Wish You Were Here, Mr Borat

First, they threatened to sue over a song. Then they shut down his web site. In its losing battle with a maverick comic, the government of Kazakhstan even took out full-page newspaper adverts to confront what it saw as damaging slurs. Yesterday, however, Kazakhstan made an abrupt change of tack in its attempts to stifle Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian who has made the oil-rich Central Asian country an international laughing stock. The deputy foreign minister, Rakhat Aliyev, invited Cohen to visit the country he has lampooned across the globe