You know, we hate to disillusion Nursultan Nazarbayev, but his authoritarian state really doesn't need Borat to give it a bad name. ISCKON is the "Hare Krishna" movement, rather than mainstream Hindus, but that doesn't make this episode smell much better. Neither does the fact that (as Press Trust of India notes) India's reactionary BJP is predictably exploiting the issue. From the Indo-Asian News Service, Nov. 22:

It is vindicating that French complicity in the 1994 Rwanda genocide is finally coming to light. But it was actually Paris' tit-for-tat of a judicial order for the arrest of Rwandan military officers following Rwandan charges of French support for the genocidaires that pushed the affair into the headlines by provoking Kigali to expell the French ambassador. The French judge has also called for Rwanda's President Paul Kagame to face a UN tribunal for his alleged role in the plane crash that sparked the genocide. Some 25,000 rallied in support of Kagame in Kigali following the judge's call. (Jurist, Nov. 23). Now, is it possible that Kagame's forces really did shoot down the plane? Of course it is—just like it is possible that a lone Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe burned down the Reichstag in 1933. And if it is true, it will be just as meaningless—notwithstanding the claims of the French Rwanda-revisionists and their useful idiots.

Now this is pretty depressing. Pakistan finally moves to overturn the atrocious anti-woman Hudood ordinances, under which women are punished for "adultery" if they report a rape. The Islamist opposition links backlash against this long-belated bit of progress with (legitimate) calls for democratization. This exemplifies how the US can do no good in this part of the world: the State Department doubtless pressured the Musharraf dictatorship to do away with the Hudood ordinances, to give Washington's GWOT ally a minimally plausible imprimatur of secularism. But because it happens in the context of a military regime being pressured by its imperial patron, this allows the would-be jihadist totalitarians to dress up their clerical reactionary agenda as a pro-democracy struggle. And even elements of the idiot left in the West get confused. From the Pakistan Tribune, Nov. 25:

Now here's an hilarious conundrum for the idiot left that cheers on reactionary Islamism as heroic anti-imperialism. Are we supposed to oppose this garbage when conservative Christians do it in the US, but support it when conservative Muslims do it in Turkey? From Reuters, Nov. 23:

From BBC, Nov. 23:

Drivers who get stopped by the police could have their fingerprints taken at the roadside, under a new plan to help officers check people's identities.

From Cuba's Prensa Latina, Nov. 24 (we've annotated, and clarified their typically poor English):

Members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) charged national leaders with genocide and force[d] disappearance at the [federal] Attorney General's Office [PGR] Friday.

From AP, Nov. 25:

MEXICO CITY: A violent Mexican drug gang took out a rare, half-page ad in newspapers in which they claimed to be anti-crime vigilantes who wanted to stop kidnapping, robbery and the sale of methamphetamine in the western Mexican state of Michoacan.

General Federation of Trade Unions-Iraq (GFTU-Iraq) Statement on the Merger with the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI):

GFTU-Iraq's first convention was centered on the following statement: "The unity of the working class is the path to salvage the Iraqi society from occupation and civil war."