This morning on "The Current" (CBC Radio 1) Kafka’s The Trial was compared to the plight of Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian originally from Sudan who has been stranded in Sudan for the last six years. On a visit to his ailing mother, he was picked up by the Sudanese police and tortured on what may have been the advice of CSIS. Since then, both the RCMP and CSIS (and I think even the FBI) have cleared him of any involvement in terrorism and the federal government has twice promised that they will issue him a passport but no passport has materialized, even when he lined up a paid-for ticket on an airline that agreed to let him aboard even though he’s on the United Nations no-fly list (they’re refusing to take his name off the list despite requests from the Canadian government). Now he’s sleeping on a cot in the Canadian Embassy in Khartoum, refusing to leave until the Canadian government deals with his case.

I usually hate "The Current" but this piece was so good I sat in my car in a dank parking garage listening to the radio and watching everyone else go to work. When I finally got to my office a friend had sent me a link to this hilarious video: