienced today, there is the chance of being caught in the midst of an excited crowd. Today’s political rally in India’s capital, New Delhi, was addressed by one of India’s most recognized youth politicians, Rahul Gandhi. 

Enthusiasm grips a crowd at a political rally in New Delhi.

Often touted as the prime minister in waiting, the young Gandhi scion swooped down in a helicopter to adoring fans, more than an hour behind his scheduled appearance. As he approached the venue, a party member encouraged the masses to keep shouting slogans. And the masses complied. When Rahul got onto the stage there was welcoming applause. I saw some familiar faces from the other rallies as they screamed and waved toward the stage. 

When Rahul starts speaking, most of the folks in the VIP section climb on top of their chairs and listen, laughing when he says a joke or clapping when he points out why his party is best suited to lead the nation. 

When the 5pm deadline approaches (the public campaign has to end at 5 p.m., Tuesday, ahead of Thursday’s phase four of India’s polls) the crowd starts surging forward. Our cameraman, Sanjiv Talreja, and I make our way to the exit as the podium goes quiet. Little did we expect to be squashed, shoved and pushed. In an effort to catch a glimpse of Rahul taking off on the helicopter, the crowd surged forward and many people rushed toward the same exit that we took. I almost lost the ladder that I was carrying and held on with all my might to the battery bag. Sanjiv, who was carrying both the camera and the tripod, was more or less knocked over. We both managed to get out without a bruise and heaved a sigh of relief! 

As we left the grounds, we could see hundreds of people standing across the open ground watching skyward. As Rahul’s chopper took to the skies, people waved enthusiastically. 

Campaigning in India is never short of drama and the colors, songs, dances and speeches are all vibrant. And no matter how often you attend a rally, there is always some new quirk to take you by surprise.

NEW DELHI, India — India’s capital is sweltering and so is the rest of the country. The oppressive heat wave felt across India has sent temperatures soaring well beyond 43 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit) in many parts of the country.

In the midst of this brutally hot weather we have been out covering political rallies.

CNN correspondent Sara Sidner gulps down water during a sweltering rally.

The latest one began at three in the afternoon, the absolute hottest part of the day. One would think this is a bad time to hold a rally but India is right in the middle of a general election.

Elections here take place once every five years. So no matter when rallies are held they are a huge draw, as people attempt to catch their favorite candidate in action.

Inevitably the politicians arrive late, which means we spend even longer at the mercy of the sun. “Under the sun,” might sound very romantic for a movie title but let me tell you it’s anything but romantic in this context.

Lugging around heavy equipment, the crew sweats so much it feels like there’s no liquid left in our bodies. Between the long wait for the candidate and the quest for the right shot, it is something of a small miracle that none of us have had heat stroke. Luckily water is handed out periodically.

The odd thing is the crowd seems immune to the heat. When the music plays, ladies in colorful saris dance with genuine enthusiasm. The men chant, push and shove to try and get a closer look.

Meanwhile the electric fans set up all along the huge field are not turned on and no one is complaining – well almost no one.

LONDON, England (CNN) – There was a strong sense of irony in the location the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose to announce their latest assessment of the progress London had made towards a successful hosting of the 2012 Olympics.

Denis Oswald, chairman of the IOC Coordination Commission, relays his good news

To set the scene, it was barely 24 hours since the British finance minister, Alistair Darling, had announced the need to borrow $257 billion over the next year to aid an economy wracked by recession.

Cold fiscal winds have blown around the world and London, arguably one of the epicentres of the global credit-crunch catastrophe, along with Britain more widely, is feeling its icy chill.

Yet here I stood, in the capital’s Docklands financial district, amongst the myriad of glass-skinned, towered-office homes of many of the world’s largest banks to hear how further billions were to be spent in the name of sport.

The British government have estimated playing home to the four-yearly Olympiad will cost in the region of $14 billion, an eye-watering figure in prosperous times, let alone the austere age of 2009.

Yet the marbled lobby area and subsequent plush pressroom, far from being doom-laden, held only happy faces and good news.

Despite the best efforts of hardened hacks to concentrate on negative notions, potential problems and rising costs the overall message that London was not only progressing well, but in many areas was ahead of schedule, just could not be suppressed.

“We were really deeply impressed by the progress made in the construction of different venues,” a satisfied-looking Denis Oswald, chairman of the IOC Coordination Commission, said.

“We know that everything is on time and this gives a very good feeling three years before the Games.”

Oswald had given the Local Organising Committee for the 2012 Olympic Games (LOCOG) a mark of 9.5 out of 10 on his previous visit.  This time, when back for a fourth look around the five major venue-construction sites for the Games, London was “very close to 10.”

And as the welcome, April sunshine warmed the skin during a short amble back to the subterranean climes of the underground (subway) station it was hard not to hope the ringing endorsements from the IOC could pave the way for an Olympic show in 2012, worthy of the precious investment it is receiving.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Standing in the queue waiting to vote, I allowed myself a few moments to reflect on some childhood memories.

Voters queue up in Soweto on Wednesday.

The polling station I am registered at is the primary school I attended in the 1960s and 1970s, and just exactly where I was standing was where, every morning and afternoon, one of the younger relatives of the Shah of Iran would roll up with his driver and bodyguard in a Rolls Royce.

He was a popular kid and I have often wondered what happened to him in the tumultuous decades that have followed since the revolution in Iran.

It was another world then, South Africa at the height of apartheid and the Shah resplendent on his magnificent throne. Both have long since disappeared into history.

Standing there in front of my old school, I thought of how much has changed in South Africa. Back in those days I didn’t understand much of politics, but I did know that apartheid was wrong.

I remember watching, as a little boy, about 10 years old, with a mixture of fear and innocent outrage as a van-load of police came onto the school grounds.

They headed for the compound where the black workers who cooked our lunches and tended the grounds lived. They were looking for black people who didn’t have the correct “passes” — papers that allowed them to live and work in white areas.

There wasn’t much we boys could do, but I remember that some of the older kids jeered at the police as they took away two or three black men whose papers apparently weren’t in order.

The brutality of apartheid is still very much alive in the collective mind of South Africa’s people, so to stand in a long line of black and white people waiting patiently together to vote remains an emotional experience for most of us.

To watch South Africans vote is to see them at their best. There have been a handful of unpleasant incidents: a hundred or so pre-marked ballot papers were found in Kwa-Zulu Natal; there have been one or two angry protests, and one election official was shot in the leg by an armed robber.

Crime and corruption are big problems in the country today, as is entrenched poverty and joblessness. Many of the elite feel dismay that the country’s constitution and the rule of law have been threatened by the long saga of ANC President Jacob Zuma’s corruption trial; many of the country’s poor, on the other hand, feel rage at how little their circumstances have changed since the ending of apartheid.

However, when we look back at the divisions that apartheid created and the rage that existed at its unfairness, it remains a miracle that South Africans are here today 15 years after the first democratic election in 1994, still voting tolerantly and peacefully, still queuing under the African sun for hours, laughing and joking with one another — and still believing that their vote can make a difference to the country they now share.

JAKARTA, Indonesia – I voted in Indonesia’s first “democratic” elections in 1999. I remember things being incredibly tense and uncertain. Suharto’s authoritarian regime had just come to an end and I was so excited – it was the first time that I really felt that I could change the course of the country.

Indonesian election officials with a voting paper.

I didn’t vote in 2004 because I was disappointed by the 1999 election results.

I felt that we had staked all our hopes in our politicians and they had failed us. Nothing had changed. It was a new game but with the same players.

I don’t think that my generation has fully recovered from the frustration of the 1999 elections. Most of my friends aren’t voting today.

Now a decade after I first cast my vote I am covering the elections, watching new voters as excited as I was.

We met Rini, an 18-year-old first-time time voter. I walked away with the impression she really felt she could impact, not necessarily the whole country, but her own life. It made me feel excited again, especially coming off the back of our US election coverage. I felt that this time perhaps the elections could mean something.

In 1999 the main issues were political and economic reforms. We were transitioning from an authoritarian regime to trying to establish a democratically elected one. Now the issues being talked about are voter list fraud, the confusion about the political parties and the ballot, corruption and the economy.

The ballot is about the size of a newspaper. I, like the majority of my fellow countrymen and despite my work in the news business, have not heard of the vast majority of the candidates.

We watched the votes being cast, and we watched them being counted. Out in the open, seeming to be fully transparent. It was a process that made me feel I could say “my country is democratic.”

But still many questions remain. For my generation, by virtue of what we have been through, is still highly skeptical of the institutions we are trying to uphold.

We can’t seem to shake the notion that, no matter what, our politicians are corrupt and to be honest, we have yet to be proven wrong.

In 1999 it was enough just to have something called a democratic process. Now we want more. We want to see this done right.