Their budgets may be a tad tighter and their delegations smaller, but developing countries are no less excited about the Olympics than their northern counterparts. There are, in fact, a number of transition countries with Olympic stories that are making big waves in their home nations and around the world. (And the clumsy responses of the International Olympic Committee almost always help to make the waves even bigger.) Here's a brief roundup of the Nations in Transition Olympic News (let's call this our NiTON review):

1. The South Sudanese athlete with no flag

The rigid IOC rigid rulebook stipulates that a new country's application to join the organization must take two years. South Sudan, which has declared independence in July 2011, falls short of this criterion. The IOC, with its usual brilliance, suggested that the South Sudanese athletes compete under the Sudanese flag -- not the most sensitive suggestion for the various parties involved, considering that South Sudan recently celebrated the first anniversary of secession from its northern neighbor.

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The first is denial. And that's what we're experiencing in Egypt right now -- for we've ended up with the worst possible outcome from the first round of our presidential elections. The winners are Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak loyalist whose spent most of his last post as prime minister during the 2011 revolution trying to smother the revolution and kill its children, and who now threatens violence and an "iron fist" at every opportunity; and Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader who wasn't even his own party's first choice, and whose lack of charisma and imagination threaten to bore us to death over the next four years while curtailing our social and personal freedoms in accordance to the Muslim Brotherhood's conservative agenda.

Three days after the preliminary results were announced, the High Electoral Commission confirmed them with minor changes. The Commission claimed that it had used this interval to investigate fraud allegations and appeals, all of which it dismissed. Voters used the time to digest the news and find ways to deal with their disappointment.

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Ten years ago this week, Venezuela was convulsed by a spasm of violence and instability that still colors public life today. In an extraordinary 72-hour period, the nation witnessed the largest protest in its history, which ended in a massacre just steps away from the presidential palace. It saw the military chain of command crumble and key officers openly rebel against orders that would have set off an even larger massacre. It saw President Chávez hand himself over as a prisoner. He was then replaced by a reactionary cabal of business leaders and hard-right military officers, flown off to a remote Caribbean Island and then, shortly thereafter,  brought back to power by a group of loyalist officers who never agreed with the decision to depose him in the first place.

Once all that dust had settled, there was little doubt who the hero of the hour was: General Raúl Baduel, who was instrumental in the collapse of the coup. As commander of the army's elite 42nd Paratrooper Brigade in the nearby city of Maracay, Baduel led one of the few genuinely battle-ready bits of Venezuela's creaking military establishment. A die-hard Chávez loyalist, he sprang into action when the coup plotters made their move. Rallying the entire 4th Division, of which his brigade was a part, he sent his troops to pick up the deposed president from the tropical island that the plotters had chosen as a jail.

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