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Asif Ali Zardari, the famously (allegedly) corrupt President of Pakistan, took $4.3 million worth of bribes for helping the French sell three submarines to his country in the mid-1990s, according to a report in the Pakistani press.

The three Agosta 90 submarines were worth roughly $1.24 billion (€825 million), according to the Nation, which cites the Pakistani French daily newspaper Liberation (Français).

It's a little hard to make out the details of how this bit of news surfaced, but it appears that there is an ongoing legal investigation by a French magistrate into a 2002 terrorist attack that killed 11 employees of the French defense company DCN, who were in Karachi working on the subs.

The Daily Telegraph reports that France's TF1 network has aired the country's first commercials aimed at a Muslim audience. The ads are for a line of halal products offered by the Panzani group, including microwaveable paella, lasagna and Shepherd's pie.

It's tempting to see this as a sign of improved status for France's notoriously marginalized Muslim population. But it's primarily an opportunity for Panzani to cash in on a major demographic: France has some five million Muslims, after all. Advertising is not political or social acceptance; it doesn't provide better access to education or jobs.

The Telegraph quotes one commenter on a French Muslim Web site who says -- apparently not in jest -- that "[TF1's] director general's going to get fired tomorrow."

Also, I understand the lasagna and Shepherd's pie, but... microwaveable paella? Halal or not, that sounds awful.

Two French agents who were in Somalia to train government security forces were kidnapped from a hotel in Mogadishu earlier this week and handed (via the group Hizb al-Islami) to Al-Shabab, which Foreign Policy describes as the "most powerful anti-government militia group" in the country.

Al-Shabab recently pledged to kill any foreign troops that respond to the embattled government's call for assistance, so this kidnapping should be viewed in the context of a wider struggle between forces vying for control of the country. Somalia, it seems, is a constantly troubled country.

As a side note, the French agents were reportedly calling themselves journalists as a cover identity, and were staying in the Funduq Sahafi al-'Aalmee, or the International Journalist Hotel. It's reassuring to see that intelligence agencies are still letting their agents pose as journalists, thus affirming the paranoid accusations of Third World governments everywhere. (/sarcasm)