Judging from past experiences, Turkmenistan's autocratic president, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, doesn't seem to be a lover of the Animal Kingdom. There was the time he reportedly fired one of his security officers for negligence leading to an "assassination attempt" -- by a cat. And once he fired 30 workers from the main state TV channel for allowing a cockroach to interrupt the evening news.

Apparently one animal does get the Turkmen seal of approval: horses. So much so that he issued a presidential decree on Monday ordering that national beauty contests for the country's thoroughbred horses should be held every April, coinciding with a celebration of the "annual horse days."

According to Reuters:

The best horses of the breed, distinguished by shimmering coats, long delicate necks and legs and popularly revered as "the wings of the Turkmen," will be chosen "to promote the glory of the heavenly racehorse worldwide," the decree said.

Special awards will be given to craftsmen for the best carpet featuring the horse, the best "holiday attire" for the breed, the best portrait and even sculpture.

Turkmenistan's 5 million people celebrate the Akhal Teke horse as a national emblem -- horses are often bestowed as gifts to foreign leaders and eating horse meat is especially taboo. The late leader Saparmurat Niyazov opened a $20 million leisure center for horses in 2004, complete with swimming pool, air conditioning, and a medical center. Berdymukhamedov, an avid equestrian, wrote a 2008 book about Turkmen horse breeds.

Let's just hope a horse isn't involved in any other national mishaps -- there are only so many government workers to fire.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the U.S. missed what was coming in Egypt because intelligence services were not paying enough attention to what was happening on the Internets: 

"There was a good deal of intelligence about Tunisia [but] virtually nothing about Egypt," Feinstein said in an interview with NBC News' Andrea Mitchell. "So there was, to my knowledge, no real warning, either to the White House or, certainly, to the Senate Intelligence Committee or the Congress."

She added that even though the protests apparently were organized in public on Web sites and social media platforms, "I don't believe there was any intelligence on what was happening on Facebook or Twitter or the organizational effort to put these protests together."

But Feinstein hedged a bit when asked whether the episode was an intelligence "failure."

"I would call it a big intelligence wakeup," she said. "... Open-source material has to become much more significant in the analysis of intelligence."

It's clear that online communities of activists using social networking sites were key players in the early organization of these protests. and some Internet activism skeptics, such as the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, seem to be stretching pretty hard to downplay their role.

But Feinstein seems to be falling prey to what FP contributor Evgeny Morozov refers to in his new book as "Internet-centrism" -- the belief that online developments are the cause not the effect of offline social and political change. 

As Maryam Ishani documents in a new piece on the site today,  Egypt's online opposition community has been active for years. One of the main activist groups in the current uprising -- the April 6 Youth Movement -- is named for the date of a textile workers' strike in 2008.  Many of these activists believed, mistakenly,  that it would be the 2010 parliamentary elections that provided the pretext for the type of mass demonstrations we've been seeing this month. 

The difference-makers this month are the tens of thousands of demonstrators who've joined these protests but have "never updated a Facebook page or sent out a tweet in their lives". Why they came out now, as opposed to years ago, is a topic for future historians. But some combination of developments in nearby Tunisia, rising commodity prices, and the impending presidential elections surely played a role. Add to that the willingness of the Muslim Brotherhood to join in with the original secular protesters and the unwillingness of the military to use overwhelming force and you have a recipe for what we see today in Cairo. 

Studying the online activities of cyberactivists -- who exist in some form in most authoritarian countries -- may be a worthwhile use of the U.S. intelligence community's time. But understanding the political and economic conditions that allow these campaigns to morph into meaningful offline movements would surely be more valuable.  

South Sudan, which as of yesterday had officially voted for secession and will formally declare independence in July,  has also decided to build a new capital city, Sudan Tribune reports: 

Dozens of countries are expected to recognize the new independent state and will need pieces of land in which to establish their respective embassies.

Juba, which was established almost a century ago, by British colonial administrators, as the headquarters of former Southern Sudan's three regions of Greater Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile and Equatoria, is said to have been disorganized, particularly for the last six years during its fast growing expansion. Officials say this is because of endless wrangling over jurisdictions of its administration by different levels of government, coupled with lack of standardized housing and poor surveying.[...]

In the resolution passed on Friday in the Council of Ministers meeting chaired by President Salva Kiir Mayardit, the government reached the decision to relocate the capital to a "befitting" new location elsewhere in the South.

The minister of information and official spokesman of the government, Barnaba Marial Benjamin, told the press that the "new capital would befit the new state of South Sudan." He said the decision was not against any community or authority, but in the interest of the new nation.

From Washington to Ankara, all of Hosni Mubarak's old friends seem to be throwing him under the bus. Even Fidel Castro says it's time for him to go. But there is one world leader still, apparently, firmly in the pro-Mubarak camp: 

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il sent a new year’s greeting to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency reported over the weekend, confirming the closeness of four decades of military and commercial ties. Mr. Kim offered the greeting to Mr. Mubarak on the occasion of the lunar New Year, celebrated last week in North and South Korea as well as China and Vietnam, amid fast-growing protest in Cairo against Mubarak’s rule.

The greeting was seen here as evidence of North Korea’s decades of support.

The Christian Science Monitor's Donald Kirk provides some background on the relationship: 

North Korea over the years has trained Egyptian pilots, sold missiles to Egypt, provided the technology for Egypt to fabricate its own missiles, and turned its embassy in Cairo into the hub for military sales throughout the region.

The relationship grew even while Egypt was developing close ties with the United States after the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979. Egypt was seen as a close friend of the United States even as Mubarak visited Pyongyang three times in the 1980s and a fourth time in 1990 in search of military and commercial deals.

It's been a good day for Southern Sudan: An incredible 98.83 percent of Southern Sudanese voters opted for secession last month, according to official results released today. But almost as incredible, Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir proclaimed that he was ready for (and even welcomed) and the secession of the country's southern half. "Today we received these results and we accept and welcome these results because they represent the will of the Southern people," he said on state television. 

Why all the conciliatory talk? After all, this is the same Bashir who many analysts feared would cancel the referendum -- or reject its results -- pushing the country back to the brink of civil war. What gives? 

In short, all the carrots that U.S. diplomats are offering the Sudanese president seem to be working. Among the prizes for Khartoum are a U.S. promise to remove Sudan from its list of terrorism-supporting states and a possible visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the Sudan Tribune. Earlier this month, U.S. State Department officials also signaled that they would be ready to begin normalization following Sudan's acceptance of the vote.

That's great news for the south; as FP contributor Maggie Fick recently explained, normalization with Washington holds great appeal for Bashir -- in fact, it's a big part of his international agenda. So he's likely to yield to U.S. pressure if it pays off. Bashir's speech today gets Southern Sudan over one big hurdle toward declaring independence, which it is expected to formally do this July. The next test for U.S. pressure and Sudanese diplomacy is whether an equally congenial atmosphere will accompany talks over tricky issues such as border delineation and the sharing of Sudan's oil.

But if Bashir does everything right with regards to the south and Washington does begin to normalize ties, there's just one rather huge catch: The United States risks sacrificing the single-biggest point of leverage that it has over Khartoum -- at exactly that time when another region of the country, Darfur, looks like it may be getting worse, not better. Renewed clashes between government and rebel groups there have sent thousands fleeing from their homes in recent weeks. It's not the kind of behavior one might expect American diplomats to encourage.

Yet Washington forged something of a devil's bargain. In order to get Bashir to accept the referendum, U.S. diplomats announced that they were delinking Southern Sudan and Darfur on their negotiating agenda -- that is, they wanted to ensure that progress could be made in the south even if Darfur stalled. Now, that progress is indeed coming in the south. And Khartoum will soon come looking for its reward.

New French Foreign Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, already under fire for suggesting, not so subtly, that France's riot-hardened police could help Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali put down his country's uprising last month, is now embroiled in a controversy over a vacation she took in that country shortly after Christmas, while the riots that brought down Ben Ali were already well under way. In particular, scrutiny has focused on a private jet belonging to a businessman with links to the Ben Ali regime that Alliot-Marie, her partner, and her parents, used twice on their trip. Again, her handling of the controversy has not inspired confidence:

Rather than apologising, her response was combative. "When I'm on holiday, I'm not the foreign minister, I'm Michèle Alliot-Marie," she said.

Less than 24 hours later, she has been forced to retract the statement.

Perhaps mindful of President Nicolas Sarkozy's oft-repeated mantra: "When you're a minister, you're a full time minister," Alliot-Marie told Le Parisien newspaper: "Obviously I am a minister 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Even on holiday, I work in constant contact with my colleagues."

On French radio, she said: "I thought a minister had the right to have friends but if that's the way it is I'll be very careful. Next time I won't leave the Dordogne."

Critics say the businessman, Aziz Miled, has close commercial ties to Ben Ali's brother-in-law, Belhassen Trabelsi. Alliot-Marie says he was actually a "victim" of the regime who was forced to do business with them. Given how many pots the Trabelsis had their fingers in during the final years of the regime, that actually seems plausible. But still, one would think that vacationing in countries undergoing insurrection is a pretty obvious no-no for a foreign minister.

Tarek Amr at Global Voices translates a post from Egyptian blogger Ahmed Khaled Tawfik, describing a very troubling development from Tahrir Square: 

Tens of phone calls have been received by the television channel, whereby callers made the smart point that they had seen the protesters eating from KFC, and that this was proof that they have foreign agendas. They seem to believe that no one can eat from the American chain without being an agent of foreign forces.

KFC's loyalties in the conflict still aren't quite clear yet. Amil Khan reports that one hired pro-Mubarak thug reported being promised "a Coke and a Kentucky Fried Chicken meal deal" to rough up anti-Mubarak protesters. Just whose side is the Colonel on?