LONDON -- It has been a long road for former middle distance runner, Lord Sebastian Coe, who won gold medals in the Moscow and Los Angeles Olympics and has gone on to become the driving force behind the London Olympic Games. Those Games officially began with the opening ceremony in the Olympic Stadium on Friday night. "We are about to embark on the greatest sport we have ever seen and most of us will ever see in our lifetimes," said Lord Coe, who was the head of the bid which brought the Games to London.

What do the Olympics mean to you? Is it about men and women who have trained and persevered for long years - indeed most of their lives - to reach the peak and a brief moment of glory? When an athlete achieves a superhuman result, do you wonder whether he or she took a shortcut, courtesy of the anabolic steroid industry, as Ben Johnson did in that infamous 100-meters final at the 1988 Seoul Games?

"I think my country Sudan has really hit rock bottom." Those were the last public words uttered by Usamah Mohamad, a 32-year-old Sudanese web developer-turned-citizen journalist, in a video announcing he would join protests against President Omar al-Bashir. Mohamad, popular under his Twitter handle "simsimt," was arrested the same day his video was aired. For the next month, his family had no idea where he was. Finally they learned he was in Khartoum's high security prison and were allowed to visit him last week.

President Obama's decision last year to call for the fall of the Assad regime, in which he was followed by Britain and other allies, was, it can be argued, a mistake. The reasons were understandable. First, the regime was behaving appallingly. Second, the US did not want to be behind the curve in another phase of the Arab spring, particularly as the Damascus government was, unlike the Mubarak government in Egypt, one which it had always disliked and which was tied to regional foes of America in the shape of Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In 2009, while I was working in public diplomacy on NATO's international staff in Brussels, I was asked to produce a promotional campaign to be posted in the Washington, D.C., Metro system for NATO's 60th-anniversary summit in Strasbourg and Kehl. In response, I asked member countries to suggest powerful images that showed Allied forces in action in Afghanistan.

The Chinese people I met while I was studying in the U.S. in the early 2000s gave me the strong impression of being aggressive in pursuing their goals. In many cases, five people shared a one-room studio to save on rent, though things might have changed now that China is the world’s second-largest economy in gross domestic product and trade. Back then, those who talked loudly at restaurants and attempted to buy a 10-dollar chair at half price at garage sales were mostly Chinese.

In London, two Saudi women are set to participate in the Olympics today. But back in Saudi Arabia, millions of women and girls are effectively banned from practicing sports inside the Kingdom. Also, they aren't allowed to drive, although there is no law stipulating that.

Jamaican-born Dr. Claire A. Nelson, founder and president of the Institute of Caribbean Studies (ICS), will be honored by the White House today as a "Champion of Change."