Free Republic

ALMATY (Reuters) - The authorities in Kazakhstan, angered by a British comedian's satirical portrayal of a boorish, sexist and racist Kazakh television reporter, have pulled the plug on his alter ego's Web site. Sacha Baron Cohen plays Borat in his "Da Ali G Show" and last month he used the character's Web site www.borat.kz to respond sarcastically to legal threats from the Central Asian state's Foreign Ministry. A government-appointed organization regulating Web sites that end in the .kz domain name for Kazakhstan confirmed on Tuesday it had suspended Cohen's site. "We've done this so he can't badmouth Kazakhstan under the...

On his hit HBO television series, "Da Ali G Show," British Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is after laughs, but in the process he is creating a new form of sociological experiment. Each week, under the guise of three different fictitious personas, Baron Cohen is shown interviewing unsuspecting Americans to elicit outrageous and politically incorrect opinions. His signature character is Ali G, a witless, hip-hopping gangster from the London suburbs; Bruno, a gay Austrian fashion maven, is his most flamboyant character. But it is the genial Kazakhstani television journalist Borat Sagdiyev who has proved to be Baron Cohen's most reliable...