When the press isn’t dependable… [Expelled Edition]

This just in, according to Ferghana.ru and the Times of Central Asia [subscription required]:

Kazakhstan Today agency reports more than 200,000 students throughout the Kazakhstan expelled from colleges and universities for insolvency. The figure comes from lawmaker Saginbek Tursunov’s letter to the prime minister.

“More than 85,000 were not permitted to pass exams in Almaty alone. The authorities meanwhile pretend that nothing extraordinary is happening. Unless the situation is remedied, more than 40% students will find themselves unable to pay for tuition by spring session,” Tursunov said.

I spent a little time searching gazeta.kz [Kazakhstan Today] for the original article, but could not locate it in the English version.  I assume that the various language editions do not necessarily carry the same stories, so I will search the Russian and Kazakh versions.  Commenters that beat me to it are welcome to throw a link in the comments.  I would say that this is a fine example of the kind of think people would have to pay for with the Times of Central Asia.  In this case they seem to be copying the stories that come down their RSS feeds to supplement their own journalism.

We here at Registan.net may be no better in that regard, but at least we’re not charging you anything.  And, we have a sense of humor.

While I was searching the net for “Kazakhstan students expelled” I got this story from the Belfast Telegraph about students in Vietnam, proving that truth remains several degrees stranger than fiction.

Humour is very much a personal thing. For the two Vietnamese students inspired by the film character Borat, who dressed up in skimpy “male bikinis” and tugged fake pubic hair from each other’s bodies, nothing could have been funnier.

But officials deemed the performance at a college event utterly inappropriate and the pair were promptly expelled for a year.

I had no idea that Borat enjoyed that kind of international appeal.  Then again, I cannot say that I am surprised.  Toilet humor usually crosses borders fairly well.  It’s interesting to see the reaction among the strict Vietnamese press.  As a communist country, it seems to be bothered that its students’ morals are almost as depraved as those capitalist pigs, clothed in Vietnamese-made designer polos, that support its economy.

Not surprisingly, the incident and the subsequent fallout have been seized on in the communist nation’s usually staid and scripted media as well as the blogosphere. “I cannot understand how they could do such an anti-cultural thing,” said Nguyen Dinh Van, a letter writer from Hanoi. “I cannot accept it.”

According to a report in Thanh Nien, a publication of the Vietnam National Youth Federation: “Many members of the 4,000-strong audience clapped their hands and cheered the nearly naked students on, although some female audience members voiced their disapproval.” Video clips of the incident were posted on the internet but then taken down. But images available on blogs suggest that the two students danced, wrestled and then pulled fake pubic hair from each other.

If this were the Daily Show, that would have been your moment of Zen.